Click here to view the embedded video.

Minutes.io lets you quickly and easily take live notes of a meeting then distribute them to a group of people with a click of a button.

I love that they don’t make you register for the site even though you have access to the archive.

Oh, and I also love that it’s completely free.

Watch my full review here: YouTube – Minutes.io.

With Adobe Reader’s new release, you can now add comments and share PDFs much easier (thank goodness!), so you might not need PDFescape as much as you used to, but they’ve included more features that I love.

Here’s a quick overview of PDFescape…

Click here to view the embedded video.

In the year 2000, people sent about 12 million daily emails. In 2010, the number of emails per day is 247 billion — an increase of about 20,000%! If you want your email to be noticed in all that mess, you have to do something different.

Give Paperless Post a try. Sign up for an account and you get 25 free “stamps” that allow you to send a cool, attention-getting email as an invitation, announcement or thank you. Your recipient receives an elegant email with an envelope they click to open. The invitations themselves are fun to open, and they have tons of templates and realistic-looking textured papers that look as handsome as something you get in the mail.

Paperless Post is not free, and there are several things about the system and the pricing that have made me hesitate to recommend it for business use. First, it’s a clumsy way to manage contacts and responses. Second, all their little extras (like envelope liners and your logo) can really add up. But I just had a great response when I sent a promotion about my speaking services to my professional association contacts, so I thought I’d share.

Watch this quick video to see how it works:

Online Invitations, Stationery, Announcements, and Save the Dates by Paperless Post

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I spent the last week on a writing retreat as I finished up the book on free and low-cost tools (coming this fall!). While I was writing away, I ran across this favorite of mine, and I realized I hadn’t shared it yet. Xpenser lets you text, call or email in your expenses while you’re on the road.

When you set up your account, you can set up the ways you want to be able to submit expenses. I can send them in via Jott, Twitter, email and more. You just send something like “Taxi 30 to airport” or something, and your expenses will be entered into your online account.  Then you can download them in a number of formats to complete your expense reports. You can also take pictures of your receipts and email them to your Xpenser account for safe keeping.

This service is in beta, which means it’s still free. It won’t be for long.

Xpenser – Mobile Expense Tracking and Management.

Oh, I’m thrilled! I just found a PDF tool that allows you to add text, notes, form fields and more to existing PDFs. I’m often frustrated when my clients send me PDFs to edit because I have to do screenshots with Jing page by page. Don’t get me wrong — I adore Jing, but the process takes forever.

But PDFescape lets you upload a PDF and add all the notes you need without having to have Adobe Acrobat, which costs hundreds of dollars.

This find is definitely my favorite of 2010.

PDFescape – Free PDF Editor & PDF Form Filler – Your Free Online PDF Reader, Editor, Form Filler, Form Designer, Solution.

WhatTheFont is a lot like one of my favorites, Identifont. This little free service allows you to upload a graphic that contains words, and the system does its best to identify your font.

I tried it with a few logos I’ve developed where I knew what the font was. It hit about 50 percent of the time, but the misses were darn close. I could have easily used one of the fonts they came up with as a close match to the look and feel.

WhatTheFont is a tool brought to you by MyFonts, which looks to be a pretty inexpensive way to purchase interesting fonts. Of course, I still prefer dafont, which is free. I’m funny like that.

WhatTheFont! « MyFonts.

Now here’s a switch… Penzu is an online blog-type service — that you can keep private! All the other blogs in the world are out there so you can share your thoughts, but Penzu lets you create a private journal for your eyes only, though you can choose to share with others.

I’m not sure what type of business application this might have, but I love the notebook-paper graphics. PC Magazine gave it props for being some of the best free software of 2009.

Penzu – Write in Private: Free Online Diary and Personal Journal.

Favicons are those tiny graphics in the tabs when you open a webpage. If you don’t have one for your site, you’ll get a little blank page graphic, and that’s no longer the cool thing to do.

Favicon.ico Generator will help you generate the tiny 16×16 pixel graphic — upload a graphic or paint your own.

Favicon.ico Generator

Not sure if this qualifies as a typical Cheapskate Freelancer post, but it is a tool, and it is free.

Paste text into this site to measure how fast you read and to improve your reading speed. You can modify how it clumps words, how many lines it shows at once and other little settings that help you work on your reading speed.

Worth a few minutes to determine how many words you read per minute, at least.

Eyercize: Speed Reading Practice.

This tool is a little strange, but I can see how it may be handy if you need to track your home library or if you sell things on Half.com or the like. Of course, I know people who keep detailed catalogs of their personal libraries, so maybe this tool would be perfect for them.

BeepMyStuff.com lets you use a webcam to capture the barcodes from your DVDs, Blu-Ray Movies, CDs, Video Games and Books.

Homepage | BeepMyStuff.com.

The other day I wrote about a site that converts your email address into a graphic so spammers can’t sweep your site.

This tool, with the unfortunate name of scr.im, converts your email address into a simple URL, and people who want to write you have to pass a simple test to show they’re human. Kinda cool, pretty clever and, best of all, completely free.

scr.im « Share your email in a safe way. Get less spam.

PDFVue is a web-based tool that lets you upload a PDF, add notes, make changes and share. I played around with it for a few minutes, and I couldn’t get it to actually change the text in one of my client documents, but I loved how I could add notes about the changes I wanted to see.

I also like the ability to create forms, add pictures and links, and generally get something handy for nothing.

PDFVue Beta : Edit, Annotate, and Share PDFs for Free.

In today’s social media world, we’ve all come to rely on the kindness of strangers. That’s why docstoc works… people share copies of legal, business, tech and educational documents with the community, allowing other community members to download them for free.

I did a quick search for an example business plan, and docstoc came back with thousands of documents. You can sort by ranking or popularity and really take a shortcut to creating your own documents.

You can also upload and sync your own documents, keeping them private if you like, for an online storage backup.

Docstoc.com – free legal forms and business templates.

Use it for selling goods on craigslist, bar crawls, avoiding telemarketers… any time you need to protect your real number.

You can play with options about when your number expires, when calls can come through, whether you want to be able to screen.

All free.

Numbr.com:: Home Page

Get your own inumbr

While I was on the airplane and working offline, the new changes were stored, and as soon as I connected to the internet again, all the files were updated on all the connected computers.

In addition, I used Live Mesh to remotely control my home computer. I could even copy a file from home and paste it to my desktop.

It rocks. And it’s free!

PS — subscribe now to Avenue Z email updates, and I’ll send you the document with Live Mesh and more than 100 other free and low-cost tech tools you can’t live without!