Because Google has probably the best email hosting infrastructure in the world and they give it away for free – up to 50 users. I think it’s a best in class product.

How good is their infrastructure? They just recently changed their service level agreement (SLA) to zero minutes of planned down time / maintenance windows for paid clients. For last year 2010, Google claims 99.984% up time meaning that their system might have been unavailable for 7 minutes each month which is negligible.

Google mail hosting aka Google Apps is free and has almost the same exact interface for the Gmail interface that we’ve all come to love with priority inbox, labels, threaded messages, integrated calendar, and keyboard short cuts. If you are transitioning from regular Gmail, make sure you turn on labs feature (like the ability to embed images and chat user list on the right sidebar) by going to Settings -> Labs.

So how do you get started? Go to the Google apps (free edition) site, click “Get Started” to the right. They even have docs on how to convert your server from MS Exchange or Lotus Notes. Fill out your domain name and follow their nice start up guide.

The most difficult thing will be modifying your DNS information to setup MX records, but they have comprehensive step by step instructions for many web hosting providers.

Another advantage of Google apps is that there’s an app marketplace which lets you extend your Gmail with CRM, project management, and other add ons that are not normally available in the regular Gmail system. The only drawback that I can see for now is that unlike consumer Gmail you start with 7 gigs and you can’t buy more mailbox storage unless you upgrade to their $50 per year per user plan versus consumer Gmail which is only $5 for 20 gigs.

And my final favorite feature of Google hosted email is the ability to make free telephone calls within the Gmail interface to anywhere in the U.S. Just use your built in microphone and speaker or headset to make quick calls to your contacts from your contact address book.

Remember though 7 gigs is still a huge amount of space. Other than that I can’t think of any other reason not to use Google apps!

Related Links:
Tips & tricks on Google Mail / Gmail (StartupInsider.net)
GMail blog

Get it: 365psd

via: StartupInsider.net

Evernote has been in our arsenal of “must-have” apps for years and best of all it’s free. It’s a cloud based note taking tool that works on Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Blackberry, and WebOS (Palm) devices so you can pull up your notes on virtually any device out there.

The steps are easy: install the app on your Windows or Mac, create an Evernote account and start syncing your notes to their cloud server. Updated notes then magically appear on registered Evernote apps on your smart phones and other devices. Plus you can even login to the web site to look at your notes.

And best of all, the free plan should work for most people.

Get it: Evernote

The Creme de la Creme
It ain’t cheap ($49/month) but it’s also the best, it’s GoToMeeting by Citrix. It has the best screen sharing quality and includes a VOIP teleconferencing so you can use your computer’s web cam or microphone/speaker instead of your telephone. Did we mention the voice quality and screen sharing quality (refresh rate) are excellent.

Some people also like Webex but we’re inclined to go with GoToMeeting. In our limited experience with Webex, the appointment scheduler web application isn’t as refined as GoToMeeting.

Free
Unfortunately one of the pioneers of free virtual meetings, DimDim has been acquired by Salesforce so they’re not accepting any new accounts. But there’s good news, Join.me made by the well respected LogMeIn team works well.

Skype, another VOIP pioneer, has free conferencing for Skype to Skype clients. Also Skype now has free screen sharing for one to one sessions – unfortunately as of now, there’s not a broadcast option. The screen quality of Join.me and Skype are not as good as GoToMeeting but you get what you pay for.

You’d be hard pressed to get a better deal or bang for the buck than using WordPress. We heart WordPress because…

1.) WordPress is free and open source! The only catch is that if you want to host your own custom domain, you’d have to pay for web hosting. WordPress is open source, so you can install it many times over for free. But if you want to just use it for your own blog, grab a free WordPress site to try out at WordPress.com!

Because WordPress is open source, you can hire a programmer to add the features you want or add functionality through plugins (see number 3).

2.) Customizable look & feel! You can find a ton of free good looking themes as well as an amazing selection of paid themes that will help you avoid the cost of a full blow web design unless you really need it.

3.) WordPress is extensible! While WordPress has grown into a mature product it still lacks some basic functionality. Luckily the developers thought of this and added a flexible plugin system to do almost anything you can imagine! There are a ton of free plugins that provide calendars, social network sharing, image galleries, membership tracking, and much more.

