As for security, the CEO of RemoteControlMail has said that the individuals that open and scan mail are disabled veterans with Department of Defense security clearances. They work in a clean room with no pockets in their uniforms. Every piece of mail is supposedly videotaped. The video recording can be watched at anytime by users interested in seeing a certain letter being opened.

If the security part hasn’t made you too wary, let’s look at the other benefits. RemoteControlMail is a green friendly company who recycles and shreds the contents of mail after opening, scanning and archiving occurs. Pricing starts at $9.95 a month for a personal account, but if you choose one of the higher plans you receive more storage for electronic archiving and additional credits for mail forwarding.

It sounds like an interesting way to get your mail on the go; however, I know most people are just not digging the fact that someone else is opening their private mail. Think I will stick to the traditional methods for now.

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Goplan has been in development for some time now from the team at webreakstuff. The initial application was built because the team needed a way that they could stay on top of projects and didn’t think that the solutions on the market were scalable enough. This launch signifies the design and development company’s first foray into the online application environment.

Goplan, like Basecamp, is an online project management tool. It offers teams a secure location where they can collaborate on tasks, manage files, chat, and a place to build a centralized online calendar. Users can choose which features to activate for each project, ensuring an unclutted environment in the user interface. With Goplan sitting atop of Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and their S3 (Simple Storage Service), we are sure to see some extreme uptime numbers when this thing really gets rolling with users.

Goplan’s additional feature list includes:

• Manage multiple projects
• Manage task lists
• Control issues with issue tracking
• Publish public facing project news
• Synchronize everyone with a calendar
• Chat real-time with project members
• Control who sees what and how
• Store project-related files safely
• High-grade encrypted connection
• Hosted, always-on application

Goplan pricing starts with a free version that allows for 2 projects, and 5MB of storage. A personal account offers 12 projects and 100MB of storage for $10/month. Then there is the mother of all, an unlimited plan for $100/month with unlimited projects and 8GB of storage. The prices and offerings are pretty comparable to what Basecamp offers, with Basecamp hitting 20GB of data at $149/month for an unlimited option.

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Through Highrise, users can track all communication that occurs between business leads, employees, clients, and vendors, keeping tabs on who was spoken to and what was said. With the ability to have multiple users on a Highrise account, all information is securely stored and easily accessible by anyone that is plugged in. There are many benefits to using Highrise, of course the major one being sharing contact information company wide. Highrise also incorporates time-saving features like forwarding contact emails into contact accounts and receiving task reminders via email or as mobile alerts. If you are worried about communicating between other contact manager applications like Outlook, Highrise offers the ability to upload and download vCards.

We like the ease of use and simple interface design that 37signals employs in their products, and this approach is evident in Highrise. No need to read a manual, or struggle at figuring things out, everything this tool does is fairly simple to understand. Highrise also works nicely with other 37signals tools like Basecamp and Backpack, making it a well rounded suite of business tools.

Prices for Highrise accounts range from a free 2 user account with 25 contacts, to a $149/month unlimited user, 20GB of storage, and 50,000 contact accounts.

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Having your Nutshell account as the initial page you see when opening your daily browser window is quite helpful. No need to visit another site or open Outlook to your 100 inbox items and be overwhelmed. Simply take a peek at a few important notes and some stuff to do then go about your business.

Nutshell also has a built in search bar with search shortcuts. For instance if you wanted to search Google for Web Worker Daily, you would simply type “g webworkerdaily”. There is currently a list of 23 search shortcuts, and Nutshell gives users the ability to create their own.

We have been testing this out for a few days now, and if you are looking for a simple no distraction start page with just the basics, Alex Griffioen’s free Nutshell should be on your list of ones to test out.

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Spanning Sync v1.0 has been in development for seven months, and has just come out of a quiet beta period. The application allows users to sync Google Calendars and iCal’s between multiple accounts, multiple Macs and with iSync compatible devices.

If you work on multiple Macs, Spanning Sync can hook them all up to pull information down from the same Google Calendar. Sharing group calendars through iCal is possible now by creating a shared Google Calendar and syncing it with iCal. That way any changes that are made in the shared calendar online, will also be made to your desktop iCal, and vice versa. Mac users can also easily sync up calendars to mobile phones and devices like iPods effortlessly as well with Apple’s iSync. Spanning Sync sure adds another level of productivity for users that work on multiple Macs, and with Apple’s iCal.

Spanning Sync has a 15 day trial period, with a $25 one-year subscription or a $65 one-time purchase.

