• Create a simple banner ad
• Write a customized limerick
• Make a tough decision for you
• Tweet your message to thousands of followers
• Record a voice over in a native British accent
• Add music to your video 
• Send your child a personalized letter from Santa Claus
• Create a QR Code
• And on, and on and on… Hilarious and fun!

Square is a tiny little card reader that slips into the audio port of your Android phone, iPhone or iPad. You set up a free account, get a free reader and can start swiping cards immediately. The system is linked to your bank account, and the money transfers in the next day. They charge no setup or maintenance fees, and take just 2.75% out of every transaction. They’ll even help you calculate and keep track of sales tax.

I’ve been practicing with the reader by charging the price of my book on my husband’s credit card. He doesn’t know it yet, but he is going to have plenty of copies to give away for Christmas.

See the full review here:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Enter to win now!

We’re giving away three Advance Reader Copies of Upgrade to Free on Wednesday. Enter to win now!

PS — Did you know Upgrade to Free is available for pre-order at a great price? Love those bargains!

Hi-LARIOUS! I can’t tell you how many times I run around the house looking for my cell phone. Frequently I pick up my husband’s phone and give myself a ring.

This clever, funny, easy tool solves that problem in a flash. Just go to www.icantfindmyphone.com and enter your number. Ring ring! The call comes within seconds, and a friendly robot woman says, “Looks like you found your phone!”

Love it.

I Can’t Find My Phone

We’re giving away 10 copies of the book on Goodreads, complete with a cupcake magnet and other goodies!

Enter to win the chance to be one of the first reviewers: bit.ly/U2Fgoodreadsgive

My husband and I often lose our battle to keep the dining room table clean because of the dozens and dozens of business cards that pile up. We know we need to put them somewhere, but they have no real home and they end up cluttering up our living areas.

Sure, you can buy an iPhone app that scans the card, but you have to double check everything, and it ends up being a pain. And there are several card-scanning businesses out there that will input your business cards, but it’ll cost you $10 and up a month.

But the other day I discovered an amazing free tool that will bring order back to our home. Like other iPhone card management apps, CardMunch lets you take a picture of the card. But the difference is that the picture is transmitted to an actual person who checks the data and sends accurate contact information back to your phone.

It’s free thanks to LinkedIn, who bought the service and did away with the pricing. Thus, it has a one-button system to allow you to request a LinkedIn connection, plus other features let you send emails, download your entire contact list and integrate your contacts with your iPhone address book.

CardMunch

I attend a lot of conferences, and inevitably I end up talking to an interesting person who says, “Here, let me give you my card…. oh dear! I seem to have left them in my….”

Contxts solves this problem in an instant. In about 2 minutes, you can set up an account for a virtual business card. Then all you need to do is give your new friend a code to text to 50500, and she instantly has your information. Or you can get her mobile number and send your card to her. It’s easy!

Try it out! Text “AskBethZ” (without the quotations) to 50500 and be one of the first to discover my super secret new home for these tools!

contxts – mobile sms business cards.

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 meantime, enjoy the webinar recording. I covered five great (and free!) graphics tools: Picnik, GIMP, FotoFlexer, Aviary and SignGenerator.org.

The goal of these webinars is to cover a handful of tools in 30 minutes or less. Next month’s topic coming soon!

Drum roll, please! The OFFICIAL name of the upcoming book is:

Upgrade to Free

The Guide to the Best Free (and Low-Cost) Tools and Apps

The jacket design is next, and we have three finalists. More updates coming soon!

For the commitment phobic, finding a time to meet with others just doesn’t get any easier. Just visit Doodle.com and click on “Schedule event.” Without having to register or give any personal information, you can quickly set up an event or meeting with alternative times. Then just send the link to members of your team, and each person (again, without registering), can indicate availability.

Here’s a little video about how to set it up:

Doodle’s best features are free, though you can sign up for a premium account with more features for less than $30 a year. Doodle also integrates with lots of other scheduling tools such as Google Calendar and now has an iPhone app.

Doodle: easy scheduling.

One of the most popular categories of free and low-cost online tools is online document collaboration. TypeWith.me is one of the easiest, fastest solutions to share documents with colleagues. You simply visit their URL, click to create a new document, and you’re on a new site that you can share right away.

