Skype

Use: International calls
App in iTunes Store | App Site

Skype on your iPhone is really handy for international calls when your clients or contractors/team members are overseas. Sure, there are some occasional connection issues, so we'll always let a client know when we're calling via Skype, but more often than not the connection is good and the price and ease of use for an office that is cell phone-based is unmatched.

Amazon Mobile

Use: Business purchases, reviews
App in iTunes Store | App Site

Between Amazon.com and Newegg.com there are few office necessities that you can't buy, and few reasons to look anywhere else. The Amazon Mobile app has a very nice user flow, integrates with your wish list pretty well, and does a good job of utilizing online reviews for products. Most things I purchase around the office have come from Amazon including internal drives, my document scanner, microphones, DSLRs, and design books. Even if I'm not making the actual purchases there, the accessibility of the user reviews when I'm checking out products in a brick and mortar proves extremely valuable. I'm never making store purchases blind but have dozens, sometimes hundreds, of user reviews to consider when making that spontaneous product purchase.

Deliveries

Use: Package tracking
App in iTunes Store | App Site

Deliveries is the iPhone app version of the mac widget Delivery Status. This app tracks product purchases you have made that get delivered via FedEx, UPS and dozens of other package carriers centralized in a single place. If you're anything like me, once you make a purchase all you want to do is know exactly where the package is and how soon it will be coming to your back door or office. The app also syncs nicely with the widget on your mac. Typically I copy and paste the package carrier's tracking code into the mac widget and then just do all my tracking through the iPhone app. This is a very high use app for me.

iStat

Use: Monitoring computer activity remotely
App in iTunes Store | App Site

Like Deliveries, iStat has the same functionality as its Mac widget. iStat uses Bonjour and your wireless network to monitor your computer activity including disk space, upload/download speeds, battery life (for laptops), CPU heat and productivity and MUCH more. Through a hack I haven't tried yet you can even monitor your AppleTV which is notorious for running hot. Outside of using your WiFi to monitor the different computers on your network, you can easily set it up to work off site when you are away from the office or home. I'll often use iStat to check remotely if my computer has completed a large download or why another computer might be running slowly. Check out the site and you might be surprised how much computer data you can monitor from your iPhone.

Speedtest

Use: Testing upload/download speeds
App in iTunes Store

This no-frills app helps you quickly check what's going on with your network speeds. A great way to see why your internet access might be sluggish, but also to get a more realistic picture of what type of service your local network provider is ACTUALLY giving you.

Prowl

Use: Pushes your Growl notifications to your iPhone
App in iTunes Store | App Site

Call me slightly nuts, but I think that Growl is one of the single greatest apps for my mac, and Prowl extends Growl's functionality to the iPhone. Growl is an action alert tool for your mac that is extremely customizable. Anytime you get an email or a song changes in iTunes or a large file downloads or a thousand other mac or app-based actions occur, you can set Growl to pop up a small message on your screen above all of your applications so that you don't need to stop working or switch apps to see who that email came from or what song and artist the track just switched to. Prowl uses push notifications so that when an action occurs on your computer you can set Growl to notify your iPhone and a message pops up alerting you. And like Growl, it's completely customizable so that you can select a very specific number of actions that get passed to your iPhone. I find this particularly helpful for uploading large files on a server for clients or downloading really large files that may take ten minutes to an hour. It's nice to be away from the computer and be told when those files have completed upload/download.

Mint

Use: Site analytics
App Site

Mint is easily my most used "app." in fact, I'm using it right now to see that you are reading this blog post. While Mint isn't a traditional iPhone app which you can find in the iTunes store, the iPhone layout is so user-friendly that I see no reason why I shouldn't include it. When you bookmark your site's Mint dashboard and keep the icon on your iPhone's home screen you can easily look at your site traffic, referral links and other critical data that help you better shape your site content for SEO and audience targeting.

Analytics

Use: Google's site analytics
App in iTunes Store | App Site

Analytics integrates with Google Analytics, which we've deploy on our site as well as client sites. This app helps us track detailed information about users and their behavior and as a result helps us target our client needs better and better helps us understand their target audience. Where Mint gives us a good, real-time view of general daily traffic, Analytics covers a greater amount of detail in a nice tidy iPhone package.

You need outside perspective. That's where an agency like Slim Kiwi comes in.

A Fast Company blog post, Are You Building a Consumer-Facing Company?, addressed this subject last week:

Design agencies, on the other hand, are born to think outside-looking-in. Not only do design agencies bring together radical talent and methodology that's difficult to maintain in a closed corporate environment, they have another advantage that's seldom talked about: Their ability to reflect across industries and companies and to form their opinion based on such experience. They have a role in creating many products, join many different teams, and can reflect, in hindsight, about the success or failure of certain ideas. That agency worldview cannot be counted in sketches, models or dollars--it is an invaluable trove of experience that is underutilized by both the agencies and their clients.

Our job goes beyond just executing a design. We're hired to provide critical insight and to evaluate your business and marketing efforts, provide you feedback, help you incorporate that feedback into your strategy, and then execute based on that strategy.

That might be a lot to sign onto. In the coming weeks, we'll be announcing a new service that will allow you to get an idea of what steps you should take and where we can contribute: Usability & Marketing Analysis Reports. You point us to your web site, pick a level of review to engage us on, and we provide you a report on what's working, what isn't, and what it would take for us to get you where you should be. Our goal is to give you a taste of our value, shake things up a bit and empower you to make an informed decision on the direction of your efforts without the big upfront commitment.

Outside looking in. Whether you're the corporate team that needs reinvigoration or just looking for expertise that isn't practical to maintain in-house, we're at our best when we're charged with bringing our outside perspective and our unique blend of expertise across industries, from consumer to business-to-business channels, for companies large and small, to the table to provide you fresh ideas. With this new offering, our goal is to let you opt for a first date rather than jumping into a relationship, while identifying where your organization can grow and optimize your efforts.

We had many animated discussions with Zeo about their online strategy and design at myZeo.com. It was clear to us that they were carefully contemplating our advice and we made it clear to them (we hope) that we had a great amount of respect for the work they had done up to this point. We love the type of client relationships that we have with Zeo, where even amongst different opinions about strategy they can see we are more interested in their long-term success than their immediate happiness. We think the end result accomplished our task and plays a part in Zeo’s ongoing success, delivering a site that serves as their single largest point of sale for a new product that has achieved national attention.