When I decided to create my own footprint on the web, though, things started to change. I started sharing my ideas and my experiences with the world, and soon I had friends around the globe, influential colleagues running innovative businesses, and fantastic mentors who were doing the things I dreamed of.

I really leveraged the the power of web 2.0 to brand myself, build an extensive network, design a business that I can essentially run from anywhere in the world, and now I’m able to travel around the globe and live in Thailand where the cost-of-living is very low, and I’m dangerously close to the white sand beaches. I’m still basically a bum, but I’m a vagabonding bum with an international business, a global web presence, good friends around the world, and an awful lot of fun travel and volunteering experiences under my belt!

Plus, thankfully, it’s awful cheap to live in Thailand.

So Here’s How I Do It

Recently, I attempted to compile all the useful tools I’ve come across since I started this game four years ago, and separate it from all the crap. You can see my whole resource page for living a kickass life here, but today I’d like to share some of the applications, tools, and resources that I use daily and recommend to all my clients and friends. These are all of my best-kept secrets!

Web Presence

• Find a quality web host – Although I’ve hosted most of my websites with DreamHost for the last 3 years (use promo code THRILLING30 to get 30 bucks off), after surveying my blogger friends and clients, a vast majority of them prefer BlueHost. They offer truly superior 24/7 phone support, have much less down time and technical problems than my DreamHost server, and I love working with them!
• Easily manage your content – WordPress is by far the easiest, most powerful content management system out there. I use it for all of my sites—blogs, business sites, minisites, and it’s even great for photo galleries, portfolios, communities, job listing sites & more.
• Get a great web design – if you don’t have the cash to invest in a proper web designer (a good, original design will often cost $3–$5K) there are TONS of great, inexpensive HTML templates and WordPress themes available from companies like WooThemes and ThemeForest. I have used great designs from both.

Gadgets & Gear

• Pack a tough laptop – If you’re going to be backpacking the world for a few years, getting sand and water in your laptop, you might want to invest in a Toughbook. But I’m an Apple fanboy and all my favorite apps & development tools are on OSX. I’ve found the new 13-inch unibody aluminum Apple MacBook Pro can take a few hard drops and has been great to travel with.
• A global smartphone – Again, I go with my favorite Apple here, and as an online businessman, yes I am an iPhone 3G-carrying member of the tech elite! You’ll need to follow the unlocking instructions here for use on non-AT&T networks, international travel & data access.
• Portable WiFi – The awesome and compact Airport Express will turn almost any ethernet connection around the world into a wifi network.
• Backup your important files – Especially if you carry client work with you as you travel the world, you want to make sure you save secure copies frequently in case your laptop is stolen or damaged. I connect to an external drive and backup my whole system with TimeMachine often, and also use free Mozy online backup to automatically upload copies of my most important files to the cloud (runs in the background so I don’t even have to see it or think about it).

Communications

• Cheap calls around the world – call friends & clients around the globe for as little as 3 cents a minute with Skype, or set up your own virtual SkypeIn number that people can dial from their phone back home to reach you on the web (I even use mine to forward to my Thai mobile number).
• One number to rule them all – previously called GrandCentral, Google Voice will give you one phone number to route and forward to any phone; highly customizable. This is also how I maintain a Bay Area, California international line that I can forward to my Skype or my mobile abroad.
• One chat client to rule them all – Adium or Meebo can connect AIM, gTalk, MSN, Yahoo chat, Facebook chat and more.
• Online group video chat – Tinychat offers free chat rooms & audio video conferences online.
• Free teleconference calls – FreePhoneConference.com gives you a free dial-in teleconference number to hold a workshop for dozens of callers.

Online Collaboration

• Maintain a public or shared group calendar – Google Calendar gives you an easily-shareable calendar and schedule organizer.
• Easy document collaboration – Google Docs gives you collaborative word documents, spreadsheets, and forms that you can share with others and modify the same document remotely.
• Screen sharing – Adobe ConnectNow is a new, free service that lets you meet live over the web and share your screen with anyone.
• Team project management – There are tons of web-based project management apps like Basecamp, or the free alternative Collabtiv.
• File storage & sharing – Store archives of your large files online and easily send & share them with your colleagues with a free Dropbox account.

Web Development

• Access your server – Open-source Cyberduck FTP client for Mac.
• Edit your code – Powerful, user-friendly editor Smultron, also open-source for Mac.
• Build test websites offline – Run your own local Apache server with MAMP for Mac.
• Test and tweak live websites – Firebug is a Firefox plugin that makes testing your code much easier.
• Test cross-browser compatibility – Finally, Adobe BrowserLab offers a way to do this easily and free (keep this one on the down-low).

e-Commerce & Invoicing

• Easily send & receive money online – PayPal
• Simple online invoicing & bookkeeping – FreshBooks
• Deliver digital products – e-Junkie handles payment & fulfillment for your ebook, audio, or other information products.

