Fortunately, new apps and devices are being created almost daily to help us improve our productivity and collaboration.

Coolendar

Coolendar is attempting to go where no calendar has gone before, integrating traditional calendar and task apps into a “planning experience.” It works as a simple list, instead of the standard calendar view, and provides alerts of tasks and plans via email, messenger, desktop, mobile and Twitter notifications. One interesting feature is its use of tags to organize items and create group plans so that events are more social (think Twitter meets Google Calendar).

Making task entries is seamless and intuitive (the example it gives: “tomorrow 8am make sure to grab the #umbrella!”) and allow for one-click rescheduling and recurrence.

Let’s Crate

We all love the days we stumble on solutions that make some aspect of our work “ridiculously easy,” and that’s exactly what Let’s Crate claims to do for file-sharing. Create an account, select a crate for storing your files, drag and drop to upload them, and then send the link to the individual file or crate you want to share. It’s that easy, and the free plan of 1 GB of space includes six crates, 1000 downloads, and a 50 MB file-size limit, with higher-capacity plans being very inexpensive.

MyDataNest

MyDataNest is another online storage and file-sharing solution, but unlike Let’s Crate, it offers the ability to edit files online without installing any software. Files are stored online and are available to your team through shared online work spaces.

Using similar functionality to Let’s Crate, you simply upload your files and then share a link with members of your team. With their basic and free plan, you can upload files up to 50 MB in size, and that includes three collaboration folders, 2 GB of online storage, and 10 GB of monthly transfer. As with Let’s Crate, higher-capacity plans are still very affordable.

GroupZap

GroupZap takes the “cool factor” award in this roundup of apps, offering real-time brainstorming and online collaboration, as if you were in the same room with your team. Quickly set up your group’s whiteboard by simply entering your email address and sharing a link. Then use sticky notes to each add your own ideas and thoughts to the board. Team members can also upload images and files by dragging and dropping them onto the board or use boxes and arrows to further annotate concepts, processes, and dependencies.

Once all the ideas are in place, your team can then use stickers to vote on different items within the board, and when the meeting is over, you can create a PDF to send to your team as a record of the meeting or for follow-up. It even records the brainstorming session to show the progression of ideas throughout the meeting.

GroupZap is free for up to 100 MB per board, with each board remaining active for seven days. There are also pay-as-you-go and subscription options, which extend the life of a board to one year and include increases in storage capacity.

Twilert

Social networking has become the distraction of late, but if you want to keep a pulse on what’s being said about you or your company, it’s hard to navigate away from the live feed for fear of missing something. Enter Twilert, an online app that sends email updates of new tweets on topics of interest to you. Advanced search options allow for monitoring of specific keywords, people, locations, and even links and attitudes (positive or negative posts or questions).

What are some of your favorite productivity and collaboration apps?

Image courtesy of Flickr user imglighting

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What exactly is curation?

In a nutshell, curation is selecting content from the web, based on specific criteria and presenting it to an internal or external audience, or both. With aggregation, the precursor to curation, we generally selected content for our personal consumption and had little filtering control. We usually had to be satisfied with receiving all content from a given source (the entire RSS feed of a site, for instance) without being able to filter out content we didn’t want. With curation, you choose specific items to share from a source and have the option to add your own editorial comments. If you’ve ever tweeted a link or retweeted someone else’s tweet, you’ve curated content.

Did you see that thing I tweeted?

It can be frustrating to try to get information you want to share to everybody on your team who could benefit from it. You all need to be up to speed on your market, competition, technology, trends, etc. If you’re sharing this info in a haphazard way (using multiple communication channels, crossing your fingers that team members will see and act on the info, mixing items of personal and professional interest), then having a system for content curation might be for you.

Where to start?

Curation platforms are still in their infancy; no single tool is likely to be the perfect solution for your needs. You’ll have to explore the various platforms and keep an eye on the evolution of the trend if it interests you. Be on the lookout for curation features to start being integrated into collaborative project management platforms. In fact, Producteev, a task management app that we’ve covered before, will soon allow team members to curate content and attach it to specific projects and tasks.

