GigaOM » Collaboration

The apps that feed our mobile communication addiction

Andy McLoughlin — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 16:00:35 +0000

When I originally thought about writing this post a few weeks ago, Steve Jobs had yet to resign from Apple. However, his resignation and my original idea for a post, focusing on our addiction to information on the move, actually complement each other rather nicely.

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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Talkwheel wants to reinvent the way we communicate online

Aliza Sherman — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 21:05:08 +0000

We have email, we have message boards, we have IM, but if they aren’t integrated with one another, our collaborative communications often fall short. Andy McLoughlin, cofounder of Huddle, recently discussed the limitations of email as a collaboration tool. Virtual teams are finding email streams hard to track and harder to scale. IM conversations, while great in the moment, often disappear into the ether, not archived for future reference. And message boards are barely a step up from the Usenet Newsgroups of the early Internet.

So where do we go from here? Many of us who work with virtual teams have tried adopting collaboration and communication systems that are more fully integrated and where the conversations are archived and searchable. These tools combine email capabilities (receiving and sending emails that post into the system), message boards or forums where topic-specific conversations can take place, and in some cases, IM-like, or even Twitter-like, functions. These systems also often include document uploading, sharing and collaboration, task management, and project management tools. But none of the tools I’ve experimented with try to re-imagine the way we communicate online. Enter Talkwheel, which positions itself as an integrated communications tool for enterprises and offers a novel way to capture, visualize and follow conversations.

Rethink our collaborative communications

I have to be honest; it has taken me a long time to “get” Talkwheel, and even though now I “get it,” it still doesn’t appeal to me. But it does present an interesting way of rethinking how we communicate and collaborate and what happens to our conversations in different places that are inter-related but not inter-linked.

Talkwheel’s premise is that if you install and use the platform with your team, all of the conversations you have — both in real-time and asynchronously — will be captured and organized in a way that lets you visualize them. You can form Talkwheel Groups to bring together specific groupings of people with whom you are communicating, such as a group for a specific project or a group for a particular department. When you bring people into a group, they are set up with Talkwheel accounts (you can also use Facebook to bring in your Facebook friends) and any subsequent messaging amongst group members will show up in several ways: as threaded and nested messages on the right side of the interface, and around the “talkwheel” on the left.

The wheel is meant to represent a round table, while the people in the group are represented by their icons around the wheel. Each person’s comments are symbolized by color-colored dots and the connections between the comments are illustrated as lines connecting those dots. As a very visual thinker, I want to fall in love with that wheel, but it really falls flat for me and feels unnecessary. Part of this feeling may be coming from the fairly primitive interface; it feels like somebody’s hand-drawn image of what they’d like this platform to become, rather than an elegant user interface that illustrates the idea of a “conversation wheel.”

Harness disparate conversations

Despite the shortcomings in user experience, the premise of Talkwheel is an interesting one: Bringing the different ways we are communicating into a single platform so conversations aren’t lost, and connections between conversations are made and are more explicit. But, despite its novel visual interface, Talkwheel isn’t the first to tackle this communications challenge and is up against social business tools Yammer, Salesforce Chatter and Socialtext, collaboration platforms like Glasscubes and Huddle, and perhaps even the new “Circles” feature in Google+.

What is more exciting about Talkwheel, however, are the analytical tools the company is rolling out. Right now, you can measure Sentiment of conversations. In the same way that you might want to know the positive, negative and neutral sentiments of conversations taking place on blogs, social networks and the like, Talkwheel lets you measure the sentiment of your internal and external team conversations. As more and more virtual teams form and subtle cues of in-person conversation are lost, being able to “take the emotional temperature” of a group conversation will have a lot of value for the manager of virtual teams.

Even though we are all in the habit of flitting between our emails, which may or may not e integrated with our collaboration tools and then our IMs and then message boards, we probably know deep down inside that this isn’t efficient; we’re just used to doing it. Talkwheel offers a solution, but it’s only a matter of time before we know if any of us are willing to break our bad communications habit and get a better grip on our collaborative conversations.