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SideJobTrack is a free and simple online solution aimed at part-time independent contractors for tracking projects and managing workflows through a set of four project tools: Create Projects, Send Estimates, Track Services, and Invoice Clients.

Projects are started with a Project Name and summary with start and due dates assigned, and a date to be entered when the project has been completed. Each project is assigned to a client, and a list of project services and materials are associated to that project. When projects have been marked completed, invoices can be sent out via email, or saved and printed out for mailing. Reports can be generated at any time to get the run down on completed projects and how much money they have brought in, in process projects and even projects that have been put on hold.

[starting a Project]

The setup of projects can be time-consuming, as you must enter client information and set up material lists with billing charges. However, you could save time later when you’re generating invoices over and over again.

[overview of projects in the works]

Creative types can customize invoices beyond the SideJobTrack defaults. Advanced settings allows users to create and customize both printed and email invoices, as well as printed and emailed estimates.

[completed invoice ready for emailing or printing]

This simple online project tracking and invoicing application unfortunately has one drawback, contacts and project information cannot be uploaded to SideJobTrack. They can be downloaded as XML data, though. Since SideJobTrack is aimed at those with freelance jobs on the side, this isn’t a huge limitation for those in the target market. If you need to occasionally invoice someone, you may want to try it out.

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The new integration will offer increased productivity with users of Basecamp having the ability to invoice projects directly through their FreshBooks account. FreshBooks picked two workflow scenarios that should meet the most important needs of 80% of users. The first system integration from Freshbooks is the ability to generate invoices based on time entries or To-Do lists. Project importing is the second integration. This allows Basecamp projects to become FreshBooks projects; To-Dos in Basecamp become tasks in FreshBooks.

FreshBooks’ new build certainly sounds like it will speed up the process of invoicing, while streamlining Basecamp users’ invoicing tasks. Things look pretty straightforward to set up through the Freshbooks interface.

You can check out a few screencasts of both cases here:

• Case 1 – Invoice on time/ todo lists
• Case 2 – Basecamp projects become a FreshBooks project; To-Dos in Basecamp become tasks in FreshBooks.

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Sign up and start off by creating a new Project, then create a list of Reminders for that project. For added convenience as tasks come in, users can send an email to a unique address for setting new reminders. For daily overviews, your Neptune account can send out email notifications daily for your next actions and reminders, which is extremely handy for quickly looking at upcoming items.

Neptune is free for 16 days, and then users have the option for upgrading to a Premium account for $10. The account options are not evident on the site, and we would have been in for a big surprise when the 16 day “trial” expired if we had not found a small “renew” button under settings. Neptune is worth trying out for daily task reminders, but you can also look into Nozbe, WorkHack, RememberTheMilk, and Ta-da List to help out with completing your main objectives for the day.

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What are your choices? You can walk it out listening to cars zoom by, or pull that MintyBoost out of your bag. What is a MintyBoost? It’s a little convenient USB battery pack and recharger made from a mint tin, USB port, and a few AA’s. This little pack can be used to power anything that has a USB connection from cameras, cell phones, iPods, to any other USB gadget. Its small and easily portable and when tested was able to last for 3hrs on 2AA batteries watching video on an iPod video, or 26 hours with an iPod mini.

The kit has been tested on multiple devices, and has been reported to work on iPods, Zunes, Sony PSP’s, Blackberry, Treo 700, Garmin Edge, and Palm TX among others. The kit is listed at $19.50 US.

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How on earth can we hunt down our beloved latte headquarters? Usually we would power on our laptop and hunt a Starbucks location down from their official site. Well now there is a better way, built exclusively for web workers in mind, almost. Caffeine addicts can now send a text message with a zip code to “MYSBUX”. You will get a text back with three of your nearest locations with their address and phone numbers. What would be interesting if there was a Google Map mash-up of Starbucks, and a link to the map is embedded in the SMS we receive.

Only drawback, how can you locate a zip code if you are traveling, or in a new area? Find a phone book, ask a stranger, or boot up that laptop again.

Starbucks does have a mobile site at mobile.starbucks.com, where users can punch in their zip code or postal code, or do a city search to locate the Starbucks in your area that has Wifi. A far better alternative if you have a mobile browser on your phone, and less hassle to locate the zip or postal code you’re in.

Don’t forget to pop into your local Starbucks on March 15th from 10am to Noon to get a free freshly brewed cup of coffee they are using to promote the new service.

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• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
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• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks