Wouldn’t it be great to work from anywhere in the world, carrying all your tools and data with you in your pocket? Wouldn’t you love to have an entire suite of software, everything you need to run your online business, attached to your keyring?

Well you can… for the past couple of months I’ve been trying various software packages which are USB compatible. What that means is that, rather than installing the software onto a computer, it can be run directly from the USB drive which means you can take it all with you – your software, settings, bookmarks, documents, the lot!

I’ve tried and tested a bunch of different solutions and my favorite by far is a platform called PortableApps. It’s an opensource solution which can be run from a USB pen, hard drive, iPod etc. and gives you easy access to an included suite of software which can be extended with other compatible applications. The program autostarts and runs a menu in the background on whatever PC you’re on, giving you quick and easy access to the software… Included by default are a bunch of great applications including portable editions of the Firefox browser, Thunderbird (email client), Sunbird (calendar/tasks), OpenOffice (office suite including a word processor, spreadsheet etc.) and more.

The best thing for Internet Marketers though is that some great web productivity applications can be added. A portable version of Nvu takes care of HTML editing, GIMP allows Photoshop like image editing, FileZilla manages your FTP needs and PuTTY portable is a great lightweight telnet and SSH client. There are loads more, with new applications being added all the time.

The best part of course is PortableApps and all the associated applications are free so what are you waiting for? Go grab a copy, buy a cheap USB pen off eBay and pop it in your pocket – you’ll never get stuck without that vital file, or the software to edit it again!