Simon has been working in technical publishing for nearly 10 years, starting out his career at Wrox Press before moving on to SitePoint, Think Vitamin, and, now, WebWorkerDaily. He lives in buzzing Bristol in the South West of England and has a passion for the web “done right”. Follow Simon on Twitter at @spiky_simon. His personal blog can be found at simonmackie.com
quanp, an online file storage service from Japanese electronics giant Ricoh that we’ve covered previously, is being shut down in the U.S. In an email sent to customers, the company notes that the service, which was in beta, will be discontinued on September 30th. Read more »
GoFileDrop is an app that adds a public mailbox to your Google Docs account, enabling anyone with the appropriate link to upload files to your account. It was previously only available to Google Apps customers, but it can now be installed by regular Gmail users. Read more »
Cohuman, a web-based collaboration and project management app that we’ve written about previously, has been acquired and will be shutting down on August 31. Current Cohuman users should check out the company’s blog post, which contains instructions for exporting data from the service. Read more »
There’s a shift happening in the workplace. A significant and growing proportion of the workforce is now made up of “Millennials” But how can businesses support Millenials at work; how do they expect to communicate, collaborate and get things done? Read more »
Socialcast, a social business start-up that was recently acquired by VMWare, has announced an update to its product that will support what the company calls the “extended enterprise:” the external contractors, partners, suppliers, clients and customers that all businesses rely on to get their work done. Read more »
Popular cloud-based notes service Simplenote has many useful third-party add-ons. One such add-on is Syncpad Webnotes, a Chrome extension that enables you to attach virtual “sticky notes” to any web page that can be synchronized across different browsers through your Simplenote account. Read more »
Simple drag-and-drop file sharing service Minus, which I wrote about a couple of months ago, has acquired the Minus.com domain name. Minus.com will be used as the service’s primary domain going forward, rather than min.us, which was used previously and was thought to be confusing. Read more »
LifeSize, a supplier of video conferencing products that was acquired by Logitech in 2009, is aiming to address the usual drawbacks of traditional enterprise HD video conferencing systems — cost, complexity and incompatibility — with some new products that it announced Wednesday. Read more »
Gui:Config is a Firefox add-on that provides a simple interface for many of the most-tweaked about:config settings via a familiar options-style window. It makes it much easier to change the settings that can normally only be found in the about:config screen. Read more »
ccLoop wants to improve email by making it into a better and more streamlined communication tool. It effectively offers a business-focused take on the familiar kind of mailing list functionality provided by the likes of Google Groups and Yahoo Groups. Read more »
What apps do mobile workers need to get their jobs done? A new Forrester report has identified eight “must have” categories of mobile collaboration apps. Here’s a run-down of all the categories outlined, together with some of our recommendations for apps to use in each category: Read more »
Most of us are drowning in email. Could a solution be to impose a Twitter-like character limit on emails? Baltimore, MD-based 410Labs thinks so; its Shortmail service enforces concise emails by limiting messages to 500 characters or less and disallows attachements Read more »
It’s no surprise that Google is looking to use its new platform, Google+, to add a social layer to the company’s existing services. It seems the company wants to forge ahead with plans to incorporate some of Google+’s social features into its flagship webmail product, Gmail. Read more »
Web workers might be the pioneers on the virtual work trail, but it seems that the general working population believes that it’s not too far behind. A new study reveals that 58 percent of U.K. workers believe that offices of today will not exist in 2021. Read more »
Microsoft has rolled out a co-authoring update to Word Web App, part of the Office Web Apps suite. This means multiple users can now edit a document simultaneously via Windows Live SkyDrive in Microsoft Word 2010, Microsoft Word for Mac 2011 and Word Web App. Read more »
Today I stumbled across a nifty Windows app: Dropbox Screen Grabber. It allows you to take screenshots using a predefined hotkey combination and then instantly uploads them to your Dropbox public folder; the URL of the uploaded file is placed on your clipboard. Read more »
If you’re struggling to keep up with a noisy Twitter stream, you should check out Twimbow. It’s a free online Twitter client, now out of private beta, that can help to keep your stream organized by color-coding and filtering tweets. Read more »
Looking for a way to brainstorm ideas with your remote team? Conceptboard is a slick new web app that offers an online whiteboard for real-time collaboration. What makes Conceptboard stand out is in its array of features, and that it’s optimized to work on the iPad. Read more »
Boxify.me is a service that offers a twist on the usual simple online file sharing service: The app provides an online “box” at a specific URL that groups can use to share files. Anyone with the URL can then upload or download files from the box. Read more »
