Jobs has succeeded in transforming the way we consume information in both our personal and work lives. With their intuitive interfaces, sleek lines and quality craftsmanship, it’s easy to see why so many of us now carry an iPhone, iPad, or both with us wherever we go. Raise your hand if you have an iPhone or iPad? If you haven’t got your hand up, chances are the person next to you does.

The iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone, nor was it the first with a touch interface, but it revolutionized the way that we browse the internet on our cells and consume data. Even if you don’t have an iPhone, your Android, BlackBerry or Windows Phone handset have all been influenced by this device.

And this brings me to our obsession with smartphones.

We’ve all been there, checking our emails on our smartphones at midnight, 1 a.m., 2 a.m., 6 a.m. We now shut the office doors and immediately start working again on the train, the bus and in taxis. We are permanently connected. According to a national survey by Telenav, a third of Americans would rather give up sex than their smartphone. They’d also be willing to wave goodbye to chocolate, caffeine and exercise before they parted with their beloved device.

UK adults and children are just as bad. UK communications industry regulator Ofcom has discovered that 60 per cent of teenagers describe themselves as “highly addicted to their smartphone.” Almost half (47 percent) of teenagers and 22 percent of adults also admit to using their device on the toilet.

Our cell phones have now transformed from a device for contacting and playing Snake to becoming a central part of our personal and working lives. The mobile workforce can now check emails on the move, hold video conferences, proof documents and log in to check their bank balance when sitting on the train or working from a cafe. Our obsession has been fueled by just the right apps to help us accomplish these tasks.

With more than 400,000 iPhone apps and more than 300,000 Android apps now available, what are the apps that today’s web workers should look at using to aid productivity and increase efficiency? Below are just some of the apps that I find indispensable:

• CamCard: This great app takes a picture of a business card and automatically adds the information to your contact list. No more rummaging through pockets trying to locate the contact details of the people you met at various meetings and events.

• Evernote: A popular tool with remote workers, Evernote enables you to quickly capture anything. Whether it’s a photo, a screenshot or a web site, whatever you capture is stored, processed and made searchable.

• Huddle: With Huddle’s iPhone, iPad and BlackBerry apps you can access my company’s cloud-based collaboration platform and manage your projects, files and people from any location, at any time of day.

• Twitter: Yes, it can be dangerously addictive, but having Twitter on your mobile ensures that you are constantly connected to the latest updates from your community and you can track what is being said about your company.

• 1Password:  How many times have you sat on your iPhone/iPad trying to remember one of the numerous passwords you have for a wealth of websites and apps? 1Password securely stores the information required and logs you into websites immediately.

• Skype: If you’re on Verizon Wireless’ network, Skype mobile gives you free Skype-to-Skype calls and IM.

• QuickOffice: Access, create, edit, and share Microsoft Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations.

• Expensify: This fantastic app allows you to capture your expenses and receipts from any location. You can track everything and build your expenses reports on the move.

• Bloomberg Mobile:  Keep up to date on the latest international business news, stock quotes and company descriptions, etc.

• Instapaper:  Ever found a great article that you just don’t have time to read? Instapaper ensures that you can come back to it later.

What other mobile productivity apps do you use and love? Let me know in the comments below.

Hear VMware’s CTO Stephen Herrod talk about the three key pillars of enterprise mobility — apps, data and people — at Mobilize, September 26 and 27.

Andy McLoughlin, Co-founder and EVP Strategy at Huddle, can be reached on Twitter @Bandrew. 

Image courtesy of Flickr user Symic.

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If your team mostly works in the cloud, it can be a hassle to scan in documents and get them uploaded to the right place. ScanDrop makes the process more efficient by giving you the option to scan documents directly to cloud file storage apps like Dropbox, Evernote, Google Docs and OfficeDrop Online. You can also create a PDF immediately from a scanned document, letting you skip file format conversions.

ScanDrop works with Google Docs’ OCR feature to convert scanned documents into editable text. Other features built into ScanDrop allow you to change the order of pages or delete a few entirely. You can also organize and tag files.

The application is available for both Mac and Windows, although the feature set varies between the different platforms; the Mac version is the most recently upgraded. ScanDrop for Windows is currently available for free from OfficeDrop’s website, while ScanDrop is priced at $9.99 in the Mac App Store. The list of scanners that ScanDrop will automatically work with is impressive, listing not only well-known brands, like HP and Epson, but some more specialized tools, like NeatDesk.