Fortunately for you, Pierre Tran, a French tech journalist, recently carried out an extensive comparison of a number of curation platforms, and prepared a very useful table in English and French that you can use to start exploring.

The platforms in Tran’s table offer a range of output options (the format in which people will be able to consume your curated content) from RSS feeds to embeddable widgets to stand-alone web pages. Their intended use ranges from collection of business intelligence (BI) for a company’s or team’s internal use (Eqentia, Knowledge Plaza, Factiva) to collecting and sharing interesting images or multimedia (Fancy, Pinterest, Magnify). Depending on what it is you do, the BI platforms might meet the needs of your team but, then again, if your team is composed of graphic artists, the “pretty picture” type of platform might come in handy as a group inspiration board.

You also need to decide if you want to curate exclusively for your team, or if you also want clients or the public to have access to the results of your curation efforts. Most curation platforms are designed for sharing the content with a public audience (Pearltrees, PublishThis), which your team could also access, of course.

Scoop.it

The only curation platform I’ve spent any time with is Scoop.it. It allows you to create a standalone page that resembles a blog and features content you have selected from the sources Scoop.it has helped you gather. There’s also a bookmarklet you can use to scoop up content you see when you’re out and about on the web.

Your team (and your clients, and the public) can subscribe to the RSS feed of your Scoop.it page. In the near future, you’ll have the option to keep your Scoop.it page private if you prefer to use it for your team only. Here’s an example of a Scoop.it page.

You start by entering keywords for your topic, and Scoop.it automatically pulls content from a number of major web and social media sources (you can delete those you don’t want). You can then add your own sources, like specialized blogs, individual Twitter accounts, and more.

For each piece of content, you can add your own comments, which is very useful if you want to point out to your team why you selected an item and what you want them to get out of it. You can also create posts from scratch.

Scoop.it’s still in beta, and has some shortcomings in terms of user experience and functionality, plus it needs to give users more control over the appearance of their pages, but it is still quite usable.

You don’t need a curation platform to curate

The sites that have been curating since before everybody was calling it that use tools that were already out there to get the job done. If none of the ready-made platforms work for you, don’t forget that you can, for example, create RSS feeds based on keywords in Google Blog and News search, and from there curate and furnish your selected content manually in a number of ways.

Copyright

The idea of curation isn’t to steal other people’s content in its entirety and use their work to draw traffic to your site. That would be unethical and illegal, even if you credited them. If you’re sharing your curated content with the public, you need to be sure that what you share with the public falls within the bounds of fair use and link to the complete, original content at its source.

If you read French, I highly recommend Pierre Tran’s companion article to the table he created on curation platforms (Le Guide de la curation (3) – les outils), and another table he created on automated publishing platforms (those with no manual filtering) in English and French.

If you’re already curating for your team, please let us know about your tools and workflow in the comments.

Photo courtesy Flickr user Minke Wagenaar

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Timers, alarms and stopwatches

Sometimes, all we need is a little added motivation, like an egg timer or alarm, to challenge us to remain focused and get to the finish line. If that’s the case for you, a simple online alarm clock or timer can help boost productivity.

• Naked Alarm Clock. A simple and free online alarm clock, Naked Alarm Clock makes it easy to lose yourself in the task at hand without worrying that you’ll miss your next appointment.

• Your Meditation Timer. If you get annoyed with more-traditional-sounding alarms, a meditation timer might be music to your ears. A soft gong or Tibetan bell can let you know it’s time to change tasks.

• Online Stopwatch. For every type of timer imaginable, look no further than this Online Stopwatch.

Pomodoro timers/trackers

The Pomodoro Technique involves breaking work up into timed 25-minute chunks (known as pomodoros), separated by short breaks to help improve concentration. There are several apps based on the idea.

• Focus Booster. This app helps eliminate the anxiety of time and enhances your focus using the Pomodoro Techinique.

