Solvate, a company that matches businesses looking for resources with professionals looking for work, today announced the launch of its “Talent Engine.” It’s basically a search engine that is designed to enable small businesses to query Solvate’s index of independent professionals and connect with appropriate matches. Read More »
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Simon Mackie
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Siphon is an add-on that lets you sync a list of add-ons between multiple Firefox installs. Big deal, you might be thinking, Firefox already has Firefox Sync. You’d be right, except that Siphon provides the ability to manage which add-ons are installed via a management interface. Read More »
Cleaning up text — which can incorporate doing things like correcting erroneous capitalization, removing unnecessary spaces and removing duplicate entries — can be a laborious, time-consuming process. Next time you need to do some text cleanup, check out CleanHaven, a free text cleanup tool Read More »
Solvate, a company that matches businesses looking for resources with professionals looking for work, today announced the launch of its “Talent Engine.” It’s basically a search engine that is designed to enable small businesses to query Solvate’s index of independent professionals and connect with appropriate matches. Read More »
Over the years, IE has fallen some way behind its competitors in terms of raw speed and standards compliance. So has the the new version done anything to make up that lost ground? I ran it through some benchmarking tools to find out. Read More »
Ever wanted to see a graph of how much email you’ve received from particular person, or about a particular topic, over time? Graph Your Inbox is a Chrome extension that plots the results of Gmail search queries. It’s like having Google Analytics for your inbox. Read More »
Alarms is well-designed, intuitive to-do list manager/reminder app for the Mac with some nice touches. Above all it’s unobtrusive, so unlike some more complex task management apps it doesn’t take your focus away from whatever it is that you’re actually supposed to be doing. Read More »
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jotOnce is an app that enables you to write a note, encrypt it with a password and share it. It could be useful if you wanted to share project notes with some colleagues, for example, or to send some information without leaving an email trail. Read More »
Firefox-using “taboholics” may have been enjoying Tab Panorama, a feature introduced in Firefox 4b4 that enables users to arrange their tabs into groups. Chrome-using tab addicts may have been a little envious, but they now have Tab Sugar, an extension that replicates Tab Panorama in Chrome. Read More »
Most of our readers probably use some “consumer” collaborative tools in their daily work: Skype, Google Chat, Delicious, Twitter, Dropbox, etc. But their use introduces risks, such as security concerns and the way the tools can change (or disappear) overnight. So should businesses be using them? Read More »
Netvibes — a Paris-based company that provides personalized online dashboards for its users — today introduced a “VIP” program that should be useful for professional and business users of the service (like WWD writer Dawn Foster, who uses Netvibes to create monitoring dashboards for her clients). Read More »
Salesforce.com today announced it will be releasing a mobile client for Chatter, its enterprise social networking service, this fall. Salesforce knows that for social applications — and even all enterprise applications — mobile is becoming increasingly important as workers expect to do business on the go. Read More »
Omnium is an ultra-lightweight, minimalistic note-taking app for Windows. It’s similar in style to CintaNotes and Notational Velocity for the Mac; it provides a fast and efficient note-taking experience. And you can put it in a folder in your Dropbox account and access it from anywhere. Read More »
It appears that WorkflowPerfect, a useful web app for distributed teams that combined task tracking with workflow management features, has disappeared. The site is not currently accessible and according to a comment left by Ton Walter the site has been down for three weeks now. Read More »
Here are some interesting posts from around the ‘Net to catch up with over the weekend: Mashable: “4 Tips for Writing SEO-Friendly Blog Posts” CMS Wire: “Don’t Create a Social Frankenstein” Social Times: “Mommy, I Want A Blog Too…” Zen Habits: “The Minimalist’s Guide to … Read More »
FilerFrog is a Windows utility that adds some useful tools to your context menu, handling tasks like moving files and image resizing. As it only adds one top-level item, it won’t clutter your context menu, but the tools are just a couple of clicks away. Read More »
KoHive is a web app that provides shared collaborative workspaces for teams. In use, the app looks very much like a computer desktop — down the left-hand side of the screen is a series of icons that provides access to different “apps.” Read More »
Courier is a Mac app that allows you upload files to a variety of online services. It uses mail as a metaphor; you put your files in an “envelope” and put “stamps” onto the envelope to tell the app where to send them. Read More »
When Windows 7 launched last year, Microsoft offered a discounted Windows 7 “Family Pack.” It contained a product key that could be used on up to three machines; at $150, it was a pretty good deal for web workers with more than one machine to upgrade. Read More »
Some people use their email for everything — storing files, emailing notes to themselves, etc. If you fit that description, you should check out Notes for Later. It’s a simple free service that’s useful for keeping making notes of websites to remember at a later date. Read More »
Are you the type of person who often clicks on the headlines of articles in your RSS reader to take you through to the article on its website? If so, you might like to try prldr, a new web-based “visual RSS reader” Read More »
Dimdim today launches Dimdim 6.0, the latest version of its browser-based web conferencing tool. Particularly impressive among the features in the release are the improved screensharing capabilities — thanks to an updated myScreen plugin — and the ability to host four-way video conferences. Read More »
Collaborating on designs can be a frustrating experience. Teams often end up emailing large image files back and forth, with comments added in the body text of the email, which can be hard to manage. This is where Draftboard comes in. Read More »