Truly Going Paperless

I can see a virtual team making great use of ScanDrop: whoever is in charge of physical documents and checking the actual mail box can scan and upload files in a matter of minutes. With a little planning, it might be possible to eliminate the office entirely, beyond having a post office box.

ScanDrop is still listed as being in beta, so it’s possible that new features — perhaps a few more applications that you can send your scans too? — will be available in the future.

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The free Android app can be downloaded through the Android Market, and will soon also be offered through the Amazon App Store. It provides more functionally than the current iPad app as it allows you to take a photo with your phone’s camera in lieu of using a scanner, giving you more flexibility while you’re on the go. The text contained on the documents you photograph becomes searchable, in the same way that text in documents scanned in through the OfficeDrop desktop app do.

Using OfficeDrop, you can connect a scanner directly to many cloud storage apps, including Evernote, Dropbox, Google Docs and OfficeDrop’s own digital filing cabinet, which allows users to organize, search, share and access documents from anywhere. If you’re concerned about security, the Android app and the other OfficeDrop apps and services use a fully encrypted system to protect your files and data.

OfficeDrop also offers mail-in scanning services, similar to Shoeboxed, where you can mail documents to the company and have them scanned and added to your account. Its online Digital Filing System starts at $9.95 per month for 10 GB storage ($44.95 per month for teams). Mail-in scanning services start at $19.95 per month for home office use and up to 50 scanned pages per month, going up to $99.95 per month for the Paperless Team account.

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Once you’ve signed up, bookmarks can be added via the website or (much more conveniently) via Firefox and Chrome extensions, as shown in the screenshot above. These add-ons are a bit fiddly; you must be signed in for the Chrome add-on to work, while the button for the Firefox add-on is hidden down at the bottom-right of the window. It also took me a while to figure out how to clip content from a web page.

Once saved, pages can be tagged, shared with contacts and made public (note: this effectively publishes a public cache of the page you’ve saved; there may be copyright implications in using this feature). Editing bookmarks/saved content like this can only be done via the website, not at the time of saving it with the extension. Bookmarks can also be imported from Delicious, Firefox, Chrome or any other service that lets you export your bookmarks in Netscape bookmark format.

By default, the website shows your saved pages in “fancy” view (thumbnails) and displayed in chronological order, but you can switch to a list view if you prefer. Bookmarks/saved content is searchable via the search box, although, strangely, it doesn’t seem to include page titles in the search. Mobile support is provided via a mobile-optimized version of the website, which works well, and there are also RSS feeds available: a private feed that contains all of your bookmarks, and a public one only containing those you’ve marked as public.

Copyto.co is free for storing up to 50 bookmarks, which should be enough to give the site a try to see whether you might find it useful. More than that and you’ll need to purchase a subscription, which costs $15.99 per year, or $1.99 month. While Copyto.co is similar to traditional social bookmarking services like Delicious (recently sold to Avos Systems) and Pinboard, its clipping functionality also means it’s competing with note-taking apps like Evernote and OneNote. Combining bookmarking and clipping services means it’s something of a compromise. As a simple bookmarking service, it works pretty well, although it doesn’t have the more-advanced social features of Delicious, and it’s more expensive than both Delicious (free) and Pinboard (one-off payment of $9.33 currently), plus, I find its extensions to be a little clumsy. As a general-purpose clipping tool, it’s nowhere near as powerful and flexible as Evernote, and once again, its extensions aren’t as well-designed. However, it’s still a new service, so I expect the developers will work on making the extensions easier to use, and I can certainly see Copyto.co being useful for certain use cases: researchers who need to clip and share specific portions of webpages with others, and developers who often to grab code from the web, for example.

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The new Android version lets users share documents and notebooks (groups of documents). Shared documents can be edited if both users are Premium subscribers, and Premium users can also view shared documents offline.

Evernote for Android now has the ability to share notes directly to Facebook, Twitter and other services. It has also added the ability to include map locations in notes (a feature that its competitor Catch has had for a while).

Evernote for Android’s interface has also been revamped, making it easier to navigate, while it also includes a more useful home screen widget. Evernote Premium users can now set up a PIN to lock the app. At over 3MB, the program is fairly large as Android apps go, but it can now be moved to an SD card.

