Greg Fry over at Bloggertone shares his favorite business tools he has used this year.

I am amazed at how many amazing products for business are very inexpensive or often completely free. The only challenge is to find them in the first place.

1. Animoto – Allows you to make really impressive videos. You can add text, photos, short video clips and music to the site. Within minutes a jumbled mess will be produced into a highly impressive video. Animoto is free for 30 second videos and as little as $30 a year for full length videos.

2. Eyejot – Video email. I have found this a really useful tool to follow up with prospective clients I have met. It enables them to see me again and to hear how I may be able to help them. This visual email is a powerful follow up after a busy night’s networking. Eyejot is easy to personalise with your own branding. Eyejot is free to use without branding. With branding it is as little as $29.99 per year.

3. Screenjelly – Allow you to record your computer screen and your voice. I have used this service to comment on cvs and tell them how and where their cv should be strengthened. Once you record your message just send it via email or twitter. Cost – Free

4. Tungle – A great application for the busy entrepreneur. Tungle makes scheduling meetings effortless and synchronises with both Outlook and Google. It makes it easy for staff and clients to see when you are available and set a meeting with you. Tungle is free to use.

5. WiseStamp is a really nifty and free product that enables you to personalise your email signature. It works on Firefox. It seems to work with most email providers (Gmail ,Yahoo Mail ,AOL, Hotmail, Google Apps…) It is easy to customise. You can add social media buttons to your signature and even your photo.

Photo by Animoto.

By Rich Whittle
In June, Missouri doctor Stuart Hoover needed to create a Web video to market his new wellness center in Springfield. He had farmed out similar video projects in the past, at a cost of thousands of dollars and weeks of waiting. This time he took a chance on a $300 product called Instant Video Presenter, from St. Louis company ej4, reports CNNMoney.

He was sent a green screen to stand in front of and software that let him key in professional-looking images over that green screen. The recommended camera and lighting cost him an additional $200.

In just 30 minutes his first video appeared on his new Web site, HealthyLifeTube.com. It featured Hoover in front of a (simulated) bank of monitors in a television newsroom. “I couldn’t believe how simple and precise it was,” he recalls.

Ted Finch, president of Video Backstage in Austin, recommends IVP to his clients who need quick turnarounds. “Instead of spending nine grand with me, they just turn on their camcorder and press a button,” he says. “Projects that would have taken weeks now take minutes.”

Instant Video Presenter

Photo by ej4.

by Rich Whittle
For many consultants, real-time collaboration with clients is extremely important. Setting up one-on-one phone calls is easy, but if you need to have three or more parties on the line, things get tricky — and expensive, says Small Business Computing.

FreeConferenceCall.com offers free private conference lines. Just enter your name and an e-mail address on their site to receive an instant account.

FreeConferenceCall will provide you with a dedicated dial-in number and an access code, which are ready for immediate use 24/7 — no need to make a reservation. Long distance charges may apply, but there are no additional charges from the company.

Calls can be up to six hours in length, and the company offers free recording and downloading of the calls. Recordings are accessible by phone or computer, and you can distribute, archive or even send recordings to your listeners via RSS and podcast.

Photo by FreeConferenceCall.

by Rich Whittle | Videomaker tutorial, How to Start a Wedding Video Business.

If you’re thinking about going into the videography business, you’ll want to check out another

This video covers a little about equipment, developing a contract, and how to cover a wedding. It really just scratches the service, but it’s a start.

Wedding Videographer Style and The Best Videographer—IOV Award Winners are also a couple of five-minute introductions that will wet your appetite.

In a speech on Tuesday, President Obama outlined proposals intended to promote job creation.

They included incentives for small businesses to hire more workers, additional money to build roads and other construction projects and rebates for homeowners who invest in energy-saving weatherizing improvements, reports The New York Times.

Obama did not put a price on the proposals, which would add to the $787 billion that Congress allocated last winter to revive the economy. But he said the cost could be offset by some of the $200 billion in lower-than-expected spending on the bailout of financial institutions.

More than half of the original stimulus package remains in the pipeline, with many road building and construction projects beginning in 2010. But Obama, in his address at the Brookings Institution, a policy research organization, said further stimulus is needed to spur employers to hire and bring down a jobless rate that stands at 10 percent.

“Our work is far from done,” he said. “For even though we’ve reduced the deluge of job losses to a relative trickle, we are not yet creating jobs at a pace to help all those families who’ve been swept up in the flood.”

Photo by Reuters.

Deidre Booker works hard during the planting season tending her mums, pansies and marigolds in the front yard and a garden of herbs, tomatoes, cabbage and peppers in her backyard, writes The Sun Times

.

So when Booker heard about the “Glam Can” — a black, 3-gallon, mount-anywhere garbage and recycling can — she snapped one up to put on the fence next to her home in the Pill Hill neighborhood.

“It looks decorative, and it’s a convenient place to put the candy wrappers and debris that are forever drifting into the yard,” Booker said.

Twanda Mobley, CEO of Mobley’s Gate Garbage Inc., dreamed up the Glam Can while she worked as a bank compliance officer.

