Product Spotlight: Photo Editing, AudioFlash And More

Web-based Photo Editing

Picnik is a web-based photo editing service that is accessed through your computer’s browser. Users can quickly fix underexposed photos, remove red-eye or apply effects to photos. Minimum hardware requirements are Microsoft Windows XP or Mac OS X, with a 1GHz processor or better, and at least 256 MB of RAM. Flash 9 should be installed on your computer to have the full-featured experience of photo-editing within a browser. All Picnik’s features are available for free during the beta testing. After beta testing, the company will offer a free version with basic photo-editing, and a premium version with advanced editing features.

Reduce Paper Costs

GreenPrint eliminates unwanted pages when printing a document and, thereby, saves paper, ink, money and trees. The software’s patent-pending technology analyzes each page of every document sent to the printer, and it looks for typical waste characteristics (like that pesky last page with only a URL, banner ad or logo). The software highlights and removes unwanted pages from printing. With the print overview, you decide what stays and what goes. GreenPrint comes with a PDF writer so PDFs can be created with one click. The software lets you tracks pages and estimates the amount of money you saved. According to the site, the average user saves $90 per year. Find it at Printgreener.com for $35.

Roxio Video Editor

Roxio Buzz is a simple video editor built entirely for sharing video on the web. It offers direct support for publishing to YouTube and GoFish, and the free version of Roxio Buzz supports Windows Media Video, AVI, MPEG-1, QuickTime and Divx. One-button editing allows you cut out of your video clips the pieces you don’t want. The software automatically optimizes video file size and quality to match the upload requirements for each site. Free at Roxio.com

CircleUp

A simple way to ask questions of a group of employees, customers or of any community you belong to and get back a single, organized result rather than receiving a blizzard of emails and instant messages. If you’ve ever asked questions, requested information or gathered feedback from more than five people, you know the difficulties involved. Now try that with 100 or 1,000 people — it’s virtually impossible (or extremely time consuming) to manage and make sense of all of those responses. CircleUp is a web-based service that can send email on your behalf to your targeted recipients to get an organized response to a question. Free at Circleup.com.

Email Switching Made Easy

Switching email providers can be a difficult process, especially if you are not technically savvy. Do you find yourself needing help transferring all your contacts, calendar entries, archived emails and folders from the previous host to a new one? TrueSwitch is designed to automatically move you from one email provider to another, removing some of the headaches for the non-techies out there. Find it at Trueswitch.com for $19.95.

Image And Archive Your Hard Drive

R-Drive creates a bootable disk or CD of an exact copy of a hard drive or partition. The end result is a drive image file (with or without compression) that can then be stored on any removable media such as CD-R(W)/DVD or USB drives. If you used R-Drive to archive a drive, you can use the included R-Drive Image program to mount your image and restore only certain files right from the Windows Explorer or any other file utility. Find it at Drive-image.com for $44.95

Record In A Flash

AudioFlash allows you to quickly and easily add audio to your website by creating MP3 compressed audio files and a set of “play,” “pause” and “stop” buttons enabling visitors to have complete control over the audio. Once your audio and buttons have been created, you can either copy and paste the generated HTML into another web page or use the built-in FTP client to upload everything as-is to your server. You can use AudioFlash to record information to help sell your product or service, create multiple answers to frequently asked questions, create audio tutorials for products you sell, etc. You can choose from dozens of audio player button colors to blend with any existing website design. Free at Audioflash.org.