Meanwhile, the note-taking alternative Catch, which I wrote about a few months ago, has added a new premium version that supports file attachments, including images, sound files, PDFs, RTF files, and Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. It’s also added the ability to share notes via Facebook, Twitter and email, although Catch does not offer shared editing.

Both services are available in free and premium versions. Evernote Premium allows users to upload any file type up to 50MB in size, totaling up to 1GB per month, for $5 per month or $45 per year. For the same price, Catch Pro also allows uploading of 1GB per month.

I still find Evernote more compelling than Catch. And while the latter service’s simple interface will appeal to some, Evernote’s enhanced sharing capabilities will be helpful in many collaboration situations.

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Once installed, Trails stores the text and images that you clip onto pages that it calls “spreads.” These are viewable in a sidebar  (via View->Sidebar->Trails or a keyboard shortcut). You can create as many spreads in your booklet as you like, and they can be can be set up as one-, two- or three-column pages.

Adding content to your booklet is done via some new Firefox context menu items: As you’re browsing, highlight some text or select an image and right-click to select to add it to your booklet. Before text is added to the spread, it pops up in a window giving you the opportunity to edit it. Content can be deleted and edited after insertion on the page, too. Trails automatically puts the URL a particular snippet or text or image came from below each piece of content on the page, as well as recording the time and date that it was clipped on.

Once your booklet is complete, it can be printed, exported in PDF format or published to the Trails Public Library online.

As a note-taking tool, Trails is nowhere as powerful and flexible as more full-featured, multi-user solutions like Evernote or OneNote.  However, it does fit seamlessly into a Firefox-based workflow, and as the booklets that it creates are nicely-formatted and can be exported as a PDF, it makes for a very easy way to share well-presented research with colleagues or clients.

Trails can be downloaded from the Mozilla Add-Ons repository.

(via ghacks)

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Update: On Friday, the company published a post on the Delicious blog saying that the service is not shutting down, but that there is no longer “a strategic fit at Yahoo” for it, and that the company is “in the process of exploring a variety of options and talking to companies right now” about finding a home for the service elsewhere.

• Licorize. Like Delicious, pages can be bookmarked using a bookmarklet, a Chrome or Firefox extension, or via the website. Licorize offers more features than Delicious, though. With each item you add (Licorize calls them “strips”), you set what type of bookmark it is (idea, to-do, goal, reminder, regular bookmark, etc.), and optionally add tags, assign it to a team member and associate it with a project. Depending on what type of bookmark you set the strip as, you also get some additional fields to fill out. For example, to-do strips have a “done” checkbox, while milestone strips have a due date. The basic free version doesn’t include project functionality or the ability to add team members; a premium version with full functionality costs $5 per month, or $49 per year.
• Pinboard.in. Pinboard is a “back to basics” bookmarking service. It’s similar to Delicious, but has a stripped-back user interface and is designed to be extremely fast to use; it’s good for users who had grown frustrated with Delicious’ sluggishness (there’s a comparison of the two services here). Note that Pinboard isn’t free. There’s a one-off charge to register (the charge increases by a small amount with each new signup; it’s currently $7.96). Users can also pay for archival accounts that allow local archiving of bookmarks for a cost $25 per year. Note: Bookmark import is running slowly at the moment, presumably because many users are currently migrating accounts from Delicious.
• Diigo. Diigo goes beyond simple social bookmarking by providing a wealth of features, including collaboration and web page commenting tools; Mike Gunderloy thought it to be the most comprehensive online bookmarking service available. It’s particularly useful for group research projects. It includes a Delicious import tool and client apps are available for iPad and Android.  The service is free and is advertising-supported; education accounts are available.
• Evernote. Evernote is a primarily a multi-platform note-taking tool, but it also works well as a repository for bookmarks. While it lacks Delicious’ social features, it’s a favorite of many of the WWD team. As well as the web app, there are native client apps available for Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Palm Pre and Windows Mobile. A basic Evernote account is free; Premium accounts are available for $5 per month or $45 per year, and offer greater upload capacity and improved collaborations and sharing features. Evernote provides support for Delicious users switching to the service here.
• Google Bookmarks. If you just want somewhere to store your bookmarks in the cloud, Google Bookmarks might just do the trick. There’s a bookmarklet for adding new items, and it offers ways to organize your bookmarks via lists and labels, and you can also share and collaborate on your lists with others. Google Bookmarks is free, but you’ll need a Google account to use it.