Here are some interesting posts from around the ‘Net to catch up with over the weekend: Mashable: “HOW TO: Get the Most Out of Your Business Facebook Page” Open Forum: “Unstink Your Company Blog” Seth Godin: “Senior management” Lifehacker: “Living Self-Employed Online: The Manual They … Read More »
Evom is a video conversion tool for the Mac. It has an easy-to-use interface and some nice extra features, like being able to grab videos from the Internet and convert them for use with iTunes. I made a screencast to show you how it works: Read More »
I’m now primarily a Mac user, but back when I was on Windows, my multi-protocol IM client of choice was Miranda IM. It’s a lightweight, highly extensible and unobtrusive open-source tool. The Miranda IM team this week released version 0.9, which contains some useful new features: Read More »
Tom’s Planner — a simple online planning app — will move out of beta this Sunday, August 29. If you haven’t already tried it, it’s worth signing up before then, as all beta users will get a year’s free access to all of the app’s features. Read More »
One of the most useful Labs features is called “Undo Send.” Ever hit the send button on a message and then immediately regretted it? Undo Send stops the message from being sent for a few seconds, which enables you to change your mind. Read More »
Here are some interesting posts from around the ‘Net to catch up with over the weekend: WebProNews: “As Long As There Are Links, The Web Will Live” GigaOM: “The Web Isn’t Dead; It’s Just Continuing to Evolve” Open Forum: “Prepare to be Interrupted” Mashable: “5 Key … Read More »
LaCie’s cloud file storage service Wuala (which Om wrote about quite a while back when it was first launched) has announced the availability of a new feature, Wuala Sync, which allows users to automatically synchronize their files online and across multiple computers and operating systems. Read More »
By Simon Mackie
Aug. 20, 2010, 12:00pm PT
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Looking for some sound effects to use in a presentation or project? Check out the Freesound Project, a large collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings and bleeps. You can search for sounds by tag, description, username or filename. Read More »
By Simon Mackie
Aug. 20, 2010, 9:00am PT
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Congratulations to Manuel Ponce de Leon, the winner of our CrowdConf 2010 ticket giveaway. Coming to San Francisco on October 4th, CrowdConf is the first conference centered around the field of crowdsourcing and the future of distributed work, discussing the flattening of the global labor market. Read More »
CloudCrowd, a labor-as-a-service provider, has announced the company has raised $5.1 million in a Series B funding round, led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ). The company says that the new funding will enable it to expand its services and the features of its on-demand labor platform. Read More »
AirDropper is a simple web app that lets users request a file by email. The recipient then hits a link in the email to upload their file using the AirDropper website; the file will be saved into the user’s Dropbox account. Read More »
Shaun Gallagher of the Pressbin Coding Blog got in touch to let us know about a couple of useful Gmail hacks he’s created: A “Mark All As Read” button and a hack that removes the new Mail/Contacts/Tasks menu from the upper-left menu. Read More »
Dimdim — a provider of well-designed web conferencing tools that we’ve covered previously — yesterday rolled out DimDim Business, an edition of its software designed for small and medium-sized businesses. It provides a web conferencing solution that’s scalable to thousands of participants. Read More »
Earlier today, I stumbled across Myna, an online audio editor. Normally, I am skeptical of such online audio tools, but Myna is by Aviary, the folks who’ve created some very fine online image editing tools, so I decided to give it a whirl. Read More »
Shoeboxed has announced the availability of a connector for Salesforce. The connector eliminates the need to enter contact data from business cards into Salesforce; after Shoeboxed scans and organizes business cards, Salesforce users will be able to import the contact data into their accounts as leads. Read More »
CrowdConf is the first conference centered around the emerging field of crowdsourcing and the future of distributed work, discussing the rapidly democratizing and flattening of the global labor market. We have a free pass to give away to one lucky WWD reader. Read More »
VirusTotal is a comprehensive online virus scanning tool that you can use to check out suspicious files. The service now has an accompanying Firefox add-on, VTzilla, that enables users to scan files prior to downloading them, and can also scan suspicious URLs. Read More »
Meeting scheduling tool Tungle today announced an update to the service that includes integration with Facebook Events, TripIt and Plancast. Users will be able to see events from all three sources on their Tungle.me calendars in order to share them with others. Read More »
By Simon Mackie
Aug. 15, 2010, 3:32am PT
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Here are some interesting posts from around the ‘Net to catch up with over the weekend: Zen Habits: “The importance of enjoying the habit” Jeffrey Zeldman: “How to use Textmate” jkOnTheRun: “One Week With the Magic Trackpad — No Pain” Mashable: “HOW TO: Pick the Right … Read More »
One way to create strong passwords is to use randomly-generated phrases and store them in a password manager. Alternatively, you could use a password hashing tool to create passwords for each of the sites you use from a master password in conjunction with a parameter. Read More »
By Simon Mackie
Aug. 13, 2010, 9:00am PT
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I’ve been playing with Flowr over the past couple of days. It’s a collaboration web app that’s a little like having a private Facebook for your company or team. I thought I’d record a short screencast to give you an overview of how it works: Read More »
optimizeLegibility is a CSS declaration that improves the handling of kerning pairs and ligatures in the browsers that support it; it makes text easier to read by spacing the letters correctly. It makes quite a bit of difference, particularly on larger fonts: Read More »
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