How are you harnessing your emails, IMs and message board posts as you collaborate with your team?

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As email passes 40, is a midlife crisis in the cards?

Andy McLoughlin — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 12:04:56 +0000

A few weeks ago, electronic mail, or email as it’s now affectionately known, hit the respectable age of 40. When Ray Tomlinson, a young computer engineer, sent the first email in 1971, he could only have guessed how it would impact the way we communicate in both our business and personal lives.

Email has transformed the way people shop, bank, communicate with family members and do business. Now an essential tool for approximately one billion mobile workers across the globe, email continues to dominate the way in which we communicate.

Four decades since the first message – believed to be “QWERTYUIOP” – email seems to be going strong. But is it about to hit a midlife crisis? With web workers now using more sophisticated collaborative apps and social business tools to communicate and share information, are we going to see email’s reign come to an end?

Email is a great communication tool. You can get in touch with business colleagues, family and friends at the touch of a button. Gone are the days of waiting by the front door for a letter from uncles and aunties across the globe, or sitting by a fax machine waiting for that signed document to come back from a client’s legal team. However, email isn’t a collaboration tool. Anyone who has tried to collate feedback from numerous colleagues on a document over email knows how painful the process can be. No one seems to remember which version the team is working on and there is always that one person who sends over some (supposedly) final amendments overnight. Hours can be wasted waiting for emails to go back and forth, searching through inboxes for missing documents, and putting large files onto CDs, USB sticks or FTP servers due to file size restrictions.

It is little wonder then that web workers across the globe are turning to the likes of Dropbox for storing and sharing files. Store your files on one computer, and they’ll automatically appear on your other computers with Dropbox installed. Simple. Indeed, Apple has finally joined the party and realized that emailing photos from your phone was so 2010 — its forthcoming iCloud service will provide a far smarter way to move your content between devices. Evernote is another popular tool with remote workers, enabling 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. And, of course, there’s Huddle. Being cloud-based, Huddle enables you to manage your projects, files and people on any device, from any location.

With social networks making it so easy to stay in touch and share information with people in their personal lives, the demand for such simplicity in the workplace has increased. Take Facebook, for example: You can message your friends, share your photos and videos (and every other aspect of your life should you so wish), and co-ordinate events from wherever you are. With more than 500 million active Facebook users spending 700 billion minutes per month on the site, and more than 200 million people tweeting, email’s grip on our personal lives may well be coming to an end.

For business, however, it’s a different matter. Yes, there are tools being used to make our working lives easier, but removing email from the workplace completely will require more than just introducing intuitive, easy-to-use tools in the office. It requires a change in habit. Email is deeply entrenched in our daily working lives and moving to other tools will require a culture shift. Any new tools and services need to be integrated into processes from the outset of a project / program / campaign so that people become accustomed to using an alternative tool. And this is before you start the mammoth task of introducing client and partner companies to your amazing new tool. While email may not dominate workplace communication in another 40 years, there’s life in it yet!

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

Photo courtesy Flickr user ilamont.com.

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25 Apps for the Virtual Worker’s Toolkit

Aliza Sherman — Wed, 04 May 2011 15:02:07 +0000

Working remotely means not having the easy access to the machines and systems you used to when you were cubicle-bound. That means no no bottomless supply closet, no access to conference rooms or presentation tools like projectors, fewer face-to-face meetings. As you work increasingly in the cloud, what are the basic tools you need — and where do you get them?

Here is a list of five basic categories of tools all remote workers should have at the ready, and a variety of options to consider for each category.

Document Collaboration and Workspaces

There is a bit of a blur between virtual workspace and project management tools. These tools emphasize collaboration:

1. ideapi. Recently reviewed by Simon, this is a simple online tool for creating documents and collaborating on discrete sections of the documents.