• Pomodoro (Mac only). Another Pomodoro supporter, this app helps you to avoid procrastination and get things done.

Time monitoring/tracking

For the analytical among us, more-detailed automated time tracking and monitoring may do the trick for increasing productive time online.

• RescueTime. This tool lets you track your Internet usage while also allowing you to voluntarily block distracting websites.

• TrackTime. This app allows you to track the time you spend on projects, as well as your web-browsing habits.

Time-out/break reminders

Sometimes the problem with getting things done isn’t our lack of effort but rather constantly overextending ourselves. This is where a forced break or time-out can help.

• Time Out (Mac only). Time Out gently reminds you to take breaks on a regular basis.

• SmartBreak (Windows only). SmartBreak also reminds you to take breaks when working on your computer for long hours.

Website-blocking tools

For many of us, the Internet is filled with tempting distractions that keep us from the task at hand, which is where website-blocking tools come in handy.

• StayFocusd (Chrome extension). This productivity extension for Google Chrome restricts the amount of time you can spend on time-wasting websites.

• Anti-Social (Mac only). Anti-Social keeps you focused by turning off the “social parts” of the Internet, such as Facebook, Twitter and any other sites you specify.

• Freedom. This app locks you away from the Internet for up to eight hours at a time.

• SelfControl (Mac only). SelfControl blocks email and websites for a predetermined period of time.

Concentration/work environments

For those of us who need complete isolation in order to get focused, there are certain tools that hone in on a single task until the job is done.

• FocusWriter. FocusWriter provides a simple, distraction-free writing environment.

• Think (Mac only). This tool limits your attention to one application at any time to keep you from getting distracted.

• Quiet (Mac only). Quiet allows you to focus on a single window while simultaneously fading out others.

• Haze Over (Mac only). This app helps you stay focused on your main window by dimming inactive windows.

• Concentrate (Mac only). Perhaps the most robust of all the apps, Concentrate allows you to create “activities” (for example: design, study, write) with customized actions that run every time you concentrate on a given task.

• Isolator. This tool helps you concentrate by covering up your desktop, its icons and the windows of other applications.

While the Internet has its advantages when it comes to work, it can also be a distraction. But with the right app to help maintain concentration and focus, it’s a lot easier to stay on track and get things done.

What are your favorite focus-boosting apps and tools?

Photo courtesy Flickr user BY-YOUR-⌘

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Cross-Platform and the Network Effect

Recently, I got the chance to catch up with LiveProfile CEO Phil Karl, whose messaging app recently managed to rack up approximately 1 million new users in just five days. The secret sauce that led to the app’s rapid growth? LiveProfile is available on all major U.S. smartphone platforms, including iOS, Android and BlackBerry, and it can operate between and on all three platforms, allowing platform-agnostic messaging.

Users in distributed teams want collaborative apps that work well on their preferred smartphone platform, but that also allow them to work with friends and colleagues using different devices; multi-protocol IM clients tend to do better in the App Store than do single-service offerings, for example. Many developers will be focusing on Android or iOS, but those that target BlackBerry (which, despite relatively flat growth, still commands a very large user base, particularly in the enterprise space) in addition to the newer entrants stand to gain the most traction now, even if only because BlackBerry users will become their most vocal supporters among other device owners in their circle.

UI and UX Are the Keys to the Kingdom

Once upon a time, you could get away with making an ugly app for enterprise use. As app selection moves from the hands of corporate IT to the general worker population, user interface and user experience design become much more central to an app’s likelihood of adoption. When a user isn’t just assigned a tool and given a certain number of hours training on that program, they’ll lean instead towards the apps that are most intuitive, and that require the least time investment on their own part to complete the task.

User interface (UI) and user experience (UX) are no longer things developers can take for granted. If I’m faced with a choice between four spreadsheet apps, all of which use the same universally-accepted document formats, and all of which can get the job done, UI/UX is going to be a (if not the) key differentiator. App developers should recognize this and invest resources accordingly.