Marketing & Promotion

• Start your mailing list – AWeber is the leading provider for customer list management, autoresponders & drip campaigns.
• Smart social bookmarking – Install the Su.pr bookmarklet in your browser toolbar, submit your links and they’ll be automatically sent to Twitter, Facebook & StumbleUpon!
• Build your expert credibility – LinkedIn is the best professional online network, and LinkedIn Answers is the best place to brand yourself, share your expertise with others, and even solicit feedback on your own questions from experienced CEOs and other professionals.
• Give a great presentation – Prezi is guaranteed to be a PowerPoint-killer. Forget slideshows, Prezi gives you a canvas without limits to deliver a dynamic presentation.

Personal Finance

• High-yield online savings accounts – get a little better return on your dollar by putting your savings in a Emigrant Direct or ING Direct account. I especially love ING because you can create as many sub-accounts as you want, easily managing different “buckets” for your many savings goals.
• Best multinational bank – HSBC Bank has the most locations around the globe of any bank I’ve seen.
• Avoid hefty fees – Charles Schwab could possibly have the best checking account for travelers. They reimburse all ATM transactions and have no international fees. If you want a referral, let me know.
• Frequent flyer perks card – Are you a frequent flyer? Get 1 mile per dollar spent, plus 12,000 bonus sign-up miles with the Discover Miles card.
• Manage your accounts & budget –  Mint.com is powerful, free personal financial management application.

Travel & Mobile Lifestyle

• Find the best travel deals – Kayak.com compares thousands of airfare and hotel aggregator sites like Orbitz and Travelocity to find the lowest fare.
• Get the cheapest local flights – Find the budget air carriers in your region with WhichBudget.
• Get last-minute airfare deals – You can bid low on last-minute flights from Priceline and check out their Pricebreaker deals.
• Meet locals and find free accomodation – Couchsurfing. Almost anywhere in the world. Awesome.
• Low-cost rentals & sublets – AirBnB lists vacation rentals and apartments for rent in 87 countries.
• Backpack around the world on $25 a day – How to See the World, the free Art of Travel guide, is a great resource to learn more.
• Learn how to become a digital nomad – Read Christine Gilbert’s great series 30 Ways in 30 Days to Redesign Your Life and Travel the World.
• Go green and get all your mail virtually – EarthClassMail will send all your snail mail to you via email. Great for business backpackers!
• Affordable world travel insurance – World Nomads insurance recommended by Lonely Planet.
• Master travel hacks – Grab the Frequent Flyer Master guide from Chris Guillebeau, who’s traveled to 119 countries in a few short years, to learn how to get the most out of your miles and get the advantage over the airlines. He even guarantees one free plane ticket!
• Learn to become a permanent traveler and live anywhere – If you want to move abroad permanently, and create income streams that support you as a perpetual traveler, then you absolutely must get Karol Gajda’s stunning ebook How to Live Anywhere. This is the guide I seriously wish I’d written! Check out my interview with Karol here.
• Get your work done wherever you go – Coworking is the hip new way to have an office without a job. If you like being surrounded by other human beings but not distracted from your work, search for coworking spots where your’e traveling.

Lifestyle Design Tools

• Set and budget for your goals – Tim Ferriss’ Ideal Lifestyle Costing method will help you figure out what your ideal lifestyle looks like, set goals for 6 months or a year down the road, and figure out what you have to do and how much it will cost to get there. Use this Dreamlining Worksheet.
• Build a support team – David Walsh is an automation genius who put together SourceControl to show you how to successfully outsource taks and give you a framework for your ambitious projects.
• Automate all your business processes – Take a few tips from Rob Granholm on how to Automate Your Systems. Rob has done a tremendous job breaking down processes, and for extra credit you can even apply this outside of your business.

What are your favorite tools, apps & resources for living a mobile lifestyle and getting work done from anywhere?

Check out my resources page for more useful tools, ebooks & resources for living an incredibly kickass life. BTW the featured photo at the top of the page is me with my buddies Migration Mark, Dwight Turner and Joel Bruner on a vagabonding trip to Laos.

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: 49 Tools for Living the Mobile Lifestyle

Used to be that I had to jump through several hoops to get my Apple iCal and my remote online gCal to sync up, and it was not a smooth two-way process like it should be now. One used to have to invest in a program like gSync or Spanning Sync, but now that Google has opened up the CalDAV support, you can easily match up your online and offline calendars without paying a dime. I know this will definitely be a godsend for me, since I maintain three personal calendars and will soon be throwing a shared business calendar into the mix!

The process is actually really simple, and I was so excited that I just had to share the news with you guys. Especially since you can even use gCal simply as a cross-platform syncing tool now (if you don’t actually like the Google Calendar format, say, but you want to sync iCal and Outlook), hopefully some of you will find this easy new process useful too. Adam Pash wrote up a really fantastic guide at Lifehacker: How to Sync Any Desktop Calendar with Google Calendar.

