I'm in the process of building two complementary businesses, but they are both directed toward the same objective - "helping clients create customer-focused cultures...by generating innovative ideas and implementing creative strategies."
That's a bit of a mouthful, but it breaks down into highlighting interesting Web 2.0 tools, brainstorming ideas, leadership team development strategies, and customer service concepts.
The first business builds "boxes" of web tools for clients, as a way of helping them create a customer-focused online persona - and there are plenty more web tools out there for the exploring....
So, let's get started!
One of the absolutely best values out in web-world is OpenOffice 3.0 - this is a completely free suite of software that closely mimics Microsoft Office 2003. Yup, total freebie.
I have been using both the word processing (Writer) and spreadsheet (Calc) modules, and so far they are perfect for my needs. They're powerful, and close enough to the Microsoft standards to make switching very comfortable. The presentation module (Impress) is somewhat of a disappointment in comparison - it lags far behind PowerPoint.
Importantly, you can save files into their Microsoft counterparts (like .doc files) for ease of sharing and emailing.
I haven't used the drawing or database tools yet, but they look impressive.
You can also download a number of templates and add-ons to really extend the flexibility of this software suite.
One caveat - I am running OpenOffice on a new laptop with 3 megs of RAM memory...and it works like a champ. My older laptop has only 2 megs and the software ran sluggishly at times.
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