Are you looking for a good 3D-design software for your e-business? Maybe you already consider 3D Max or Maya.I just want to introduce you Blender, an excellent open source design application for your 3D modeling needs. It’s fast, it’s free and you can download this complete 8MB application from Blenders website.

With Blender you can create and apply textures, animate, render and also include audio effects in your projects.

In Blender’s website you can find tons of material, examples and also a 400 pages book with the official users guide.

If you are looking for a web conference software for your business, Dimdim has a very good product.

Dimdim is the Open Source web conferencing company. With Dimdim you can show Presentations, Applications and Desktops to any other person over the internet. You can chat, show your webcam and talk with others in the meeting. It’s really very easy to use and requires the flash plugin available in your browser.

You can also think on using Dimdim for elearning purposes or even for perform sales with potential customers. Excellent piece of software!

Have you ever wanted to write down a mind mapping for your business? I use to do it not only for the business I work for, but also for the classes I teach at the university.

Free Mind is a terrific tool for doing this. You can easily draw your mind maps and export them to HTML (in order to present them online), PDF and other well known formats.

Free Mind is written in Java and can be installed in both Windows and Linux. Great tool!.

While most web sites provide downloads of current versions, OldApps.com does somewhat different by providing older versions of useful programs.

Often newer versions are better yet complicated to use and we understand that it is hard to find old versions. Many software providers do not put older version of their software on their site therefore OldApps.com came online and started helping those who need old apps.
 
Personally, I use older browsers versions to download some files I’m interested in, as some swf, xml, etc. I can not download them using the current versions of the browsers because they execute those files instead of giving me the change to download them.
 
In other hand, many slow internet connection users want to get the smallest possible program to use. OldApps.com is taking care of those by including size of the files next to them in most cases.

When planning your next business, you’ll probable have a project chart to follow, with the entire tasks in detail. You’ll also know that MS Project is a very good tool to manage the project and follow its performance. I use this terrific tool for many years while working as a consultant, and while there weren’t any other than can replace it with better functionalities.

Now, I recently tested Open Proj, a free, open source project management solution. OpenProj is a complete replacement of Microsoft Project and other commercial project solutions. OpenProj is ideal for desktop project management and is available on Linux, Unix, Mac or Windows. It even opens existing Microsoft or Primavera files. OpenProj shares the industry’s most advanced scheduling engine with Project-ON-Demand and has Gantt Charts, Network Diagrams (PERT Charts), WBS and RBS charts, Earned Value costing and more. There is literally no time or effort involved in switching to OpenProj, and your teams can manage projects on any platform for free.

As far as I saw, OpenProj has all the most important features that Microsoft Project has and for free!. If your business is a low budget one, consider using this fantastic tool!.

You’ll probably know how badly for SEO your e-business is having broken links in your website. Is very common to link external pages and then forget about those links. Those pages can go offline and you’ll never get noticed.

To prevent this, you’d better check your links frequently, especially those external ones, but also those one that point to some other pages inside your website.

The most obvious way to do this is manually, by clicking on each link. This can be a tough task if you have a very big site or with lot of external links. So I recommend you to use an application that helps you with this control.

A very good one and free for Microsoft Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP is Xenu’s Link Sleuth. This application checks Web sites for broken links. Link verification is done on “normal” links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and java applets. It displays a continuously updated list of URLs which you can sort by different criteria. A report can be produced at any time.

If you don’t want to install any piece of software in your PC, you can still try Dead Links.com, a broken link checker that has a free service for small websites. If your site is really big, you can use one of the paid services. I tested the free one and it’s really good.

How many times do you find two or more versions of a single document in your computer? Did you use to program? If you do, this will sound familiar. Today, I’ll like to write about a terrific tool that will help you manage these documents.

WinMerge is an Open Source visual text file differencing and merging tool for Win32 platforms. It is highly useful for determing what has changed between project versions, and then merging changes between versions.

When you select two documents to be compared, you’ll get visual differencing and merging of text files. The documents are located in different panes so you can quickly see both.

For instance, if you download an open source application form the internet and then you make some modifications in the code, this application can quickly help you find those modifications comparing them with the original files. I use it also with office documents. It’s really cool!

Many people know Wikipedia, a great source of information that I frequently use. Almost all the information that I need and that could be written is there.

Wikipedia is developed with an application called Wiki. The Wiki is a system that let us have a collaborative website so every user can create and edit content there. The application saves the information and stores the older version of it, so you can have all the tracking of every piece of data there.

In big companies people uses Wiki as a documental tool for grab information about all their processes, systems, marketing and other useful data. Their employees write in the wiki all these information so, for instance, they quickly know how to answer a special type or email, or how to proceed to install a software, etc.
In small endeavors, people also use wikis following the same goal: documenting. The next video, shows in a very simple way, why wikis are so useful. Enjoy it!.

There are many applications that can help your business creating tutorials or how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel etc). One of them is Wink, a freeware available for all flavours of Windows and various versions of Linux.

Using Wink you can capture screenshots, add explanations boxes, buttons, titles etc and generate a highly effective tutorial for your users.

You can also add audio to your tutorials and export your tutorials or presentation in many available formats (SWF, PDF, PostScript, HTML and EXE). Using smart capture tools, you can easily grab screenshots from your pc based on mouse and keyboard input.

Wink is a nice tool for your business, and it’s free.

There are many good software applications that can help you with your daily duties, much f them very expensive. Software for image processing, design, and office suites are my favorites. But, why pay too much for tools that perhaps have similar totally free. Even more, sometimes, the free versions are better that the paid ones.

Blogger Not a Blind prepared a list of useful free applications; from FTP clients to file encrypters; from image editors to compression tools, this list includes the most wanted software applications. Take a look at the “94 of the Best Free Software Applications that are Better than Purchased Software”.