What Delicious alternative do you recommend?

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Catch’s web interface is pretty bare-bones, but it’s easy to use while offering more options than Paprika. Catch notes can include text, images, links, map locations, and Twitter-style #hashtags. The interface includes full-text search of notes, plus sorting by date and tag.

Specific notes can be made public if you wish to share them, and other Catch users can comment on shared items.

One can capture data by sending it to your account through email or by importing a TXT or CSV file. The service can accept HTML text, but the interface doesn’t really render HTML as one would expect on a web page.

Catch is available on Android, iPhone, and iPad. The mobile apps can use location data to show maps, and to “show notes nearby” a location. The apps have offline access to notes, and are password-protected.

If you prefer a desktop app, you can turn Catch.com into a desktop app for Mac using Fluid. There’s also a Google Chrome extension, and Catch synchronizes with the cloud and mobile devices over a 256-bit SSL encryption.

The service offers an open API, so developers can create their own apps to sync with Catch. Catch itself offers no less than four Android apps: AK Notepad, Catch Notes, and the specialized Catch Health Tracker. Compass takes advantage of Catch’s location awareness to power a navigation app. All are free, and show what can be done with the platform, but there aren’t nearly as many apps for Ctach as are available through Evernote’s Trunk.

Catch is currently ad-free, and does not limit how much data you can capture; currently there is no information as to whether the company plans to charge for the service.

On the whole, I don’t find Catch to be compelling enough to make me switch from Evernote, but it may be of interest to those who like Catch’s location features, or don’t like Evernote’s freemium model.

What do you use for note-taking?

Notebook sharing is an incredibly useful collaborative feature that has been available in the Evernote web app for a while now, but it wasn’t available through the desktop client. In the Evernote 2.0 beta, you get “in-app sharing,” which means that you can share notebooks, as well as view notebooks that have been shared with you, right from within the Evernote for Mac interface (shared notebooks are available through the “Shared” tab in the left-hand panel). Note that while most of the notebook sharing features are available to everyone, you can only elect to allow other users to edit your shared notebooks if you’re a Premium user.

Notebook stacks are a new way to keep notebooks organized, providing a way to visually group notebooks; they work a little like folders. You can now drop related notebooks into their own stacks (so I could have a stack for WebWorkerDaily-related notebooks, for example), then view or collapse them as needed. Stacks are synced with the rest of your notes, so once this feature is supported in clients for other platforms, your stacks will also appear there.

To get the beta, you  need to click on the “Update to Beta versions” checkbox in the “Software Update” tab in Evernote’s preferences and then check for updates. Today’s release may still be unstable or buggy; you certainly shouldn’t rely on it for critical work. There’s no timeframe for when the Windows version of Evernote will get these features, although Evernote says it’s in the works.

Let us know what you think of Evernote 2.0 Beta for Mac in the comments.

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But how can you focus on note taking when you have other things on your mind such as networking, the other sessions you have to attend, and possibly some additional work you have to do? Here are three things you should keep in mind:

• Remember that being present and attentive is your priority. This means actively listening, looking at visual aids, and paying attention to the lecture itself. While you can record audio, video, or view live tweets, these must be for reference only and not a substitute for the real thing. It makes no sense to sit in an auditorium for an hour only to repeat that hour via a recording because you were too busy taking notes or getting to know the person beside you to digest the finer details.
• Know why you’re taking down notes. Is it for faster recall or to record your own insight? Will you be using your notes to write a blog post or make a presentation at work? The reasons behind your note-taking will help you determine the best approach and tools to use.
• Get as much information as you can about the tech specs of the event beforehand. Will there be free internet access available? How reliable is it and will be be available throughout the entire venue? Will you be able to plug or charge your devices easily? This information can help you choose your tools accordingly.

With that out of the way, it’s only a matter of getting your notes down as efficiently as possible.

