Since starting The Second Glass I’ve been amazed at all the new software that we’re using. When we first started the magazine, in 2006, we edited all of our articles in Writely, which is now Google Docs. Writely was the first web-based word processing software. Not only did it allow you to write, edit and email documents, it allowed for multiple editors. This meant, that no matter what computer you were on you, and anyone you shared the documents with, had full access to everything.

Now, Google Docs is a cornerstone for our business. At least five times per meeting someone will say, “I’ll put it on Google Docs.” Spreadsheets, word processing, databases… the docs never end.

In our last meeting, we realized that Google Docs weren’t cutting it for our now large list of business contacts. Our team needs to share these contacts and keep track of communication so today I signed us up for Zoho CRM software. It compares with SalesForce, but it’s free for up to three users, instead of $25 per month.

After talking it over, we decided to say screw it. Worst comes to worse we can always export the info and start paying for Sales Force. Best case, we save some cash. After taking a look at Sequoia Capital’s 56 Slide Presentation Of Doom I’m pretty much sold on anything that’s free and can be compared to the paid version on the same chart.

Finally, the last online program I haven’t been using as much as I should, is Picnik. This is an online photo editing program, similar to Adobe Photoshop. It’s suprisingly powerful and can link directly to your Flickr, Picassa or Facebook photos. The nice thing about running software not hosted on your own computer is that a team of servers are processing the information, instead of your potentially, crappy, five-year-old junkbot. In the very near future you’ll be able to do some cool stuff with a device such as your iPhone.