BING.com (But Its Not Google)

I’ve been seeing a lot of bing.com commercials lately so I thought it may be time to look into this ‘new’ search engine. (In case you haven’t seen these yet you can check them out here.)

Bing.com, formerly Live Search (live.com), formerly Windows Live Search, formerly MSN Search (msn.com), went fully online June 3 2009.

It sports some cool new features (specifically with video and image searches) but beyond that it doesn’t seem to be much more than a new face on an old search engine. Microsoft is spending $80 – $100 million to advertise this ‘new’ search engine which, when it comes down to it, is just msn search with a new skin and some cool new bells and whistles.

So far, I haven’t found a reason why it is any better than Google or Yahoo. I will continue using Google as my search engine of choice and don’t see switching any time soon.

If you would like to read more about this, Wikipedia is a good place to start.

Basecamp & Highrise Review

As business increases I have recognized the need to use a project management and CRM software solution. Keeping track of 3-4 concurrent projects can be done in your head, but increase that to 12-15 and things start slipping through the cracks! I recently started using the solutions offered by 37signals.com and I am very impressed!

This may sound like a paid review, but trust me it is not. I do get 50% off my monthly fee if you click the links on this post and sign up – but that is not the reason I have written this. In the short time I have used these solutions I have become more productive, things are getting done more efficiently and my clients are happy. At first the monthly fee put me off, but if being more organized means getting even one more project in a month its paid for itself many times over.

I reviewed many other solutions from open source (www.opensourcecms.com look under ‘groupware’) to paid solutions (www.activecollab.com) and ended up back at 37signals.