You can upload your own Word, text or HTML document to work on, or you can start with a blank document. When you invite collaborators, each reviewer has his own colors. I like that you can export straight to PDF or keep it in the original format. Another cool feature allows you to watch a quick movie of all the changes that were made and by whom.

TypeWith.me doesn’t require any type of registration, and it’s free, free, free.

NEW! The Cheapskate Freelancer is going multimedia. Watch this 61-second video for more details about TypeWith.me, and favorite the new Cheapskate Freelancer YouTube Channel for more videos (coming soon!):

TypeWith.me: Live Text Document Collaboration!

Because of horrible, malicious virus writers who spend their days trying to figure out clever ways to take over our computers, our bank accounts and the universe, we are warned again and again to never click on anything that we don’t recognize. I used to tell students in my computer courses, “Even if your grandmother sends you a link, be suspicious. Make sure you know where you’re going before you click.”

This is great advice, or it was until a couple of years ago, when Twitter’s 140-character limits meant that we would be 11 characters over just by pasting a link such as http://www.cheapskatefreelancer.com/2010/03/pdfescape-the-pdf-editor-ive-been-dreaming-ofe-online-pdf-reader-editor-form-filler-form-designer-solution/.

With Twitter and other services, brevity was imperative. So they started creating URL shortening services that let you convert a long URL into a teeny, tiny one.

Now back to the security issue. If your grandmother sends you a long link like the one above, you’d probably trust it. But what if the link she sends is http://z.pe/56lG? You may think your grandmother has become a hacker and try to block her.

Some people have an inherent (and justified) fear of shortened URLs since you can’t see what you’re clicking on. But I have good news. A 2010 study by Zscaler Inc., a company that sells security services, looked for malicious content in 1.3 million shortened links taken from Twitter over two weeks. Just 773 of those links – 0.06 percent – were malicious. The rest were just grandmothers and regular users like you and me sharing information and resources with others.

Here are just a few URL shorteners that I use:

• A.gd (http://a.gd): Cool options like password protection, link tagging and expiration dates, plus traffic tracking.
• Bit.ly (http://bit.ly): Twitter’s built-in shortener.
• BudURL (http://budurl.com): It’s a long link, but BudURL offers all kinds of tracking information to help with your marketing.
• Is.gd (http://is.gd): I love this little guy. It has no bells or whistles, but it stands for “is good.” That makes me happy.
• Threely (http://3.ly): Lets your viewers preview the link before they click (so you can verify your grandmother is still a good person), and allows custom URLs, such as http://3.ly/Cheapskate (goes to www.cheapskatefreelancer.com, of course).
• TinyURL (http://tinyurl.com): The first service I discovered that would shrink a long link into a short one. They’re still around, but now the URL seems impossibly long.
• Unhid (www.unhid.co.cc/): This site will convert a shortened URL to its actual link so you can take a peek before clicking.

(PS — this post is a preview excerpt from the Cheapskate Freelancer book, available in October!)

When it comes to free and low-cost photo editing software and webware, Picnik is my sentimental favorite, and GIMP is the industry standard. But somewhere along the way I stumbled across FotoFlexer, and I may be in love.

FotoFlexer has the ease of Picnik and some of the advanced features of GIMP. FotoFlexer lets you add special effects, plus it can create layers, merge photos, erase ex-boyfriends from family photos, etc.  The best thing is that the interface (while not as cool as Picnik’s) is certainly much easier to understand than GIMP’s. That makes it easy for word people like me to edit and create graphics to be proud of.

Just this morning I was working on a client’s blog and transformed this…

Into this avatar…

I was able to take out the unneeded text and close up the square… without the need of a cupcake to handle the stress. It took about 5 minutes. Makes me feel like a pro.

FotoFlexer – The worlds most advanced online photo editor.

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.

I love these types of environmentally beneficial services (I consider it a Beth Favorite). Signing up with My Junk Tree should put an end to quite a bit of the paper junk mail that fills up your mailbox.

It’s twenty bucks for three years, and they promise to cut down on junk mail and even stop delivery of the phone books that collect dust under the coffee table. Who uses those anymore anyway?

My Junk Tree.

Have you seen these two other green resources?

