ThinkNear offers ‘smart marketing’ and the ability to choose when you would like your ads to be seen.  The service creates coupons that attract your ideal customers to your business.  For example, if you are quiet between 10am and 12pm on a Monday, you can use ThinkNear to send coupons to people in your area so they can use them at the designated time.

As the owner of your business, you can decide what kinds of discounts to offer and when you would like to offer them.  ThinkNear uses this information to provide good deals to people who may not otherwise use your business.

The service is fairly priced at $99 per month, but businesses are currently being invited to use the service free of charge for the first three months.  After this period you can decide whether to continue or not.

You control the whole system and if you wish to stop offering discounts or change the level of discounting you are offering at any time, you may do so.  ThinkNear looks likely to have a positive effect on businesses that are struggling through slow times.

Tower runs on all Intel-based Macs using OS X 10.5 or higher which have an installation of Git 1.7.0.1+ on board.  Tower includes 30 days of free trial followed by a reasonable one-time registration fee that includes lifetime upgrades.

Created by fournova, an app development team in Germany, Tower is likely the best version control software I’ve tried on the Mac.

You can easily manage repositories with grouping, change histories, and synching with remote storage for sharing amongst a team.  It has more than one way to show Commit Histories, another handy tool, letting developers communicate what’s changed, why and how.

In fact, using Tower, you can make changes to your own copy of the work in progress and keep them local (no sharing) until you’re ready and only commit the things you’re ready to share – all while keeping your team’s work always updated as their commits are shared.

To facilitate that last part, some great merge tools are included.  I especially like the drag-and-drop ability of branching merges.  This makes it easy (and non-permanent, as it can be reversed) to pull together disparate work.

All in all, this is a great tool for developers working in teams.

It is called Clickworker and it has been designed to be beneficial to both freelancers and companies looking to outsource work.  The idea is simple and will appeal to companies with lots of small pieces of work that need completing.  The whole job is sent to Clickworker and is then broken up into individual tasks.  For instance a company may need hundreds of small descriptions for a website.  Each one will be a separate task and can be taken on by an individual Clickworker.

The site is very well designed and could be another nice income stream for freelancers.  They can use the site in between other work they take on, and with no required amount of work to be completed it is easy to fit in whenever it suits them.  The companies using Clickworker will also benefit from being able to get large jobs completed far more quickly than they would by enlisting the help of just one or two freelancers.  They can also leave all the planning to Clickworker, safe in the knowledge that they will get the completed job returned to them very quickly.

It may be early days for the site but things are definitely looking very encouraging.  We will keep you posted.

The site enables you to hire whatever type of assistant you need.  The service can be used to find researchers, people to maintain your website and a PA to help you manage the contents of your inbox.  In addition to this you can even find people who will help you find workers to take on jobs in your home.

With the large number of people currently seeking online, freelance work at the moment, MyAspirant looks to be of particular use in this field.  There are two broad pricing plans and they are set out according to hours worked and tasks completed.  You can also sign up to receive a free trial for seven days.  This should be long enough to gauge whether the service will be good for you or not.

The main benefit of MyAspirant is that it enables you to find a personal assistant for all manner of different jobs.  You may be tempted to think that all the jobs are for online tasks, but as you can see from the large list on the home page of the site, this is not the case.  Time will tell just how popular MyAspirant will become.

According to the site’s own figures, the fourth quarter in 2010 saw Elance freelancers rake in more than $27 million US dollars.  This represents an increase of around 38% on the same period in the previous year.  In addition to this, previous figures for the second quarter in the same year showed total earnings of $23 million US dollars.  This was a full 45% more than the providers on the site earned the year before.

The most interesting thing here will be whether the growth continues as the economy gradually improves and jobs are more readily available again.  While some people are undoubtedly filling the gap between jobs by doing some freelance work, others may be focusing on maintaining their new career courtesy of Elance.

Elance has also recently reported that finding work online is becoming more and more popular, with growth bucking the more disappointing trend in other areas.  It would seem as if Elance, as one of the leading places of its kind online, is enjoying record growth thanks to the general state of the economy and the jobs market elsewhere.  It looks set to continue as well.