If you use Outlook and often forget to include attachments in your emails, check out CodeTwo’s Outlook Attachment Reminder, which scans the text of outgoing email for certain keywords. If one of the keywords is present and an attachment is not, it pops up a warning. Read more »
Last week, Google rolled out a largely well-received beta of its new social networking platform, Google+. Having played with Google+ over the last few days, I think that it may find a home in a perhaps unexpected market: the workplace. Read more »
Following the success of Facebook and Twitter in the consumer space, over the past couple of years we’ve seen a wave of enterprise social networking tools hoping to capture similar successes in the enterprise market. But how are these tools shaping the businesses that use them? Read more »
Google’s Chrome browser is continuing to grow in popularity. According to StatCounter, a website analytics company, Chrome is now used by a fifth of Internet users worldwide, taking 20.7 percent of the global browser market in June, up from just 2.8 percent in June 2009. Read more »
GoDropBox is a third-party add-on for Google Apps that adds a public mailbox to your Google Docs account, enabling anyone with the appropriate link to upload files to your account. This is handy for web workers who would like to accept files too big to email. Read more »
On Tuesday, Microsoft officially launched Office 365, the Redmond software giant’s suite of online collaboration and office tools. It competes with Google Apps for Business, but how do the two compare? Here’s a look at some screenshots of key applications in the two suites. Read more »
Microsoft has now launched Office 365, its suite of collaboration and office tools that aims to take on Google Apps for Business. But with a product that costs more than Google’s offering and is coming much later to market, will Office 365 be a success? Read more »
Many of us are drowning in email, and Chris Anderson, curator of the TED conferences, thinks it’s time to address that by creating an “email charter” to reduce the amount of unnecessary email sent and to make the email we do send easier to process. Read more »
The daily email deluge is the scourge of productivity, but how can you stem the tide? Over at Six Pixels of Separation, Twist Image president Mitch Joel suggests that you should tell people in your emails how to work with you. Read more »
As well as add-ons, Firefox has a vast number of settings you can adjust via a special “about:config” page. But what happens if you’ve spent ages tweaking those settings to customize your browser perfectly, but you have to re-install it due to a hard drive crash? Read more »
One of the major drawbacks with traditional room-based telepresence installs is that systems from different vendors are typically incompatible with each other. Video conferencing and online meeting provider FuzeBox, makers of the Fuze Meeting service, announced Fuze Telepresence Connect, which hopes to overcome these interoperability problems. Read more »
Tired of sending the same old emails, over and over? Tout is a web app that allows you to create email templates, schedule and send templated emails, manage contacts and track the success of the sent emails to optimize your communications. Read more »
Coworking centers — independent collaboration spaces that appeal to web workers who would otherwise be based out of their homes or coffee shops — have been springing up all over the world. But how much does it cost to rent a desk at one of these places? Read more »
Wikis are a handy way for teams to share information and collaborate. But the trouble with many traditional wiki products is that they tend to be difficult to use. Papyrs is a slickly designed drag-and-drop wiki app that makes building intranet pages incredibly easy. Read more »
Team task management app Cohuman, which won the “People’s Choice” award in the Launch Pad competition at last year’s Net:Work event, now has a companion iPhone app that helps users to keep updated on project status, communication and tasks even when they’re out of the office. Read more »
Want a high definition video conferencing system for your meeting room, but don’t have the budget for a costly room-based telepresence system? You might like to check out the MondoPad, a huge 55-inch, 1080p multi-touch LCD display that’s effectively a giant tablet computer designed for collaboration. Read more »
Telecom giant Alcatel Lucent’s research and development arm Bell Labs is hoping to replicate the feeling of in-person, natural communication with a fascinating concept it calls Immersive Communications. It uses “mixed reality” to insert the video feeds of real people into customizable artificial environments. Read more »
Google has rolled out appointment slots, a useful new feature for Google Calendar that allows users to publish available appointment times on a publicly available calendar that other users can then book. Here’s a short screencast showing how to set up appointment slots and how the booking process works. Read more »
One of my key requirements for the task management apps that I use is that I can access my to-do list anywhere. That’s why I was keen to test SmallTask, an app for Mac and iOS that has built-in support for popular file sync service Dropbox. Read more »
QuickFox Notes is a great little note-taking add-on for Firefox, packed with an array of features. Its notes can be synced between different machines, and it also works with Simplenote. But by using an extension, you can modify QuickFox Notes to save notes to Google Docs. Read more »
As most web workers know, successfully coordinating meetings over email can be tricky. Meetin.gs is a collaborative tool that is hoping to make organizing meetings easier. It handles meeting invitations and also provides an online space where attendees can share notes, materials and the agenda. Read more »