My email system had a hitch in its git-a-long for the last couple of days, and the Contact Us form was shooting your valuable comments into cyberspace. It’s working now, so please feel free to contact me here or send me an email through scr.im (another cool free tool!): http://scr.im/bethz.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

I’m having way too much fun discovering new tools for the Cheapskate Computing book. A couple of people have recommended BeFunky, and I finally checked out their site last week.

I’m so impressed. Just upload a graphic and click around on the filters. Within minutes you can create an interesting graphic to spice up your website, your newsletters or your Facebook profile. Here’s what I did with a picture of me after the Seattle Marathon last summer. It took about 20 seconds to create. Cool, huh? BeFunky is an instant Beth Favorite. Their basic level is free (you can do what I did with the basic level), and the nice folks at BeFunky upgraded my account for six months (the next tier up is about 50 bucks a year) so I can investigate their premium tools.

BeFunky.

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.

Clever, clever Best Buy folks set up@Twelpforce, a Twitter account that gives free tech answers just for asking. Great public relations idea, and a fantastic free resource.

Also, check out CrossLoop, another great resource for help with your computer.

Twelpforce twelpforce on Twitter.

Come on… be honest. Some of you still text and drive, right? Jott.com is the solution. Just dial a number on your phone, and a chipper voice asks, “Who do you want to Jott?” Say the name of a contact (or yourself), and Jott will take your message and convert it to text, plus attach the audio for the recipient’s listening pleasure. One of the attendees to my presentation called it “automated nagging.”

Jott has been one of my Beth Favorites for a couple of years now. It used to be free, which was crazy, and now they charge a very reasonable $3.95 a month for their most basic service. Well worth it. It integrates with all kinds of things — social media, great to-do list services, etc. Love it.

Jott.com | Voice-to-Text Notes, To Dos & Reminders.

Oh, I love free stuff, and I love people who make it easier to download free stuff.

Visit the Ninite site, and check off the free applications you want on your computer, such as Firefox, Chrome, iTunes, Audacity, Skype, AVG, Adobe Reader, Gimp… The list is fantastic! (And it reminds me of all the great tools I still need to cover here on Cheapskate Freelancer.)

Once you choose your programs, click to install, and Ninite will manage your installation. This is great when you are doing a full upgrade to Windows 7.

Ninite Easy PC Setup and Multiple App Installer – Great For Win7 Upgrades.

I’m in Orlando this week, teaching a series of sessions on Free and Low-Cost Social Media Tools. Ordinarily I remote in to my computer at the office using Live Mesh from Microsoft, but the software is misbehaving.

So I returned to an old standby, LogMeIn. I abandoned LogMeIn because it didn’t have all the cool features that Live Mesh does, most notably that I can store the files I need on the road in Live Mesh folders, so when I update them on either computer, all copies of the files are updated. Plus, Live Mesh lets you drag and drop files across the computers, and LogMeIn makes you upgrade to the Pro version for that.

But I just tried LogMeIn again, and I am impressed. I can’t do the file sharing, but now LogMeIn allows me to copy something on one computer and paste it to the other, so I can copy a whole file to transfer. Plus, I use multiple monitors on my desktop, and LogMeIn lets me switch between them with the click of a button.

The biggest thing I like about it today is that it works, and, of course, it’s free. The professional version is quite reasonably priced as well ($70 a year for one computer), plus they have other services such as backup.

LogMeIn – Remote Access and Desktop Control Software for Your Computer.

The cool thing about Elance (besides the very affordable prices you can find) is that you don’t release payment until you’re satisfied, so you can guard against a flighty freelancer.

Elance | Hire experts to do your work: outsource to companies, consultants and freelance professionals..

This year Blog Action Day is focusing on Climate Change. Thousands of bloggers around the globe are writing about the effect of our changing climate on every part of our lives and the environment.

For my part here on the Cheapskate Freelancer, I offer three free tools that relate to climate change.

• Climate Wizard: The Nature Conservancy’s site that shares climate change information that allows us to visualize the impacts anywhere on Earth.
• NativeEnergy: A for-profit organization that uses revenue from selling carbon offsets to fund renewable energy projects. Contains several calculators to determine your carbon footprint. I also love the reasonably priced cards you can buy and send.
• Votenet: If you run elections for your association or organization, calculate the carbon footprint of the paper you’re using.