2. Glasscubes. I’ve been using virtual workspace Glasscubes for a while now. Here’s my latest post taking a fresh look at the app.

3. Binfire. A free solution that lets you “manage projects by adding members, creating tasks and milestones, and assigning responsibility.” Here’s what else Amber has to say about Binfire.

4. Hyperoffice. A collaborative suite bundling email and communication, project management, database management and group meetings. Reviewed here by Amber.

Project/Task/People Management

Some of these tools also offer collaboration features, but they are more focused on managing tasks and people and getting things done efficiently.

5. Huddle. Many moons ago, we reviewed Huddle, and the team collaboration space is still going strong.

6. Cohuman. Delegate, assign and prioritize tasks with others for free. It even integrates into Google Apps. Simon published a screencast about this app.

7. Teamly. A collaboration tool with an emphasis on priorities, as Thursday explained in her initial review.

8. ProjectTurf. A collaboration app for running a project including briefs and time cards. Thursday reviewed it here.

9. Zcope. Simon felt this combined project management and collaboration tool had a lot of potential. It has slightly more advanced project management features than many of its competitors.

10. Mavenlink. This SaaS app neatly integrates project management, collaboration and invoicing. I reviewed it recently.

11. Microproject. Simple, online project management for the smaller team. Here’s our review.

12. Wrike. We’ve covered Wrike several times, including most recently when the company added mobile apps to its project management and collaboration solution.

Desktop Sharing/Presentation/Web Meeting Tools

GoToMeeting is one of the leaders in the desktop sharing/web meeting space (did you see the announcement of its Skype integration?), but there is an array of other useful remote presentation tools out there:

13. iMeet. Elegantly combines video and audio calls with document sharing. I reviewed it in March.

14. join.me. A no-registration, free screen sharing app that fills a gap now that DimDim is now defunct. We’ve praised it here on WWD before, including announcing its iPhone app.

15. yaM. An app to streamline the process of holding meetings including planning, scheduling and note taking. See our review.

16. Zipcast. Slideshare’s quick presentation tool adding video and chat to your slideshows for public (free) or private (fee) presentations. Mathew reviewed it here.

17. CrunchConnect. Charles recently reviewed this web conferencing solution with an emphasis on sales.

18. FuzeMeeting. A fee-based video conferencing solution with collaboration features.

19. Yugma. Free and fee-based Web video conferencing with desktop sharing.

20. Zoho Meeting. Free for one-to-one video call meetings, or starting at $12/month for up to five participants.

File Storage/Sharing/Syncing

Giving the entire virtual team access to files – especially big ones – without having to email them back and forth is critical for remote work processes.

21. Dropbox. Store and share files in the cloud securely, and get access to them from your mobile device. Ryan covered the latest version of Dropbox late last year.

22. Box.net. An enterprise-friendly file sharing and collaboration, reviewed most recently by us here.

23. SugarSync.We’ve written about this file sharing and backup solution before including most recently about new features for its iOS app.

Miscellaneous Useful Cloud-Based Tools

A couple of online tools that help you do things that previously required pricey desktop software.

24. Diagram.ly. Simon recently reviewed this easy-to-use site for creating flow charts and other diagrams.

25. Tom’s Planner. A Gantt chart-based planning tool, with easy drag-and-drop functionality; it’s now iPhone and iPad compatible.

What are some of your must-have tools for remote work?

Image courtesy stock.xchng user spekulator

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Xobni’s Gadgets Bring Third-Party Collaboration Tools to Outlook

Charles Hamilton — Tue, 03 May 2011 19:00:37 +0000

Xobni, a popular productivity add-on for Outlook that automatically displays additional information about email contacts, has announced that it is making available “gadgets,” third-party additions to Xobni that will allow well-known collaboration tools as Yammer, Chatter, Dropbox, Evernote and Salesforce to become an integral part of the Outlook interface.

