3 key apps for your business

A look at the current three best apps for businesses

Written by Rob James, Contributing Writer

What are some of the best apps that can be downloaded for businesses? While there are many apps available that can help boost a business’s productivity, while also helping to track expenses and speed up online transactions, only a few bring together a wide range of functions with an excellent interface to be deemed truly indispensable. Among these apps, TripIt, Evernote, and Dragon Dictation are arguably best at providing high quality services that make business trips, organisation, and work communication much more efficient.

TripIt - 

Designed to make business trips much easier, TripIt works to calculate expenses, while making reservations, saving receipts, and providing mapping software for when you’re visiting a new place. Ideal for business travellers, TripIt can alert you to flight cancellations and changes, and can also find the best hotel prices, and forward on email messages to your phone relating to any alterations in schedule. A premium version is available for around £34 that lets you upload more photographs and data.

Self employed workers can particularly benefit from TripIt’s ability to keep track of expenses, and its ability to control costs. Like other apps in its class, TripIt’s strengths come via its consolidation of a lot information into a single app, which can also be synced with a number of different devices. You can share information with other travellers, and sync up your data with LinkedIn and Facebook to maintain social networking while on a trip.

Evernote -

Ideal for businesses of different sizes, Evernote is another one stop app that lets you collate huge amounts of data into an easy to use interface. Still perhaps the best productivity app out there, Evernote stores documents, voice recordings, images, and video into notes, which can be tagged and quickly searched. Data can then be synced up across devices, making it very difficult to lose track of your information. To do lists, meeting notes, and scans of receipts for expenses make Evernote particularly useful.

Your notes are shared to a private cloud service, meaning that you can pull down important information when on the go, while adding in new data from your phone and tablet to look at when you’re back in the office. Recent updates to Evernote have included geolocational tracking to link different notes to particular places. A premium version is available that has a few perks, most notably the ability to search for text within PDFs.

Dragon Dictation -

Any business user that needs to make notes on the go, or send emails and update social networking sites can benefit from Dragon Dictation. The Nuance designed app is a speech to text program that lets you make voice notes, which are then transcribed. The sophisticated voice recognition software means that you rarely get serious mistakes, making Dragon more efficient than other voice apps.

While the mobile version of Dragon Dictation is not quite as comprehensive as the desktop version, you can still store a lot of information and synchronise different commands to Twitter, Facebook, and other sites on the go. Hands free dictation on the train, or in the car, also means that you can stay on top of tasks without having to stop to type.

Rob James is a self-employed internet marketer. He uses Distinct Connections 4G Business deals for his business communications. Rob uses internet marketing to promote himself, and recommends you optimize your site for mobiles too. He can usually be found blogging about Mobile related topics, and loves checking out the latest gadgets.