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Top 10 Google Chrome Plugins for Small Businesses

Feb 062012

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

The Google Chrome Web Store has made it easy for anyone to stay organized, and the browser has gotten much faster, as we’ve noticed in the beta version of Chrome 17. But as the web gets bigger and stronger, so many apps and plugins are available that it’s hard to know which is the best for you.

If you’re running a business and don’t want to be bogged down by multiple PC-installed applications, there are a couple of great go-to apps that you should become familiar with to help manage your day-to-day routine. Whether you need financial management or to check your email offline, here are some great options for small businesses using Google Chrome.

Are you using the second-favorite browser? What plugins do you use to manage your business? Let us know in the comments.

1. Gmail Offline

Gmail Offline beta is built to support offline access, so you can read, respond and archive without network access. After your first start-up, Gmail Offline will automatically synchronize messages and queued actions anytime Chrome is running and an Internet connection is available.

There is also a great Google Mail Checker widget that notifies you of any messages in your toolbar.

Click here to view this gallery.

More Small Business Resources From OPEN Forum:

- Pinterest for Brands: 5 Hot Tips
- Social Learning Trends to Watch in 2012
- How Klout Found Success By Focusing On Users
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Top 10 Google Chrome Plugins for Small Businesses
Christine Erickson
Sat, 04 Feb 2012 16:13:58 GMT

Wealthfront Allows Tech Company Stock Holders To Test Share Sale Strategies Post-IPO

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Feb 062012

Wealthfront Allows Tech Company Stock Holders To Test Share Sale Strategies Post-IPO

One of the challenges that many post-IPO tech company employees will face is when to sell stock and how much stock to sell once the their stock lockups conclude.Financial advisors can help with this, but some aren’t experienced enough with the specific fluctuations of tech companies to create a financially wise strategy. Wealthfront (formerly kaChing), a startup that has been disrupting the investing and personal finance space, is debuting a new tool employees use to test option sale strategies post IPO. Basically, Wealthfront will allow you to test various strategies against the actual stock behavior of a number of tech companies that went public in the past 10 years. The tool is actually embedded below so you can test it out.

As we’ve written in the past, Wealthfront brings the quality investment theories of a fund manager online, at a much lower fee, essentially democratizing private wealth management to the masses. The startup is the brainchild of Andy Rachleff, who was formerly a founder of Benchmark Capital.

Rachleff explains that the current tool looks at five typical stock performance patterns: increasing (Google, Salesforce), decreasing (DivX), peak-dominated (Netflix), u-shaped (VMWare) and oscillating (Orbitz). To showcase the tool’s technology, Wealthfront picked 10 companies, two that fit each pattern, to offer real-life examples. Basically, you compare your company’s stock performance to one of these companies.

The tool then applies four different stock-sale strategies to the stock performance of each company, comparing the results to what would have happened if an employee sold no shares. For example, one sample plan shows an employee selling 10% each quarter for 10 quarters. Or an employee could sell 50% up front and 10% per quarter for five quarters. And there’s always the option of selling all shares vested immediately post-lockup.

So, Wealthfront can determine if your company’s stock performance is going to be similar to that of Google, then you are better off holding more stock. If you work for a company that’s going to perform like DivX, you’ll be better off unloading all of your stock on day one, after the lockup period expires. Generally, Wealthfront advises employees to sell shares gradually.

Wealthfront says it will update the simulator to include more companies and sales strategies in the future. The tool could definitely be useful for the growing number of Silicon Valley tech employees that are finding themselves as shareholders of stock from companies that recently went public.

Wealthfront has raised over $10 million from DAG Ventures and individual investors including Marc Andreessen, Jeff Jordan and partners from Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Chartbeat: Real-time analytics that thinks like you do.

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Jan 302012

Brief Summary

Chartbeat is a revolutionary real-time analytics service that enables people to understand emergent behaviour in real-time and exploit or mitigate it. Chartbeat launched in April 2009 and is used by some of the most popular sites on the web including the Onion, Mahalo, Pitchfork, and DailyKos. Based in New York, the team is led by General Manager Tony Haile and is part of betaworks, a media company focused on the real-time web and social media. The best way to understand Chartbeat is to try the demo or take a tour. Customer testimonials can be found in our buzz section.

How is chartbeat different from traditional services like Google Analytics?

Just as real-time search has proven to have a fundamentally different usecase from traditonal search, real-time analytics has a different focus and value than traditional analytics services.

Traditional analytics services are focused on understanding usual behaviour across persistent content. For example, how well a sign up flow converts a visitor into a user. In contrast, real-time analytics is focused on unusual behaviour, the peaks and troughs of the social web, and it is focused upon transient content: content that might not have existed yesterday, might not be looked at tomorrow but today is driving your site.

Not only does chartbeat make data available in real-time, it also receives constant updates from a site’s users about what they are doing. Although Google Analytics can tell you how many people loaded a page in a given time period, chartbeat can tell you how many people kept the page open and are on it right now, and whether they are actively interacting with it.

With chartbeat’s real-time dashboard, editors and content creators like Talking Points Memo can immediately understand what content is most important to their visitors and how deep the level of engagement is, enabling them to adapt their site and take advantage of the viral nature of the social web.

Using chartbeat’s performance panels, sites like Dogster can keep on top of uptime and page load latency from both the server and browser sides, so they can understand the effect of changes in their code, an additional widget or a flood of traffic to the site and act.

Chartbeat’s alerts to SMS, email or iPhone means that sites like harvard.edu can be the first to know when traffic spikes, page load slows, or the site goes down. Chartbeat’s customizable alerts can even let them know when traffic or page load to a specific page breaches the parameters they’ve set.

Built With

Chartbeat utilizes several excellent technologies.

BackType is a real-time, conversational search engine. We index and connect millions of conversations from blogs, social networks and other social media so you can find out what people are saying about the topics that interest you.

MongoDB (from “humongous”) is a scalable, high-performance, open source, document-oriented database. MongoDB bridges the gap between key-value stores (which are fast and highly scalable) and traditional RDBMS systems (which provide rich queries and deep functionality).