Using Tools to Improve Note-taking

According to a research paper on note taking, in an academic setting the average note-taking speed for students is 0.3 to 0.4 words per second, while lecturers speak at around 2 to 3 words per second. With this speed discrepancy it’s no wonder that most people find it hard to jot down concise yet complete notes. Still, there are ways to work around this:

• Don’t rely solely on text-based notes. While many of us are used to pen-and-paper note-taking methods, the difference in speech and writing speed means that we can’t rely on them alone. This is why we should look beyond written notes. We could include mindmaps, photos (of important slides, for example), or audio recording. Some apps that allow you to record in a variety of formats include Evernote, Springpad, FolderBoy (which Charles reviewed here), and Notepub.
• Use fast tools. Don’t just look for fast loading time or responsiveness, but note your own speed when using the tool. This means that some options aren’t ideal for many people, such as alphanumeric keypads and apps for handwriting or speech recognition. You can even use SMS abbreviations, shorthand, macros, and word completion apps to increase speed further.
• Process your notes. Directly after the lecture is the best time to enter the second phase of note-taking: information processing. This is where you’ll start to consult external sources for additional information and make connections among the things you’ve learned. You could do this by organizing all the material you’ve gathered and by making annotations. Some handy annotation tools include Apollo and A.nnotate.

Taking a cue from student life, don’t be afraid to borrow the notes of other attendees. You can borrow notes directly from people you have a strong rapport with, or wait for bloggers to post their own notes or articles summarizing the talk. They might include some points you’ve missed or make connections that you didn’t think of. Just be sure to offer to share your own notes and express that you’re looking for something supplementary. You don’t want to leave the impression that you’re asking them to do all your work for you.

It may take a lot of practice to become very effective at note-taking, but the important thing is to get better each time.

Share your note-taking tips below.

Photo by stock.xchng user christgr

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That evolution started with the addition of the shared notebooks feature over a year ago. But it hit a whole new level with the launch of the Evernote Trunk, an app store for Evernote. If you’re looking for a way to easily store, organize and share information with your team, Evernote has become an extremely useful tool.

Getting Information Into Evernote

The hardest part of using many collaboration tools is getting information into your system. But using Evernote — and the huge array of tools that work with it — means that no matter where you are and what you’ve been doing, there’s a way to get that information into your system. You can take a photo of a business card and send it straight to Evernote. You can record a summary of what happened in a meeting and share it through Evernote. There are even notepads made just for Evernote users that are particularly easy to scan and add to your account.

Smartphones work well with Evernote, which means even more freedom for telecommuters. While your distributed team may not be able to work from tropical beaches every day, they certainly can share information without getting sand in their computers.

Getting Information Back Out of Evernote

Evernote won’t ever take the place of a full-fledged project management tool, at least for a team or large group of people. But it can certainly augment other products. Several of the new tools in the Evernote Trunk are geared towards letting you use Evernote to organize information and then get it into the systems where you need it. Tarpipe, for instance, allows you to pull content from Evernote and use it with social media.

A Free Service

To use all these tools, you don’t even need Evernote’s premium service. You can rely quite well on the free service. Only two factors might make it important for certain users: faster image recognition and the ability to search PDFs.

There is an incredible amount of flexibility within Evernote that can make it an ideal addition to your collaboration toolbox.

Share your tips for using Evernote as a collaboration tools in the comments.

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As you might expect from the name, FolderBoy encourages users to create folders to organize notes. You can even create folders within folders, and move notes and folders using drag and drop. You can create tags, too, and can even tag your tags. FolderBoy says “trust us, tagging your tags is useful!” although I’m not entirely sure why. But even without using tags, it’s easy to find information quickly with FolderBoy’s “find-as-you-type” full-text search.

Similar to Evernote, FolderBoy allows you to upload text, files and links. But, once saved, the links aren’t clickable, and FolderBoy’s notes are in plain text only.

FolderBoy has some useful features, although some will take getting used to. It will create events when you type phrases like “aug 31″ or “next thursday.” It didn’t parse “a week from friday” correctly, though, and it tends to assign a time of 5pm to events created this way. You’ll need to be careful about deleting folders, too, since any notes within a folder will be deleted along with the folder.

FolderBoy is web-only, and does not have any mobile apps, although the website seems to work well on my iPod touch. The service also doesn’t have an import or export function.

FolderBoy has a free version that allows allows you to upload up to 500MB of data and create up to 1,000 notes. Premium accounts will soon be available for $45 per year and will allow users to upload up to 50GB of data. You can try FolderBoy’s demo account without signing up, or enter your email address to get your own account.