Best of luck with it.

Also Check Here for 49 More Incredible Tools for Living the Mobile Lifestyle

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: How to Finally Synchronize Apple iCal, Outlook, and Google Calendar

I hope you all have the opportunity to spend quality time with your loved ones today, and to those students who are celebrating their graduation from college this weekend or will be graduating in the weeks ahead, I give you my sincere congratulations! As a special treat for you guys, I’d like to share a link to some of the best commencement speeches, including wise words from greats such as Kurt Vonnegut, Winston Churchill, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Will Ferrell.

Here I’d like to share my favorite commencement address, delivered by Steve Jobs at the 2005 Stanford University graduation ceremony. Jobs is a creative and technical role model for many, and an incredible public speaker. Of course for anyone who’s passionate about Silicon Valley like me this is an exciting address to hear, but Jobs offers something for everyone. The CEO of Apple and Pixar shares his experiences with adoption and growing up in a working-class family. He talks about love and loss, about his fight with cancer and embracing one’s mortality.

Jobs attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon, for a short time, and he relates stories about how he dropped out of college when he didn’t see the returns for his parents’ financial sacrifice, sharing what he learned as he continued to audit classes that appealed to him. If there is one big take-away, Jobs encourages new grads to find what they love to do, citing that “work fills a large part of your life,” and that following your passion is of the utmost importance.

“…it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later. Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something: your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.”

Stay hungry. Stay foolish. Congratulations to all of you who’ve worked so hard to graduate from your degree programs this summer.

[source: Gawker]

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: College Grad Special: The Top 10 Best Commencement Speeches

One of my favorite parts:

One mistake many businesses make is refusing to partner with the competition for fear that it’ll steal secrets or gain an advantage. It’s far better to follow the oft-quoted advice of Michael Corleone: Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. After all, your competition is your competition because you share the same goals. So why not use that common ambition to your mutual benefit? You might even find that partnering can double your success. “Nowadays,” Rigsbee says, “somebody might be my competitor in the morning, and by the afternoon we might be working together on something.”

She also mentions a few examples of great companies that offer some interesting extras to attract top talent, like subsidized vacations (S.C. Johnson & Son), incentives for buying hybrids (Timberland), sleep breaks, and tuition reimbursement.

I’d love to see more of this trend. In the areas I focus on, I’m seeing companies like Apple, Google, Yahoo, and so on teaming up with each other over and over again. And it’s obviously working very well for them. They are able to bring cooler products to market building on each other’s abilities. It’s also why I like the open-source model for business — where the tools are there for anyone to add value to the product, and no one is afraid of losing their secret upper hand. (There are plenty of other ways to have a competitive advantage.)

-Innovative Partnering [Business 2.0]

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: The Need for Corporate Partnerships

Communications coach Carmine Gallo recently wrote up a great critique of Jobs’ presentation, packed with some useful tips for the rest of us to improve our public speaking skills:

1. Build Tension. A good novelist doesn’t lay out the entire plot and conclusion on the first page of the book. He builds up to it. Jobs begins his presentation by reviewing the “revolutionary” products Apple has introduced. According to Jobs, “every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything…Apple has been fortunate to introduce a few things into the world.” Jobs continues by describing the 1984 launch of the Macintosh as an event that “changed the entire computer industry.”
2. Stick to One Theme Per Slide. A brilliant designer once told me that effective presentation slides only have one message per slide. One slide, one key point. When Jobs introduced the “three revolutionary products” in the description above, he didn’t show one slide with three devices. When he spoke about each feature (a widescreen iPod, a mobile phone, and an Internet communicator), a slide would appear with an image of each feature.
3. Add Pizzazz to Your Delivery. Jobs modulates his vocal delivery to build up the excitement. When he opens his presentation by describing the revolutionary products Apple created in the past, his volume is low and he speaks slowly, almost in a reverential tone. His volume continues to build until his line, “Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone.” Be an electrifying speaker by varying the speed at which you speak and by raising and lowering your voice at the appropriate times.
4. Practice. Jobs makes presentations look effortless because he takes nothing for granted. Jobs is known to rehearse demonstrations for hours prior to launch events. I can name many high-profile chief executives who decide to wing it. It shows. It always amazes me that many business leaders spend tens of thousands of dollars on designing presentations, but next to no time actually rehearsing. I usually get the call after the speaker bombs. Don’t lose your audience. Rehearse a presentation out loud until you’ve nailed it.
5. Be Honest and Show Enthusiasm. If you believe that your particular product or service will change the world, then say so. Have fun with the content. During the iPhone launch, Jobs uses many adjectives to describe the new product, including “remarkable,” “revolutionary,” and “cool.” He jokes that the touch-screen features of the phone “work like magic…and boy have we patented it.”

[via: Steve Jobs' Greatest Presentation]

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: 5 Ways to Pitch Your Product Like Steve Jobs