Tuesday, January 17, 2012

iPad 2 Apps for Sales and Marketing

I have had my new iPad 2 for almost a week now.  I wanted to purchase it prior to my trip to Australia, and needed to get it loaded with apps.  I am amazed at how it has simplified my morning rituals, especially with news and all my feeds.  Below are some apps I would absolutely recommend for any sales or marketing individual:


  1. Flipboard - oh my goodness.  Every morning I had gone through a ritual, reading all my feeds from Google Reader, hitting tech news sites, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.  Flipboard was recommended from numerous sites, and it is absolutely fantastic.  The app provides a tiled, "flipable" interface for all your information sources, and presents them in a newspaper like fashion, making it a breeze to get your morning briefing quickly.
  2. HootSuite - for those who want a quick and easy way to distribute posts, tweets, etc, this is a must have.  With one app you can write a single post, and send to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.  I find it a necessity, as I have multiple accounts on some social networks, and it makes it oh so easy to manage.
  3. Dropbox - It really amazes me how pervasive this app's functionality is throughout other apps.  If you want centralized cloud storage that is included as a save destination in just about every app, this is the way to go.
  4. Keynote - I bought the whole apple office suite, including Keynote, Numbers and Pages, and it saved my rear today.  I had left my power converter in my room, and arrived at my business partner's office with no way to run my laptop.  I opened up the iPad, browsed to my Dropbox, and opened my training presentation.  Fortunately for me, I had an iPad to VGA cable to run my presentation all on the iPad using Keynote.
  5. ThinkBook - what a great organizational tool.  ThinkBook provides a fantastic and intuitive interface to organize notes, todos, projects, questions, etc.  It also allows dashboard creation, with a master list of todos or questions as a reference based on tags.  And it integrates with...Dropbox :)
  6. Notability - one of the things that most excited me about the iPad is that i could get rid of my Journals.  For years i have carried around a "book of life" with all my meeting and call notes, todos, etc.  Notability, along with my stylus now gives me a digital notepad, and it integrates with...Dropbox.
  7. WorldClock - having distributors in 6 separate areas of the world is always a challenge, and add to that traveling and changing time zones.  This app lets me know when I can make that call with Skype.
This is my short list, and I have already been using these apps religiously from day one.  If anyone has any others, please comment and let me know.