In case you haven’t heard of Google Wave, here’s a brief description:

Google Wave is an online communication and collaboration tool that makes real-time interactions more seamless — in one place, you can communicate and collaborate using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is a conversation with multiple participants — participants are people added to a wave to discuss and collaborate on its content. Participants can reply any time and anywhere within a wave, and they can edit content and add more participants as a wave develops. It’s also possible to rewind waves with the playback functionality, to see what happened, and when.

All you have to do is leave a comment and I’ll send the invite to the email address you enter for the comment.  I think I have six invites left, so the first 6 get them!

– Jason

** I’m trying to get my hands on some more!  Stay tuned.  As you can see the comments filled up quick :0)

Tomorrow, I’ll be doing a business building webinar (Thursday, September 3rd) at 5:30 PM titled “The Top 5 Startup Questions Ever Answered.”

It’s going to be question and answer style - half presentation, half one-on-one consulting with a client of mine.

The webinar will be free for everyone who signs up.  If you miss it, I’ll post the replay for 24 hours :0)

• What is the most effective way to market services to potential clients? And in order to do this, what do I need to find out first?
• How can I ’sell’ myself to potential clients when I’m new in the industry and I don’t have a lot of experience?
• What challenges may I face when starting my own business?
• What are some of the big no-no’s when owning my own business?
• What should I be doing to stay ahead of my competition?

Make sure you sign up before this thing gets too crowded!

Sign up –>> Top 5 Business Building Questions Ever Asked Webinar.

That data, if you run an online business, is your absolute most valuable asset.

The other day, I found a free, online invoice system that I wanted to share with you.  It’s an open source web application meant to help manage and create invoices in a simple, straightforward way.

The invoice system really is nice.  As of right now, it doesn’t integrate with Paypal, so it won’t let you send one-click-and-pay invoices to your clients, but hopefully a developer will get it straightened out soon!

via siwapp - Free Online Invoice System.

About three weeks ago, I learned about a way to increase sales through a website by 13% with relatively no effort.  Now, obviously, when I heard that I was like, “Gimme a break!”  I work my ass off to write good sales copy and you can throw a button on the page and increase sales?!

So now, three weeks later, I though I’d let you in on the secret too (plus give you a link to the freeware I’m using!)

The secret is live help or online customer service.  You’ve probably seen it if you go to VerizonWireless.com to pay your cell phone bill or some of the upper end sales pages online.

By simply putting the “Live Support” button on one of my niche websites, conversions went up a staggering 24%.

Now, just so we’re all on the same page, there have been a few people that clicked it.  6 to be exact.  4 of those have been, “Oh!  There is someone on the other end of this chat window” type conversations.  But for an increase of 24% overall, I’ll take it!

Here’s the link to the live help software I’m using…  There are open source, server side apps out there like HelpCenterLive, but I find this app to be pretty solid.

LiveZilla - Freeware Live Help

If you know of any other server side live help applications out there, let me know!  All the ones I tried seemed ugly and outdated, but who knows.  Maybe I’m missing the good ones…

There’s no limit to free media players for handheld devices.  My Nokia Internet Tablet has a player that I can stream media from network locations (aka Gandolf, my media server).

You can even do it with a Windows Media Extender like the XBox 360 or the Popcorn Hour (also highly recommended).

But what about your desktop?  Well, if you want to kill productivity, install a media player that lets you stream movies!!

Yesterday, I found a player that I particularly enjoy, Moovida.  It’s compatible with all the major operating systems and is truly a beautiful application.

Moovida is much more than a simple media player… it is a cutting edge media center bringing the best of the internet to your TV screen. Automatically creating your own digital library you can browse from your sofa with a remote control. The elegant and easy to use interface automatically displays artwork and fan art throughtout and gives you access to movie synopsis and artist info.

Granted, it’s got some bugs but that’s cool.  It’s a great app anyway!

Check out Moovida, the free media player

I can’t remember if I ever shared this with you, but it’s an awesome tutorial on how to build a server rack for your house or your office, without having to pay thousands of dollars!

Admittedly, it isn’t the prettiest thing I’ve ever put together, but it works and exemplifies the geek in me :0)

For about $150 and 3 hours of work, it’s entirely possible to put together a stand-alone unit to house all of your computers/servers.  I, for instance, have my email server, web server, media server and file server in this bad boy.  There’s also a rackmount network hub, modem and monitor hanging off the side so I can monitor vitals…

Anyway, here’s a link to the original how-to article:

Deadly Computer Blog » DIY ~20U server rack.

If you’ve ever thought about operating your own microblogging service, I’ve got an app for you.  Obviously, dethroning Twitter isn’t really a possbility, but you might do one for your office or your family!

I found this cool open source server script for you to play with.  It’s called Laconica, pronounced “luh-KAWN-ih-kuh,” and is a Free and Open Source microblogging platform. It helps people in a community, company or group to exchange short 140 character messages over the Web.

Users can choose which people to “follow” and receive only their friends’ or colleagues’ status messages. It provides a similar service to sites like Twitter, Jaiku, and Plurk.

Want to try Laconica without installing anything? Hop on over to identi.ca, the largest microblogging service based on Laconica.

via Laconica.

Here’s an interesting WordPress hack that I thought you guys would be into…

WP-CRM is a WordPress system for creating a basic Contact Manager / CRM. The system requires a combination of plugins and a theme. It was inspired by the great work David Yeiser did with WP-Contact Manager, and by 37signals Highrise.

Features:

• Add contacts from the front end of WordPress – no need to go to the admin screen.
• Associate an image with each contact.
• Assign each contact to a company… or don’t.
• Create a note history for each contact.
• Clickable email and website links.
• Google map contacts address.
• Dial a phone number works on cell phones with internet browsers.
• Fully hcard / vcard compatible.

Check it out at WP-CRM: a basic CRM built with WordPress | SlipFire.

Check out TubeMogul and to get access to Jimmy and Travis’ online video creation video (I know.. that was weird to type..) just click here: Social Media Soap Opera

If you think about it, the only thing you SHOULD need to get up and running is a basic OS that runs your computer and opens up a web browser (which Linux does nicely).

WindowsForAll does exactly that.  It allows you to use the Silverlight technology and open up a full, Windows operating system in your web browser.

This os browser operating system deploys quickly and you can run all the native components on it.  The downside is you can’t store data and files on the instance because it technically ‘lives in the cloud.’

As clustering technology and server disk drives increase in size though, we’ll be able to enjoy the full potential of browser based operating systems!