A Smart Web App Is a Safe Bet

Web apps may not have the same sex appeal as a native app, but a well-designed one that’s customized for the various smartphone platforms is a good bet. It’ll help you cast widest possible net in terms of device compatibility; it future-proofs your app against the whims and dangers OS platforms are subject to. Apple can’t reject a web app, for instance, and investment isn’t lost if, say, Windows Phone 7 gets axed by Microsoft.

That’s not to say going with a web app is easy, however. Building a good app that provides a solid experience no matter what platform it’s being used on is a challenge that can exceed platform-specific development in terms of degree of difficulty pretty easily. But making something like Facebook’s new mobile site, that intelligently monitors and responds to visitors’ hardware choices, will eventually pay off in terms of long-term development costs and user satisfaction.

Making apps that people want to take to work with them is the new backdoor to widespread enterprise adoption. It’s exciting, because it means even the smallest development studios can potentially compete with major publishers, but it also means competition will be fierce. But if you can strike a chord early with users by beating the competition in ways that are most appealing to the remote workforce of tomorrow, you’ll be ahead of the game.

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The BYOA revolution is already underway, whether or not your IT department is prepared for it. Consider, for example, Geoff’s recent article about bringing your iPad 2 to work. In the piece, he mentions a number of different applications, but they’re not ones that you’ll find on a typical enterprise software deployment list. Yet, as Geoff claims, each is indeed an app with plenty of potential as a workplace tool.

Why is BYOA a good thing for businesses? Because it cuts down on training time, helps employees feel invested in the technical side of doing business, and will eventually save money for businesses by replacing costly licensing fees with cheaper apps. The approach won’t work for everyone yet — especially as compliance and regulatory issues in some industries won’t allow it — but expect BYOA practices to become widespread enough that even regulatory bodies and standard-setting organizations have to adapt to deal with the consumer app invasion.

This BYOA approach to software selection at work may seem a bit too chaotic for traditional businesses, but anyone looking to do business on the web, especially those who depend on remote employees should seek to embrace and foster this trend, and look for ways to turn it to the business’ overall advantage. That doesn’t mean asking IT to watch what’s being used and then mandating it across all user devices. It does mean encouraging workers to share software tool recommendations and notes about usage of tools in a way that rewards app exploration and discovery, without feeling like an unnecessary and ungrounded imposition.

The app ecosystem is designed for consumers, and as such, a traditional IT software approach to their use won’t generate optimal results. By and large, it’s very hard to identify any single apps that have the kind of general acceptance and widespread use of Microsoft Office on desktop platforms, for example. The “best” software is a category that changes with a fair degree of frequency, and gems are often unearthed through serendipitous discovery rather than methodical research. That’s why a BYOA approach should be encouraged. As long as the portability of the output and the security of the information used in the production of digital materials isn’t an issue, leaving teams and individuals to find the best tools for the job will more and more often be the better way to guarantee good results.

Won’t this lead to information fragmentation? Not if your teams work together in selecting their own tools. Businesses can set output expectations (we want deliverables from project X to be in such-and-such format), but keeping these as generic as possible and leaving process up to distributed individuals will ensure that platform and apps used are those  most suited for the job. BYOA also frequently involves less commitment and software lock-in. Solutions can be put into action to respond to a single need, and never be used again, if that’s what team members decide is best. So long as product outputs keep to generally accepted formats, ephemeral tools pose no short- or long-term threat to the preservation of information.

We are in the midst of a sea change when it comes to how information technology is deployed and used in the enterprise, and it’s not a shift that’s limited to hardware devices alone. Those devices represent new paradigms when it comes to software, too, and ones that aren’t necessarily compatible with the old-school enterprise licensing model of application deployment. Consumer devices and consumer apps will define the working generation to come, and the remote workforce will lead the charge.

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Here are some of the latest and greatest apps I’ve found to help me connect with others, find places to go and document and share my experience.