Now there is a new site that has been added to the mix – ContractBot.  The name apparently derives from the fact that the site is 99% automated.

One thing you will notice at the moment is that the site – which is based in Canada – is in its very early days.  There is just a handful of jobs on there at the moment, although hopefully this will develop as the site gains traction and pace.  It certainly looks promising and there are clear sections on the home page for both parties to use. You just have to click the appropriate section – blue if you want to find workers and green if you want to find contracts.

The main way that ContractBot differs from other outsourcing sites is that no fees are charged to users. The only fee they seem to take is one of 5% which is levied on all organisations when ContractBot transfers money to them.  The site also has an affiliate program that looks promising and may help to bring in more visitors and users.

It is too early as yet to say whether ContractBot will be a success.  On the one hand it has plenty of other similar sites to compete with.  But on the other hand the no fee idea could be a winner.

iDrive Pro has several benefits that are what put iDrive on the map in the first place.  Not only is it a secure online backup, it’s also redundant since the backup is stored in two separate locations.  That in itself is a pretty big deal in this market.

For some, though, that wasn’t good enough.  The limit on the amount of storage available was getting in their way.  For obvious logistical reasons, iDrive can’t make an affordable version of Pro with unlimited storage.  So they created a new type of backup option called Unlimited.

This allows for an unlimited amount of data to be stored, but does not have the redundancy of a Pro account.  It does include some other benefits like the option to have data shipped on a large portable hard drive for fast restorations of large amounts of data and backup data versioning to allow for multiple versions of the same file to be kept.  The automated backup is also included.

Many freelancers, small business owners, and the like are using online backup services as their primary way to safeguard data that is otherwise stored on personal SSD hard drives.  For this market, obviously, the more options the better.

The good news for employers who use the site is that this is now possible. oDesk provides freelancers with a number of tests that can be taken to measure their efficiency in certain areas. When a prospective employer searches for a freelancer, they can look at the results of the tests to help them select the right person for the job.

oDesk has recently made it easier to view these results. It is now possible for an employer to find those people who are in the top 10% of the results. This makes it easier to choose just the right person, instead of someone who is merely competent in the chosen field. This is an optional feature but no doubt lots of employers will start using it to help them find the best fit each time.

It will be interesting to see whether the feature changes the way employers look for freelancers on the site. Of course, it might mean that freelancers will have to considerably improve their own skills to come out on top.

But there have been other changes afoot as well, namely the push to include new sites for other countries to use. First in the queue was the Australian site and there is also a New Zealand based site for users in that country to take advantage of as well.

Following on from this there will also be a UK site coming soon, bringing the total number of Freelancer sites to four thus far. It will be intriguing to see if others are added in the near future; perhaps a Canadian one would be the next sensible choice?

The point is clear though – there are enough freelancers around the world to warrant specific sites dedicated to all of them. Up until now everyone has been able to use the international site (signified on the Freelancer website with an American flag). This should still be the case when the next new site comes online. But it will be a relief for many freelancers to know that they have a dedicated site to go to in their own country that will help them find the freelance work they need.

Watch this space for more developments in future months.

Several payment services such as Authorize.net and PayPal offer this ability, but it comes at a price.  Autorize.net requires you to conform to their API, which basically requires that you build a custom internal system for handling CM and Authorize.net.  PayPal has relatively high fees for processing and the Pro version of access to their API.  This still requires that you mate an internal CM as well.

Recurly.com aims to make the whole process cheaper and easier by putting it all into one location.  Their marketing is geared towards software as a service (SaaS) companies – especially those with Freemium models – and their offering is definitely taylored to that model.

The Recurly system allows for upgrading, downgrading, subscriptions and cancellations all in one setup along with their matching recurring billing services.  Even refunds and handling of declined payments (suspension of accounts) can be done with Recurly.  Most people can set up their system to match with Recurly’s in a day or less and their system works in a similar fashion to PayPal’s basic service model with a relatively simple API.

Their payment model is simple and charges on a flat scale, starting at $49/month for simple subscriber management without white labeling and advancing to $99 and $199 monthly for more customized and branded services.