Articles & Tools

ZipCar just released an awesome (and long overdue) iPhone app, allowing members to not only search for cars nearby and make reservations, but also to unlock their cars (awesome!) and even beep the horn when you're lost in the parking lot. But the coolest tidbit dropped by ZipCar's CTO?

Thirty percent of ZipCar members have an iPhone. Talk about owning a tech-savvy, young, affluent, kick-ass market. Here's the full vid from USA Today.

And, of course, ZipCar is an awesome tool for city-dwelling entrepreneurs. If you're ever in need of wheels, check it out -- and even if you're not a member, download the iPhone app just so you can beep the digital horn.

Back in the day, I used Guru and Elance to get my first web design firm started -- we scored some good projects, even though (or perhaps because) those marketplaces are swarming with jokers and chop shops. I recently checked back in to the world of Guru and found this, posted as part of Guru's project description form by a well-meaning client:

Programming Language:
Yes, I do require a specific programming language.

Desired Programming Language:
English

Whoops! It's one of the big challenges of being a web developer, but also one of the reasons we're in such great demand: a lot of people -- including some potential clients -- still have no idea what we do.

One of my big projects lately is reducing my administrative overhead -- all the time I spend writing contracts, creating PDFs and waiting for a signature to come back by fax, e-mail or snail mail makes each project more expensive and distracts me from doing real, valuable work for my clients. I've never been satisfied with my contract workflow, but I think I've finally found the solution: digital contracts and electronic signatures with EchoSign.

Price: $20/month ($15/month paid annually)
Competitors: DocuSign, ContractPal, AgreementExpress
Verdict: Takes the pain out of contracts and gets projects started quickly and professionally.

My contract creation and execution process has always been cumbersome -- I'd edit my template in Office, save it as a PDF, e-mail it to the client, and eventually get back a copy of the signature page by mail or (if I'm lucky) as a scanned and e-mailed image. It took way too long for me to create the contract PDF each time (and back in the day, I had to crack open InDesign too). It was a pain for the client to print it out and scan or mail it -- and don't even get me started on faxes. The signature lag time delayed the start of my project, particularly with new clients, and I was never comfortable getting only the sig page of a 5-page document, which is what clients sent me 90% of the time.

With EchoSign, that whole process goes online and can be completed in a matter of minutes. The signatures are legal and enforceable (perhaps even moreso than my sig-page-only responses), and I never have to create a PDF again. EchoSign allows me to create a contract template with some fill-in-the-blank fields (like Client and Project), then attach a statement of work to the end that's unique for each client -- and I can even import the SOW directly from Google Docs. The world of contract law just got a lot more convenient.

EchoSign's interface is generally very friendly, and it's certainly leaps and bounds beyond its competitors. That said, it took me five or six tries to get a document properly formatted (I uploaded a PDF and placed signature fields through the Flash interface, though you could do the same thing with text tags in your document). That meant by the end of my testing I had more than used up my five free-trial signatures, but once I had conquered the learning curve I had an awesome, fast and easy-to-use contract that I could shoot off to any client in a matter of seconds.

So, if you're in the market for a faster and easier project kick-off, check out EchoSign. It's the last part of my paperwork that I've taken fully digital, and it's already making my life easier and more efficient. Enjoy!

• EchoSign -- Painless, paperless contracts