“I’m a homeowner, and it really bothered me to see litter all over people’s lawns,” said Mobley, who lives in Chicago Lawn.

After Mobley got laid off in a bank consolidation in March 2008, she started her own business to make her dream happen.

Photo by Mobley’s Gate Garbage, Inc..

World-renowned jewelry designer, Pascal Mouawad, has teamed up with Grammy Award winning music mogul and style icon Jermaine Dupri to create NuPop Movement . The line, characterized by its oversized case and vivid colors is designed with inspiration from the iconic pop art of the 60’s as well as the vibrancy of today’s music and culture – and makes it affordable for all – between $95 and $145.

By Marcia Wade Talbert

Kalief Rollins, winner of the 2009 National Youth Entrepreneurship Challenge, presents one of his company’s t-shirts to President Barack Obama. (Source: The White House)

Running a successful business is not an easy feat no matter what your age. Yet there are teenagers, like Kalief Rollins, the winner of the 2009 National Youth Entrepreneurship Challenge, who were able to benefit from business start-up education and learn not only the value of a dollar, but how to claim the value of his life.

In this, the first article of a four-part series on youth entrepreneurship, BlackEnterprise.com examines how an emphasis on teen entrepreneurship education has the potential to create positive career paths for youth.

Rollins, 17, considers the t-shirt business he started with his brother in April, to be his ticket to success. He quit football and even missed out on high school graduation night parties with friends so that he could dedicate more time to his business, Phree Kountry Sankofa. His ambitious attitude even afforded him a chance to meet President Barack Obama along with two finalists in the OppenheimerFunds/NFTE National Youth Entrepreneurship Challenge competition.

The competition is the cornerstone for NFTE, which sponsors programs around the world to teach students how to start a business. By the end of the entrepreneurship course students are expected to create a business concept and write a business plan for it. The course runs for either a semester or a year, and it is paid for by the school or with donations from local businesses.

“NFTE helped me realize that I needed to be a legitimate business with licensing and figure out my profit margin so that I didn’t sell shirts for too little or too much,” says Rollins, one of 28 contestants in the competition. Rollins has sold nearly 400 shirts since the company’s inception in April.

But Steve Marriotti, NFTE’s founder, says that the real purpose behind the program is not about teaching kids how to make money, but it’s about teaching teens how to take ownership of their lives. Studies show that entrepreneurial experience increases occupational aspirations, interest in college, reading, and leadership for youth.

“Entrepreneurship is just a tactic. It is really about owning you,” say Marriotti. “The strategy we are trying to [teach them] is to own your time. Money is a tool [to do that].”

Over the last 21 years more than 280,000 young people from low-income communities have graduated from NFTE classes and a recent evaluation of alumni shows that six months after matriculation 70% were in college, and one in three ran a small business.

Recently CNN interviewed Ephren Taylor, 27, the youngest-ever African-American CEO of a publicly traded company in the U.S. He talked about starting his own business at age 12 and shared tips on being an entrepreneur and starting a business.

One thing Ephren Taylor pointed out is that a recession can create the opportunity in many cases to start your own business. This is a great point if you think about all of the people who are collecting unemployment. People who have gotten laid off and are eligible for unemployment still have a steady stream of income and plenty of time on their hands. So instead of putting all your time and energy into finding another place of employment working for someone else, why not dedicate yourself to starting your own business?

Be persistent
Another tip Ephren Taylor shared was that you have to be very persistent when asking for cash advance loans to get your business started. Ephren Taylor says starting his business at such a young age was an advantage for him because he was fearless and he could use his age as a marketing tool when trying to secure funding.

Ephren Taylor taught himself how to create video games and program computers when he was young and he started his company when he was 12. He said he asked about 80 different people for financing, and his young, fearless idealism kept him from getting discouraged.

Read, read, read
Ephren Taylor’s path to learning to create video games started with a book. Ephren Taylor points out that there are books on just about every subject out there, including starting a business.

Ephren Taylor has also written his own book, “Creating Success from the Inside Out: Develop the Focus and Strategy to Uncover the Life You Want.” He also has a web site, “Ephren Taylor The Social Capitalist” that offers business and finance advice.

Don’t overanalyze
Ephren Taylor cautions people against over-thinking opportunities, because that can lead to fear and giving up before even getting started. Ephren Taylor has become so successful at such a young age because he started working on his goals when, he says, he was still “dumb enough to believe” that he could do anything. And it paid off.

On his web site, Ephren Taylor offers advice to churches to help them prosper. He says he is passionate about financially empowering people. He particularly encourages college students and people who don’t have kids and mortgages to start their own business because they are in a better position to take risks. His web site says:

Beyond his unprecedented accomplishments at an early age in business, Taylor is an author, inspirational speaker, and real estate mastermind. His first book, “Creating Success from the Inside Out”, is published by the world’s number one business publisher, Wiley and is an Amazon and CEO Read best seller. The book serves as an expose of the mindset of today’s multi-millionaires while defining success as not only attaining wealth, but how to utilize it.