As we have noted in other tech tips, the increasing use of tablets and smartphones in the business place has inspired us to provide more tips on apps that could benefit you both in your business and personal use.

The WSJ article of August 23, 2012, offered interesting information on the multitude of applications available today. For this blog post, we will focus on two, one on managing your reading and one on holding remote meetings.

APPS FOR ORGANIZING READING

Whether you need to organize your e-reading for business or in your personal life, there are many apps for magazines, newspapers and books that can be applicable to smartphones or tablets. You may already have a virtual library on your phone or tablet, as I do, and find the need for more organization.

The basic apps in this category are free and are used by most people, including the Kindle app for Amazon Kindle users, the Nook app for the Barnes and Noble Nook users, iBooks for the Apple user and also Google books. With these apps, you can download, read, browse, highlight, etc. You can also sync across devices. For example, I use a Kindle, but also my iPad. I use the Kindle app to access my library on my Kindle, iPad or phone. My library is always immediately accessible. The WSJ article also mentioned the Bluefire Reader app, which lets you customize your experience, allowing readers to adjust their book’s font, page color and control the brightness of the screen. I did try this app out, but I found it a little disappointing; the setting for fonts was not easy to use and you have to download another app, such as IndieBooks, to buy books. Once on an app such as IndieBooks, you must then buy the book through an independent bookseller. The upside to this is that local independent bookstores are supported.

An interesting app for cataloging is BookCrawler. Another is iBookshelf, a $1.99 app that will show you a list of all of your books with a thumbnail of the book’s cover. You can sort lists by genre, title or author and call up reviews. Both of these cataloging apps also come with a bar code scanner to scan any book into your catalog. Perhaps an even more interesting app is for clipping. If you come across an article but don’t have time to read all of it, you can save it for later. IdeaShower’s Pocket and Readability app lets you do that. You can send it to a digital archive and call it up anytime. Best of all, you don’t need the Internet to read it. Other apps are InstaPaper for Apple and Mobelux for Android at about $2.99. Goodreads, an app that is also a social networking site for readers, now also offers scanning capability along with cataloging and reviews.

There are also many apps for organizing articles. These are somewhat similar to Google Reader. Pulse is an app that lets you enter news sources that you prefer and free apps automatically pull stories from the sources and present them in a news feed divided by topic and publication. There is also a social sharing component. Apps such as Flipboard allow you to integrate updates from facebook or twitter into your newsfeed.

I suggest playing around with a couple of these apps to find your comfort level and what best suits you. It may take some time at first, but could be a time saver in the long run.

APPS FOR REMOTE MEETINGS

Many people are aware of or use free apps such as Skype for remote meetings. Here are other easily accessible possbilities.

For one-on-one meetings, FaceTime is great for the iPad or iPhone and it is free. Video calls are enabled over WiFi. Skype, as mentioned, is the most common to use for devices other than Apple, It is free for video calls over WiFi or cellular networks. For a larger group call, Google+ is perfect for Apple and Android use. You can chat with as many as 9 other people. All of the users must have a Google account, but the users can also view shared screens and Google Docs. A similar free app for both Apple and Android is ooVoo, which allows you to connect with up to 11 people. There are also mobile versions for video conferencing. CitrixGoToMeeting, for example, allows up to 25 participants and has audio and view sharing content. The host, however, must have a subscription.

Let us know your thoughts on what has worked best for you, and stay tuned for our review on Guy Kawasaki’s book on Google+, which sheds new light on the future of social network sharing.