Running a business can be tough, but with the right tools, you can streamline your operations and focus on things that matter.  Here are some of this year’s top performing business applications that you can use  on your desktop or mobile device to help you with your day-to-day operations.

Productivity

Evernote lets you take notes, organize and store information so that you’ll never have to forget tasks and ideas for your projects.  It supports and syncs your data between multiple platforms so you can essentially access it anywhere whether on your laptop, desktop, tablet or smartphone.

Evernote has seen accelerated growth over the year.  The ability to sync between devices has boosted its popularity among users allowing it to grow rapidly from 11 million users in June 2011 to over 75 million users this October.  The company has received over $200 million in funding and is valuated at $1 billion.

Evernote comes in free and premium plans.  The free version has a monthly usage limit so if you are a power user, you will want to have the premium version.  Check them out at www.evernote.com.

Advertising

OpenX combines ad serving, ad exchange and content valuation in a Software as a Service platform.  Their solution allows digital media companies to maximize ad revenue on any platform.  The company has enjoyed a staggering 44,000% growth from 2008 to 2012.  

With over 100 billion monthly impressions 450 unique viewers worldwide from all forms of digital screens, OpenX provides a compelling advertising platform to get your business known.  Check them out at www.openx.com.

Marketing

Rocket Fuel is perhaps one of the most interesting marketing platform providers this year.  The company combines Big Data with Artificial Intelligence to help marketers make informed decisions to help them tweak their marketing strategies and maximize their marketing ROI.

Rocket Fuel made its name through monitoring billions of ad trades and giving advertisers the opportunity to purchase the right ads at the right time through its predictive modelling platform.  The company has since applied the same AI and big data technology for other marketing solutions.  

The company has been seeing steady growth.  It has doubled its user numbers from 2012 and has grown its revenue to 132% in Q3 this year over the same period in 2012.  

Check them out at www.rocketfuel.com.

Finance and Inventory Management

NetSuite is one of the fastest growing and most popular accounting, inventory management and CRM providers out there today.  With over 16,000 mid to large-scale enterprises using their products, NetSuite has been named by Gartner as the fastest growing financial software vendor this year.

NetSuite’s cloud-based solutions are created specifically for industry standard needs such as professional services, software, wholesale distribution, manufacturing, and ecommerce.  You can check them out at www.netsuite.com.

Social Network Monitoring and Management

In today’s digital world, having a social media presence is a must for many businesses.  However, it can get really tedious to manage and monitor multiple social networks especially as your userbase starts growing.  

Hootsuite is one of today’s most popular social network management and monitoring tool.  It allows you to post and monitor your community from multiple social network channels including Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter.  Their platform centralizes all your feeds into one easy to browse page, giving you a birds-eye view of everything that’s going on in your community.  From their dashboard, you can reply to messages or auto-schedule your posts so that they will be sent at the best time of the day to maximize engagement.  Hootsuite’s platform also includes detailed analytics and reporting.  Reports are customizable depending on your chosen plan.  

Hootsuite is available for free and for power users, there is a paid version that opens up more features.  You can check them out at www.hootsuite.com.

This is a quick overview  of some of the  most popular business tools this year.  Each business is different though and yours might have specific requirements that need to be met.  There are literally hundreds of other tools out there so be sure to do your own research so that you can find the best one that would suit your needs.