If you like the idea of using folders to organize notes, and you need an app that helps you to find notes fast, FolderBoy may be for you. But if you need rich text, desktop and mobile apps, plus import and export, you’ll need to look elsewhere.

What features do you need in a note-taking app?

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After iPad announcement day, I provoked a lot of controversy by writing that I felt that the iPad could serve as a travel computer for me. After handling it and trying out its features, I’m now even more convinced that is true.

I’m a writer, more specifically a professional blogger. I’m not doing heavyweight computer tasks when I travel. In fact, I’m usually not even writing when I’m on the road except for brief updates to my web sites. I’m answering email, conducting text-based research on the web, taking notes, and doing other lightweight tasks.

I’m not the only writer or blogger who thinks the iPad can help in their work. After a week with an iPad in hand, the Chicago Sun-Times’ Andy Ihnatko raved about how useful the gadget is for his workflow on TWIT last week. Mashable’s Ben Parr wrote one of his recent posts completely on the iPad, although he admitted that a few things were a pain, like working with images.

The only real processor- or software-heavy task that I did during my last extended business trip was edit photos in Adobe Lightroom on my return flight, which could easily have waited till I got home. It certainly wasn’t worth hauling around a computer that weighs three times as much as an iPad for almost a week just to get a two-hour head start on my photo processing.

The first thing I noticed when getting my hands on an iPad was how big it was. The size was surprising. I had expected the screen to feel smaller than it does. This was good news for its usability for many of the tasks that I do. Many of these tasks, such as web browsing, can also be done on my iPhone but the small screen makes them awkward. The iPad provides the screen real estate to take notes, browse and read without getting a headache from it.

Besides being large, the screen is also gorgeous. The resolution is wonderful and it is just a joy to look at. As spoiled as I am by using my iPhone screen on a daily basis, the iPad screen is even more beautiful, although it obviously gets streaky easily.

Another thing I noticed almost immediately was the speed of the device. It responds to commands lightning-fast compared to my iPhone. This kind of processor power raises interesting possibilities for what the iPad may be able to do in apps that the iPhone can’t, such as in the area of photo editing. There is already at least one photo editor out for the iPad, PhotoGene, that looks to be very robust.

A lot of commenters on my previous iPad article suggested that instead of an iPad I get a netbook for my travel needs. While there is a price penalty for buying the iPad over a netbook, I see the iPad as a better option for me for several reasons:

• Weight: The iPad is half the weight of most netbooks — an important carrying consideration for someone with arthritis in their back.
• Compatibility: Since I’m already heavily embedded in the Mac OS ecosystem (I use an iPhone and MacBook with iCal, Contacts and Mobile Me, for instance), all my data will sync natively very easily with another Apple device. I use the iWork suite, so having a device that can use those files is definitely a plus. I can design presentations at home in Keynote and then take them on the road using the iPad. I can take transfer text notes back and forth in Pages.
• Speed: The tablet format and quick-boot OS will make it much easier to do quickie tasks (such as making a short note in an application like Evernote) than a netbook. Juggling a netbook for such tasks while standing would be awkward at best, and I could be done and have the iPad put away again before the netbook would probably even be booted up.
• Connectivity: For me, the 3G iPad, with its no contract pay-as-you-go connectivity, is the one to have. To have cellular system access with a netbook, I’d have to pay for a connection device like a MiFi or wireless card, which means paying every month for an expensive service whether I really need it that month or not. With the iPad 3G plan, I can have (and pay for) connectivity only when I need it.
• Battery Life: Both the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg and Andy Ihnatko are on record as saying the iPad can get 11 hours or more of battery life using power saving settings. This far exceeds the average netbook and is just one more reason the iPad is a superior travel device.

So, how do I imagine utilizing the iPad on my next business trip?

First, I have to gear up. I’ll have an iPad with 3G. I’ll install the following apps: Evernote, iWork (Pages, Numbers and Keynote), Things and WordPress (please see disclosure at the bottom). I’ll take the camera connectivity kit and an external keyboard with me, but the keyboard can stay at the hotel during the day which means I save the weight of hauling it.