4.) WordPress is easy to use! First off, most web hosting companies have an easy one click WordPress installer. I’ve built over a dozen WordPress sites for clients and most of them are blown away when they see how easy it is to add or edit content. The fact that the presentation (theme look & feel) are separate from the content makes a world of difference for my clients who want to edit their own site and not accidentally damage anything in the process.

WordPress is the best bang for the buck you can get out there as a web publishing platform.

As for web hosting, we can recommend two companies, DreamHost and MediaTemple, both have easy one click WordPress installers. Unless you’re planning on creating a site like YouTube, you should not have to pay more than $20/month.

Here’s our collection of favorite Firefox extensions aka plugins to save you a lot of time when you’re trying to collect or share information or if you happen to be both the CEO and webmaster of your startup and need to fine tune and debug your home page.

So these plugins can be organized into two broad categories:  On the top of the Firefox browser toolbar are information collection and sharing . The bottom of the browser (status bar area) hold the design and development tools.

On the top left is Evernote, a client/server based note taking system. With the Firefox plugin, you can quickly clip the contents of any web page into your Evernote account. Evernote is available as a web application and also as a dedicated app for virtually every device out there so you can read your notes almost anywhere.

Then’s there’s Delicious, which is a cloud based social bookmarking service. Bookmark, tag, and write down notes for each web site you’ll want to look up later.  Note that Delicious maybe jettisoned soon by parent company Yahoo, you can still export the bookmarks at anytime for now. A possible (paid) alternative is Pinboard but it’s currently without a Firefox plugin.

You can use Goo.gl Lite toolbar add-on to quickly generate a “Goo.gl” (Google’s shortener service) URL of the current page. With one click on it save the current URL to your clipboard immediately.

Email This lets you quickly launch your email client including web based Gmail to quickly send the current page to someone.

Try the amazing Fox to Phone, which will launch the current page from your desktop Firefox onto your Andorid device web browser with minimal intervention. Install the Firefox extension and download the companion app in the Android marketplace. If you’re on an iPhone, try out Firefox Home which will sync your browsing history, local bookmarks, and tabs on your iPhone.

On the bottom are design and development tools:
From left to right, we’ll start with MeasureIt, which lets your measure the pixels by drawing rectangles on the current web page. It’s really useful if you trying to shift pixels around a page.

Want to grab the color value (RGB or Hex) of any web page object/component without snapshoting the screen and pasting it into Photoshop? Try Colorzilla.

Want to write something about the page you’re looking at without opening up WordPress admin? Try ScribeFire. Read my quick review.

If you’re constantly making changes to a single page and want to clear the web browser cache with one quick click? Try Cache Status.

Want to grab a screenshot of the entire web page even if it’s taller than your current monitor resolution? Try Screengrab.

Want to see how your page looks like at 1024×768 resolution or other monitor size without resizing your OS resolution? Try Firesizer.

And finally one of the most popular and useful Firefox extensions of all time, use Firebug to help you debug HTML, CSS, and Javascript. You can use it in a combination with Y!Slow to speed up your web pages.

Summarized list
Information collection and sharing: Evernote, Delicious, Goo.gl Lite, Email This, Fox to Phone, Firefox Home
Design tools: MeasureIt, Colorzilla, ScribeFire, Cache Status, Screengrab, Firesizer, Firebug, Y!Slow

So in bullet fashion here’s why we adore it…

• Free to use with 2 gbytes of storage . It’s just $10/month for 50 gbytes of storage.
• Files magically sync up on all your devices (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, etc.).
• It’s both a sync and back up tool.
• Share specific folders with people on your team.
• It has revision control so you can roll back older copies of your file.

If you have a team of 2-20 people and you want brainless, “set it and forget it” type of folder/file sharing, run, don’t walk and get Dropbox. Even if you don’t have a team right now and aren’t backing up your important files anywhere, do yourself a favor, install Dropbox and move your most important files into it. Dropbox will automatically back them into the “cloud.”

What could be improved? When you’re sharing folders with others and want to re-send invites, there’s no easy way to do it. But this is a relatively minor issue for the convenience and reliability that Dropbox currently delivers.

Get it: Dropbox