A $10 app saves hours of commuting

(CNNMoney.com) -- Chip Galloway, the owner C&C Landscaping in Salt Lake City, used to spend hours in the car driving to landscaping projects -- time he knew would be better spent courting new clients. But if he didn't see those projects firsthand, his workers might easily make a costly mistake, like misplacing a tree or putting incorrectly sized rocks in a water fountain.

"It's usually a 10-minute visit that takes 45 minutes each way to get there," says Galloway. "There are only so many hours in the day."

That changed last year, when Galloway got his hands on software called Pixetell -- a sort of 'e-mail meets voicemail meets Web conferencing' tool.

Now, for $720 a year, Galloway and five of his top employees can send detailed multimedia e-mail messages. They can shoot video and photos and describe them in a voiceover, and motion with a mouse to highlight key points in architectural drawings and spreadsheets. Project managers in the field often take snapshots of what they're working on and send them to Galloway along with their comments.

Read the full story at CNN Money by Jennifer Alsever