Ahh technology. You gotta love it. Just when the 500 apps and tools you use cover all bases that could possibly need to be covered, you discover ANOTHER cool tool that you just have to sign up for, download, play with and which you then wonder how you ever managed life without it!
Once again over the weekend, I took part in Start Up Weekend Sunshine Coast. As I wrote in another blog post recently, Startup Weekend is a global brand and movement, which has now hosted over 1200 events across around 500 cities throughout the world that have created over 8,000, Startups through 100,000 highly motivated entrepreneurs.
There’s many very cool things about Startup Weekends, but one of them is that when I am there to coach/mentor by hanging out with the teams, I always discover a bunch of cool new apps and tools that the teams are using.
Here’s a quick run down on my favourite new tools after the weekend just been:
1. https://explee.com/
Explee is the application that allows you to create powerful and efficient animated video. The whiteboard style called “whiteboard animation” or “video scribing“ is an efficient way to simply explain an idea, a project or a complex notion. Explee is a cloud based animated video app, meaning you can create and display your animated videos from your laptop, tablet or smartphone and always have the latest version of your work at your fingertips.Sure there’s others in the market like Powtoon and GoAnimate, but Explee seemed to be a popular choice over the weekend.
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2. https://meerkatapp.co/
Meerkat is a live video streaming app available on iOS and Android developed by a team headed by Ben Rubin. It quickly found popularity on micro-blogging site Twitter after its debut on the website Product Hunt in March 2015 and the South by Southwest Interactive Festival. Meerkat directly links with Twitter accounts, letting people stream a live video to their followers on Twitter. My friend Danielle wasn’t at the live pitches, so asked me to download it so she could watch a live stream of the event from home. The result? 83 people got on to watch the stream, which my 8 year old ran holding my iPhone. I did do a little tweeting across various networks to spread the word, but within 20 minutes, this many people were on!
3. https://www.invisionapp.com/
Now last but not least is this cool tool which describes itself as ‘the world’s most powerful design prototyping tool.’ Just upload your designs and add hotspots to transform your static screens into clickable, interactive prototypes complete with gestures, transitions, and animations. Perfect for people with an app they want to create. Share a link for collaborators and clients to open on their desktop or mobile device.
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What tools could you not live without? Have you ever taken part in a Startup Weekend? What were your best technology takeaways? Love to hear from you in the comments section below!