Using slidecast and zipcast, slideshare can be used to hold presentations to users from all around the world through the internet. I am still playing with it, and am fascinated. Like anything else, there is a learning curve, and I have spent hours playing with it.

Here’s my first upload and I have embedded it in my blog. Next, I will try to add sound, and start a zipcast.

For the budget conscious entrepreneur, here are some free online tools that are quite powerful and useful. They can be used for email broadcast, communication/marketing, file storage, document creation (word processing, spreadsheet), social media.

1. Prezi – www.prezi.com – an alternative to Powerpoint presentation software. Free. A zooming presentation editing software. Great way to create stunning presentation.

2. Mailchimp – www.mailchimp.com – send up to 3,000 emails a month to as many as 500 subscribers for free. There is a tutorial that explains how to use the software. Choose from several ready made templates.

3. LinkedIn – www.linkedin.com – LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site. Founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking. As of 2010 , LinkedIn had more than 65 million registered users, spanning more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. The site is available in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. Registration is free.

4. Dropbox – www.dropbox.com – Dropbox is an easy way to store, sync, and, share files online. Simply drop your file to an internet folder, which can be accessed by other computers. you can invite people to view private files in a public folder accessible by anyone who knows the address. Great for working and transferring files with clients.

5. Open Office – www.openoffice.org – an alternative to Google Docs or Microsoft Office. You can download free software that you can use for word processing and spreadsheet. Easy to install.

6. Hootsuite – www.hootsuite.com – Using one dashboard, the user can measure, monitor and post to social media including Twitter, Facebook and Linked In. Great for marketing communications and customer engagement.

7. Ping.fm – www.ping.fm – Ping.fm is a free social networking and micro-blogging web service that enables users to post to multiple social networks simultaneously. Making an update on Ping.fm pushes the update to a number of different social websites at once. This allows individuals using multiple social networks to update their status only once, without having to update it in all their social media individually. Ping.fm groups services into three categories – status updates, blogs, and micro-blogs – and updates can be sent to each group separately.

8. Google Docs – www.docs-google.com – a free web-based word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and form application software by Google.com. Free storage of up to 1 gB of data. Documents can be shared, opened and edited by multiple users at the same time.

Squidoo is a community website that allows users to create pages (called lenses) for subjects of interest. Squidoo is in the top 500 most visited sites in the world, and in the top 300 most viewed in the United States. Squidoo grew 91% in 2008, and had 900,000 handbuilt lenses as of February 1st, 2009.  Development on Squidoo started in 2005, launching a beta testing period in October of that year.  The launch team consisted of Seth Godin, his book editor Megan Casey, former Fast Company employee Heath Row, Corey Brown, and Gil Hildebrand, Jr.

The site came out of beta testing two months later and reached 100,000 lenses within the first six months.

Since its debut, Squidoo has been profiled in CNN, The New York Times, MSNBC, and The Washington Post.The site was given top prize in SXSW’s community/wiki category. Squidoo has challenged established information websites like About  and eHow for traffic, while staying very close in unique visitors to newer models like Mahalo and HubPages.

See a sample Squidoo page.

Users register by creating a profile and sign in to connect with other members in the same business, same locale, or similar businesses in a different locale.    Users can also engage in different discussions on the site’s forum and share experiences.

Sprouter is currently funded by angel investors and its current priority is to build the site’s user base.  It has yet to determine the business model for generating revenues and will be looking to partnerships with small business associations as potential source of revenues.

So, to all the entrepreneurs with a time-deficit, this is another chance to network from the comfort of your chair.