1. SXSW Go. This is the official SXSW app, which helps to track the multitude of sessions and events you can attend.
2. Plancast. Announce your plans, such as the conferences or events you are planning to attend. Then search for plans, people or categories of events through this app and see where your friends are going. Check out the Unofficial SXSW Events Guide.
3. GroupMe. Create a private text chat room by grouping people in your contact list. Handy for making plans amongst friends and acquaintances to meet up at a conference. Other similar text grouping apps include Beluga and TextPlus.
4. Yobongo. This app runs on the premise that you may want to chat with others based on proximity and may need help breaking the ice to get a conversation started in real time.
5. Hashable. Track the people you are meeting with and introducing to one another using this app to help build your network and augment your address book with key information about your relationships with others.
6. Hurricane Party. With this app, you can specify your location and the time and tap into your contacts to bring people together. Personally, I may use this app to let folks know where I’m having lunch within walking distance of the convention center to invite them over to join me.
7. Liquidspace. This app identifies possible work locations nearby and can issue you with a “visa” for your Liquidspace “passport” to book and access those work spaces. Spaces can free or fee-based and can include empty work cubicles or board rooms at nearby offices; meeting rooms at hotels; backrooms at restaurants, or any underutilized work-ready space. The company behind the app provides the owners of these spaces with tools to manage space inventory including bookings. If you’re at SXSW, look for the workspace in a bus renovated by Steelcase/Turnstone.
8. Paperlinks. I’m embracing the QR Code trend with new business cards courtesy of Paperlinks. I’m also investing $250/year for the custom mobile destination site where my cards lead. See my earlier post on Paperlinks for more details.
9. Retrollect. Remember View-Masters? This app lets you upload, save and view photos in a similar way. I’ll also use my favorite storytelling photo app Whrrl, Instagram, and I’ll check in now and then on Foursquare.
10. Geoloqi. If all this location sharing has you freaked out, this app allows for private, real-time sharing of location data. You can leave “Geonotes” at locations where you’ve been, be notified if your friends are close by or share GPS maps of your locations only with people you know.

For more on useful mobile apps for conferences, check out my post from last year and my toolkit at OneForty.

What apps are on your smartphone for SXSW and upcoming conferences?

Photo courtesy stock.xchng user bvdwiel.

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As the All Facebook blog points out, users must explicitly give permission to third-party apps wanting access to personal information, but many people probably won’t notice the addition of the words “current address and mobile phone number” to the text in the request window, and will likely click “allow” without realizing they’re granting so much access to their data.

This change is consistent with Facebook’s policy of encouraging openness. But for web workers who are increasingly using Facebook for business purposes, such a policy may not be welcome.

Of course, the easiest way to avoid making your postal address and mobile phone number available to third parties is to not include it in your Facebook profile at all. To edit this data, go to “Profile” at the top-right of the Facebook screen, then click on the “Edit Profile” button. From the menu on the left, click on “Contact Information.” Delete any information you may have entered in the “Mobile Phone” and “Address” fields, then click the blue “Save Changes” button at the bottom of the screen.

Note: if you’ve added a phone number in the “Other Phone” field, Facebook will copy that number into the “Mobile Phone” field if you leave the mobile number blank. So you’ll need to erase any phone numbers that you’ve entered into either field.

Do you include your personal contact information on your Facebook page?

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For Mac-using remote workers, the Mac App Store presents a major step forward in making sure that we always have our tools with us, no matter where we are.

When I know I’ll be working from someone else’s computer, I mentally make a checklist of all the software I’ll need to download and install before I can get up and running. In some cases, this is a simple process, but in others, it’s quite difficult. It can be a considerable headache to depend on trial or demo versions of the software I need.

Now, however, the App Store allows us to install apps associated with our accounts to any Mac. This represents a major change for the better in the way we can work. Imagine signing in with your Apple ID and quickly and easily making a temporary workstation feel just like home. It’s a vision that’s now within reach, without the need for a remote server or enterprise support.

As long as you’re using the software for personal use, you should be able to log into the App Store from any Mac and download the apps you need. Once you’re done, you can just uninstall your software, transfer any stored data to a thumb drive or to storage space in the cloud (if it isn’t already automatically synced, as with apps like Evernote) and go. You’ll be able to spend less time on setup and configuration, and more time actually getting work done.