Some preparation at home will make my life easier on the road. I’ll add to the iPad’s onboard photo library any photos I think I may want to use from my archives while at the event. I can export my Notebooks from Circus Ponies’ Notebook program to view as web sites in Safari if I think I’ll need them. I’ll also prepare in advance blank draft blog posts that are pre-completed with thumbnail photos (for instance, the event logo) and any advertising banners I intend to use. This will save cutting & pasting and photo editing on the road, and will make posting faster in general. All I’ll have to do is write content and use the camera connection kit or my iPhone camera to add pictures to my posts.

Once on the road, I’ll use Evernote and Pages for taking notes, WordPress or Safari for doing my web posting, Things for editorial planning and Keynote for any presentations. Any contact or calendar changes that I make will be synced to Mobile Me for backup. I can store and pull files that I need from Mobile Me or Dropbox.

I am really looking forward to the day that I can leave my laptop at home when I pack my suitcase.

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

I signed up for a free Nozbe account to check out the integration between the tools. Evernote replaces Nozbe’s note-taking component, offering a wealth of new options, including access though Evernote’s web interface, desktop client, and mobile device applications. Activating the integration follows a process similar to  integrating Evernote with Twitter (covered here) and Cliqset (covered here). The integration between Evernote and third-party applications is clean and easy for even non-technical users to complete thanks to the Evernote API.

The integration makes use of tags to tie your Evernote notes into your Nozbe account. You create tags in Evernote that correspond to a Nozbe project name or context, and Nozbe searches through your Evernote account for tags that correspond to your projects or contexts and makes the notes accessible in your account. For example, I created a tag “Nozbe Integrates with Evernote” in my Evernote account. When I synced my Nozbe account with my Evernote account, the tagged notes appeared in my Nozbe account in the “Evernote Notes” section. Your tag appears at the bottom of the note as the name of your Nozbe project. If you are new to tagging or still trying to formalize how you use tags to organize your data, just make sure your tags are descriptive and correspond with your Nozbe project names (including capitalization) and you’ll have no problems getting this integration to rock.

In Nozbe, you can only view your Evernote notes. However, you can put the notes into any contexts you set up for your Nozbe projects.

While I am not a card-carrying GTD user, I do use some its principles in my current workflow, so I find this integration useful and think that it improves upon Evernote’s already strong feature set and its ease of use. One last bit of advice: if, like me, you sometimes aren’t as strict about syncing as you should be, to make best use of this integration, you’ll need to get into the syncing habit.

Have you tried out Nozbe’s integration with Evernote? What do you think of it?

As an example, if you have a “Research” notebook, adding “@Research” to the subject line of your email will file it into that notebook. Additionally, you can add tags to your notes by using a hashtag format. So for example, adding the hashtag “#webworkerdaily” to the subject line of your email would add the tag “webworkerdaily” to the filed note.

While this change might seem fairly insignificant, it actually means that you’ll spend a lot less time categorizing and tagging notes after submitting them. Kevin goes into a little more detail and includes some caveats to bear in mind.

What do you think of this change to Evernote?

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My first stop was to sign up for a Cliqset account. I then set up my account to talk to my Friendfeed, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr and Twitter accounts.  Finally, I authorized Cliqset in Evernote (following nearly the same process as I used when I integrated Twitter and Evernote.)

Sending social media content from Cliqset to Evernote is as easy as selecting the Evernote icon and then clicking the “Share” button to send the item to your Evernote account.  What I really like here is how cleanly the integration packages the information you are sending to Evernote. Once the content is in your Evernote account, you can collaborate with other Evernote users or save it for your own reference. A small but nice touch is that the integration adds a Cliqset tag to any content you send into Evernote, offering you an easy stepping stone to better organizing your content.

As of this writing, the Cliqset social media stream is still in its infancy as far as content providers and members go; if you don’t find what you want in the social stream you can use the Cliqset Firefox Extension that enables you to capture content from web sites outside the Cliqset social stream. Clicking on the extension’s toolbar button launches a dialog box with the same sharing options and Evernote integration you enjoy from within Cliqset.

While I have some doubts as to whether I need yet another research tool, the neat packaging of content I sent in from Cliqset and the Cliqset Firefox extension resulted in a lot cleaner reference material than the web clippings I usually capture during my online research, so I may yet find a way to squeeze it into my workflow.

Have you tried out the Cliqset/Evernote integration? Share your experience below.

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