Greplin is a personal search engine for all the data you keep in the cloud. It works a lot like the desktop search Spotlight where you search for a word or phrase and Spotlight will go through your entire hard drive looking for matching files and documents.

Greplin does the same thing but for your online data that you store on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Voice, Dropbox, Gmail and a bunch of other services. You can run a query and find public and private data on those sites. Tweets including DMs are shown as well as digging into the transcripts of your Google Voice voicemail.

Greplin uses OAuth and other APIs for authorization, so they never see your third party credentials. Since Greplin’s searches work on a variety of online sites it is invaluable to the small business owner who does business online by saving them a lot of time locating the exact information they need when they need it.

Greplin.com is in closed beta right now. Most of what Greplin offers will be free. A fee is charged for more features like searching within attachments. Below is a video illustrating how Greplin works. To register for Greplin go to http://www.greplin.com and pick the first index you’d like to use.

Let us know how you envision you could use Greplin in your personal life and business.

Greplin Demo from greplin on Vimeo.

Flipboard is a free iPad app that you can quickly download from iTunes and then request access to the service via email.

It downloads your latest incoming updates from your Facebook and Twitter accounts and turns it into a colorful digital magazine. Flipboard will turn the links you receive from your Facebook friends that might include photos and displays it on your iPad along with the first few paragraphs. If you touch the photo or image it will expand to fill the entire iPad. If you touch a link it will bring up the page on Flipboard’s built-in web browser. You even have a comment section to discuss the story with your Facebook friends.

You can use Flipboard to read your Twitter incoming messages. It displays a few paragraphs of the web page along with any links or images so you are not limited to the 140 character cryptic messages your followers send you!

Flipboard also acts as a Twitter feed reader so you can put your favorite feeds into Flipboard and it will turn into an instant news magazine that updates itself. You can link to lots of Twitter news sources such as Fortune, Economist and Wired to name a few.

You can also use Flipboard to aggregate data feeds from major news sources. It sorts the stories into useful categories — news, business, sports — allowing you to riffle through a great variety in just a few minutes.

Flipboard is still in it’s infancy with lots of bugs that need tweaked. For instance, it doesn’t store downloaded data for when you’re not connected to the Internet and there’s no reload button to refresh content. At the moment you have to shut down the app and restart it to refresh content. Sometimes there is a lag of 30 minutes updating Facebook content. You also can’t bookmark a webpage within Flipboard to your iPad’s Safari web browser. Future releases of Flipboard should iron out some of these bugs though. For now there’s still plenty to like about Flipboard.

One example of how you could incorporate Flipboard into your social media marketing and sales efforts is to create a dummy Twitter account that you will not use to promote your business or proactively seek followers. What you would use it for is to tweet to this account any customer reviews about your product you find online or any videos you post to YouTube of customer testimonials. This Twitter account is essentially your social bookmarks that you link to the Flipboard app on your iPad. This will enable you to create a social media magazine that is portable and attractive which you can show your potential clients to assist in the sales process.

Are you using Flipboard as part of your marketing/sales process? If so, share with us how Flipboard has been able to help you and your business.

To help hotels and resorts stay on top of mentions, chats or general dialogue that might be happening about their properties,  Screen Pilot, a bleeding edge digital marketing firm, have compiled a Top 5 list of free tools that can be used right now to keep tabs on the social media-verse.

-Social Mention (socialmention.com) is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content from across the social universe into a single stream of information. Social Mention monitors more than a hundred social media properties.

-WhosTalkin (WhosTalkin.com) is a social media search tool that allows users to search for conversations surrounding the topics cared about most such as property brand name. Search and sorting algorithms combine data taken from over 60 of the internet’s most popular social media gateways.

-Samepoint (samepoint.com) crawlers encompass every conceivable type of social media service. Categorization breaks out results by type of social media.

-Surchur (surchur.com) is the ultimate dashboard to right now. The surchmeter shows how popular a keyword is on different sources: surchur, blogs and twitter etc.

-Trendrr (trendrr.com) allows you to track the popularity and awareness of trends across a variety of inputs, ranging from social networks, to blog buzz and video views downloads, all in real time. Compare trends to one another, monitoring and evaluating across a variety of sources.

No matter what tool you use, interpretation of the data is a different ball game.  Screen Pilot’s social media services can help you translate what all these results mean. Not only does Screen Pilot position hospitality brands in the social media space, but we help track the impact and revenues generated as a result of social media and other hotel internet marketing efforts. For results, best-practice advice and incremental revenues visit screenpilot.com

According to PC World “Quickoffice” is one of the Top 10 Must-Have iPhone Business Apps”! If offers Office functionality on the iPhone with an impressive suite of features!

Quickoffice is available for iPhone and iPod Touch running on iPhone OS 3.0. Enjoy superior Microsoft® Word and Excel CREATE & EDIT functionality today in a powerful productivity suite. VIEW, EMAIL, and ACCESS attachments with the most popular file formats.

The core Quickoffice suite comprises four great programs which allow users to work on important documents such as contracts, business plans, sales presentations, financial reports and other documents sent as email attachments – directly on their phone. Plus, Quickoffice users can “push” their documents to a printer, fax, projector or back to a desktop with complete confidence.

Suite features:

• Open, edit, and create text (.TXT) files, Word (.DOC, .DOCX) documents, and Excel (.XLS, .XSLX) spreadsheets compatible with Microsoft Office 2007 for Windows and Microsoft Office 2008 for Macintosh
• Auto-save and auto-restore
• High-fidelity rendering and crisp characters
• Advanced notepad editor
• Intuitive cut-copy-paste compatible with the iPhone OS 3.0
• Set custom passcode lock to prevent sniffy people from running the app and much more!

Quickoffice is running a special offer of 50% off for the first 10,000 customers at $9.99 which is a steal! If you are on the go and work with Microsoft Office then you’ll find this app invaluable. To learn more and to take advantage of the special offer click here.

Social Mention is an alert tool that acts similar to Google Alerts but focuses it’s results from blogs, microblogs, networks, bookmarks, comments, images, news, video, audio and other social web information.

How can you search with Social Mention?

It’s similar to doing any search you would on search engines such as Google.  You just enter a phrase you’re looking for, a product, company name or person’s name and you will receive a daily email alert when your keywords are triggered.

You can also track your topic easily by setting up a Social Mention breaking news alert or RSS feed. For instance you can do a real-time search on a topic such as “Walmart Black Friday Deals 2009” and choose from a variety of sources and I chose for this example “Google News” and it returned the following results:

As you can see it’s pretty powerful with lots of information. If you would like to give it a try, click here!