So the App Store makes Mac software more portable, and it also makes it more discoverable. It will be a lot easier to find the right app for the job, and will simplify making sure that clients and co-workers have access to the same tools as you do. Eventually, when Apple introduces Mac app gifting, you’ll be able to provide teammates with the tools they need on demand, and they won’t need to pick up the cost.

The current Mac App Store is only the beginning. It’ll be built-in to OS X Lion, which means eventually it’ll be on every Mac you encounter. And it’s likely that apps won’t be the only thing you can grab from the cloud. User accounts, preferences, application data and documents; evidence suggests that soon it’ll reside on the web for easy access from wherever you happen to be.

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In Toshl, there are only two things to input to record an expense: an amount and a tag(s). The only way to enter your expenses is through your phone, which makes sense to me. Otherwise I’d have receipts stacking up next to my computer, and you know how that would end. You can sync your data with the website manually from your phone, or set it to sync automatically over Wi-Fi or other connection. And if you want to keep track of the cash leaking out of someone else’s wallet too, you can. Toshl lets you sync multiple phones, and you can create a tag for your name and theirs to see who’s spending what.

Essentially, the Toshl website is only used for viewing and exporting data. You can’t even create an account through the website; you have to do it from your phone. Your expenditures can be displayed by time period or tags in two different graph formats. With the free account, you can export your data in .csv format. With the Pro version ($19.95 a year), you have a few more options, including exporting to Excel, PDF and Google Docs.

There are a number of other expense tracking apps out there, but most have many more features than I need or have the patience to learn how to use: Mobile app ProOnGo (not free) also syncs with a website, has a receipt reader and exports to QuickBooks. Expensify (free) also exports to QuickBooks and can be used for tracking time and mileage. PageOnce (free) allows for globally tracking of all of your expenses and bills, and offers alerts and notifications. EasyMoney (Android-only, not free)can also be used for tracking both expenses and bills, and allows you to enter more specific info for each transaction. Expenditure (iPhone only, not free) has a nice interface, but it doesn’t offer syncing or graphs. SplashMoney (not free) can connect to your bank account, and also has a desktop version.

Toshl is available for iPhone, Android, Nokia Maemo and Symbian. The company plans to add more features gradually, but I hope they don’t abandon their less-is-more approach.

What do you use to track your spending?

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Of course, there’s a huge “if” involved in that. That being that the Apple TV’s web working prospects are only as good as its ability to support and run apps in the future. If apps do come to the platform, it could become a revolutionary device for the person who works from home. That’s because if it does get apps, and if, like the iPad its internals are based on, it can support external keyboards or other input devices (maybe an iPad running a virtual keyboard app?), it could become the cheapest productivity computer available.

Running iWork, Docs to Go, or even just Google Docs with its upcoming iOS editing capabilities, the Apple TV connected to a display could prove a fine word processor, number cruncher and presentation tool. Perhaps best of all, at just a little bit larger than a pack of cards, it’s also incredibly portable, and can theoretically work wherever you have access to a TV or computer monitor with an HDMI input.

But would Apple really risk cannabilizing its own iPad and notebook sales for a $99 device that could do pretty much everything many basic users would need from a computing device? While it’s true that Apple probably wouldn’t want to trade sales of $500 or more for ones at $99, I don’t think an app-capable Apple TV would really do that; there’s enough of an advantage in owning a Mac and/or iPad compared to an Apple TV, even with apps, to make sure that people will still go for the more expensive devices.

Apple TV could be more than just Apple’s means of gaining entry into the living room. If the company plays its cards right, it could be the way to broaden the iOS customer base far, far beyond its current numbers. A $99, extremely portable, easy-to-setup and use device that plays nicely with Macs, iPhones, iPod touches and iPads would definitely have a place in the toolbox of any web worker.

What do you think of the potential for the Apple TV as a web working device?

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