On April 18th Zapier announced their newest integration with the Swedish smart button called Flic. I’m not known to go insane when finding out about apps and integrations – in fact, a year ago I probably didn’t know what an app means (no, I’m not kidding). But working for a SaaS startup has made me put on my techy pants and actually follow the news and trends.

However, nothing prepared me for this!

I love Zapier – we all here at Process Street do. (If you don’t believe me just check out Ben Mulholland’s author page, not only are most articles about Zapier, he wrote a 111-page ebook about it — download HERE). But this integration made me drop everything and enthuse to my husband about all the things I’ve always wanted to do but couldn’t because this didn’t previously exist.

Now don’t get me wrong – I absolutely adore the idea of pressing a button to inform the world of the fancy brunch I’m about to have with my girlfriends. But being a 20-something startup employee with a tech-obsessed husband and a new found interest in apps made me think of all the more everyday uses for this invention.

I’m not going to bore you with the specific details of my personal life but I will let you in on my 19 Flic use cases that might (without exaggeration) change my life, and yours.

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With legions of social activists paving the way, we’ve been dealing with the lack of workplace diversity in America for over a decade. And although you’d think that tech startups—with their productivity solutions and their open office spaces—would be at the forefront of the gender equality movement, the numbers tell a different story.

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On November 18, 2014, Microsoft Azure went dark. Thousands of the cloud computing service’s customers experienced downtime on their sites for over 9 hours. When they flooded Microsoft customer support to ask what the hell had gone wrong, customers learned that it wasn’t some glitch, natural disaster, or devious hacking scheme.

It was pure human error.

Microsoft deployed an update without running through the standard operating guidelines specifically laid out for this scenario. Instead of rigorously checking that the update was good to go, engineers shipped it on the assumption it was bug-free. This wasn’t just this one-time incident—engineers at Azure regularly violated standard operating procedure because 99.9% of the time, it was a total waste of their resources.

And it’s not just Azure that does this—habitual violation of process leads to a ton of mistakes in all kinds of IT arenas.

When I was 16, I landed my first “real” job which so happened to be in IT. I had just passed my CCNA with the help of my dad (apparently the youngest person in Australia at the time) and was hungry to get my hands on some real technology.

But once I started, I found there was rigid process everywhere, and configuring a live Windows 2000 server was a totally different experience to tinkering with my fathers machines at home, with serious consequences for not following the process.
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[ Download our Free Ebook ] – Click here to download our free 111 page ebook on “How to automate the tasks you hate at work using Zapier“.

Unless you’ve recently come back from a ten-year vacation in the wilderness, you probably have a computer, laptop, or smartphone that you use on a daily basis.

But even with all the modern technologies and products available to us in this 21st century, the daily struggles of organization and productivity remain.

Thankfully, there’s an app for that (quite a few, actually). At Modernize, we’ve compiled a list of some of the best and most efficient smartphone and tablet apps to help you organize your life. Take a look and get downloading!

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Help me. I’m on a laptop running Windows 8 right now.

Like many others, I hate it and think it’s the worst operating system since the not-so-distant Vista.

If I didn’t have to use it, I might be able to appreciate for a second that Microsoft made a bold design decision that actually ended up being influential.

Microsoft’s Metro design language was one of the first instances of flat design in technology and it came in the least likely form: a terrible mp3 player nobody bought apart from this one kid at my school. The short-lived Zune.
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Have you ever been asked for your email address to see extra blog content? It looks something like this:

That’s a content upgrade. I’ve written pretty extensively about them in this blog post on lead generation, so if you need an in-depth look at the topic (plus the psychology of why it works), that’s the place to start.

They’re great tools for blogs connected to businesses because they capture the contact info of people who are likely to want your product or service. They get the valuable content, you get another email on your list of subscribers plus a free pass to market to them. The best part is that it’s not just any old email address, owned by someone who doesn’t care what you’re saying. It’s the email address of someone who is:

1. Interested enough in what you’ve got to say to give away their email address

2. The perfect fit for your product

It’s doubtful you’re the sort of person who turns down leads, so if you aren’t already using a way to capture emails with content upgrades (or you’re doing it in an awkward way), you’ll want to check out these four tools.

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If you’re building a startup of any kind, chances are you’ll need an explainer video.

Explainer videos are short 1-3 minute videos that help spread your message and teach people what your product and company is all about. A startup video can help explain difficult to understand concepts and, if you’re lucky, can go viral and give you a bunch of traction — as was the case with Dropbox.

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Back in 2014, I moved over from Dropbox to Google Drive and found a few unexpected benefits. At first, I had a little trouble managing the space since the 1TB on my Google Drive was bigger than my HDD, but after I got that sorted I started to learn some of the deeper features of Google Drive, some of which are pretty cool.

Below is a big list of the top tips and tricks I have learned from my experience with the platform.

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I hate paper and I love Evernote. I use it to store everything. I automatically forward files from my email to my Evernote (including snail mail which is automatically scanned and emailed to me). I take photos of every document I sign and business card I’m given using their iPhone App and I even forward my Workflowy history to Evernote.

Some people may suggest using Dropbox or Google Drive, but Evernote has a specific benefit that makes it kick ass: Search.

Evernote is built around search. All documents, images and photos are scanned and made searchable. This means you can dump everything into one folder and Evernote will make it instantly searchable from any of your devices. No organizing, no tagging, just sweet, sweet search.

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[ Download our Free Ebook ] – Click here to download our free 111 page ebook on “How to automate the tasks you hate at work using Zapier“.

Communication is a crucial element to success for any business. But for businesses that have an outsourcing operation or runs on virtual teams, communication is life or death. Virtual environments do not have the luxury of being in the same room or building as their co-workers, so the natural communication benefits from working in an office disappear.

Poor communication can lead to lower quality, productivity, and morale across the organization.

Here are 5 tools that can get you and your team back on track and chatting up a storm.

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