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Top 8 Web Apps For Start-Ups 

Use the Best, Forget the Rest

If you're busy creating a start-up business, there are many decisions to be made. Especially if you're working from home. You have so many questions to answer. Is yesterday's shirt still clean enough to wear? Do paper towels really double as coffee filters? Is it "lazy” to sleep until noon, or just "lazy-ish”?

Being your own boss is rewarding, but sooner or later you'll have to get motivated and answer those pesky e-mails in your in box and decide how to spend your time. With so many web apps and websites out there, it can be tempting to use them all or ignore them outright. In an effort to save you time, we're providing a list of eight helpful tools sure to increase your productivity decrease your frustration.

Love MySpace, but hate the nauseating, Geocities-level backgrounds and fake gift card spam message? Consider LinkedIn, a more professional social networking tool that allows you to connect with your professional clients as well as their connections. LinkedIn makes networking easy and a little less awkward. Think of it as an online office party, only without the uncomfortable silence and terrible cake.

Nothing is worse than being on an outdated computer (borrowed E-Machine?) and needing Photoshop. Enter Splashup, an excellent photo-editing tool for photo and graphic editing. Splashup works in all browsers, allows layer editing, and interfaces with Flickr, Picasa, and Facebook.

Balancing your checkbook may very well be a lost art, but Dimewise can help keep track of your money. Dimewise records your cash flow and produces handy graphs and charts so you can decipher where you money is going and what you have left to spend. Excel is for suckers.

Do you like sleeping on the couch? Then you had better remember not only your anniversary, but the anniversary of your first date, the anniversary of the first time you made eye contact, the anniversary of the first time you rode in a car together, and the anniversary of your first kiss. Remember the Milk can help you remember everything and manage your tasks. You can manage and share it from any computer in order to receive email, SMS, or IM reminders for anything you set it to tell you. Sign-up is free, and Remember the Milk works with Google Calender. It's even available on the iPhone.

Not enough room or speed to send large files? Leave this problem in the past with YouSendIt, which allows you to transfer large files over the internet without an FTP program. YouSendIt offers plug-ins for Outlook and Photoshop, which means no more hard copy deliveries, no more Kinkos runs, and no more hurried phone calls to tech-challenged business partners.

If it's true that all bloggers live in their mother's basement, you may never want to meet one. Thanks to PayPerPost, you'll never have to. PPP allows you to pay bloggers to mention your website or product. Questionable? Maybe. But hey, if they're willing to sell their souls for an extra buck, you're just helping them move out of the basement.

Offered by 37Signals, Basecamp is an online collaboration program that provides to-do lists, messaging, file sharing, time tracking, and scheduling. Basecamp includes customizable permissions and viewing settings, and you can run multiple projects simultaneously while easily navigating between them. Writeboard, by the same company, can be used with Basecamp and allows multiple users to write, share, revise and compare different versions of a document.

Inblogit is a blog service that is easily integrated into any design, which means your blog will look better on your existing website. You can create your own design, it's easy to use, it's good on Linux and Windows, and their website is orange. What more could you want?

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So there you have it. Eight ways to use some online tools and feel better about yourself while doing it. Who knows, these tools just might make you so productive that you could actually have time to hit the grocery store. And if you do, remember the laundry detergent and the coffee filter... because you're starting to stink.