The first crop of gadgets includes tools for web-based document sharing, lead tracking, issue reporting and monitoring, and note-taking, such as:

An Evernote gadget that automatically displays notes containing the name or email address of a particular contact, and allows adding and editing.
A Dropbox tool for finding files and sharing them by creating links that are entered into email messages. Drag-and-drop file sending is planned for the future.
A JIRA bug tracker tool that allows programmers to update project status inline.
A Google Translate tool that automatically translates entire conversations, both incoming and outgoing. Xobni says that the translations are good enough to be helpful for use in customer support.
A WebEx tool to schedule meetings, and start them on the fly.

Other gadgets available today include:

Productivity: GoldMail
Collaboration: Huddle and Microsoft SharePoint
Content: Facebook, Flickr, Hoover’s, Klout, LinkedIn, Twitter, Xing, YouTube, Yelp
CRM: Salesforce CRM

Xobni was one of the first companies to bring “social CRM” services to the inbox, but has more recently seen significant competition from the likes of Rapportive, Gist and Liaise. By hooking into third-party services, the gadgets can offer offer additional capabilities not offered by Xobni’s competitors.

When I spoke with Xobni representatives recently, they said that the rationale for developing this platform was simple: research shows that in the enterprise, people spend 38 percent of their screen time in Outlook, so it makes sense to make Outlook as capable as possible.

Xobni says that its system relies on open APIs, and it is based on OpenSocial. Developers can create their own gadgets; they can be created with straightforward web development tools. The infrastructure can even be hosted on intranets to take advantage of corporate LDAP servers. Gadgets are not yet part of Xobni for Gmail beta, but they are on the way.

The new Xobni gadgets are available from the company’s website. Most of the Xobni Gadgets are free, but the JIRA and Saleforce gadgets are priced at $9.99 per user per year. Xobni handles billing and payment for developers.

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Collaboration May Be a Pain but SaaS Makes It Simple

Stacey Higginbotham — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 00:11:22 +0000

There are thousands of startups trying to offer collaboration software but four of them onstage today at our Net:Work event explained how virality, openness with other applications through an API, and simplicity will help startups succeed against their enterprise rivals, especially those like Microsoft SharePoint. At the same panel CEOs from SlideRocket, Box.Net, Huddle and Central Desktop explained why true collaboration (which isn’t email) is important and how such collaboration software will be built on software as a service platforms.

The simplicity will drive adoption, especially as employees bring in “rogue” software that is virally adopted amongst other workers. And then once it reaches a significant level of adoption, then IT generally steps in and realizes that such consumer-like SaaS collaboration software can be delivered more securely and takes control. As Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box.net said, “We’re experiencing a revolution in the enterprise.” And as part of the revolution, large companies will be created and those with success as platforms will be simple to use and also link to other platforms. As Chuck Dietrich, SlideRocket’s CEO, said, “If you’re an online app, how can you not have APIs?”

However, the bottom line for these vendors was that the emergence of real collaboration and cloud platforms is enabling startups like them to disrupt the marketplace with a different type of product for enterprise communication — a product that is easier for people to use and likely easier for the IT organization to pay for and maintain. Viva la revolution.

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Xobni Gets Huddle Integration

Simon Mackie — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 15:05:35 +0000

A new version of Xobni, a popular search and relationship management add-on for Microsoft Outlook, is being released today, including integration with Huddle, a cloud-based collaboration suite. Huddle data will appear in Xobni’s sidebar, providing users with visibility of project workflows, the most recent communications between team members and ready access to the latest versions of uploaded files in their inboxes. An auto-identification feature will also provide users with insight into contacts that share a Huddle workspace with them.

As Xobni has added support for Gmail contextual gadgets (third-party email applications for Gmail that pull information from the web to augment the data in a user’s inbox) to this release, we can probably expect to see more useful gadgets, like Huddle, coming to Xobni’s sidebar.

Gmail gadget support in Xobni is interesting, because it means that it is essentially providing a bridge for third-party email application developers, who can now build applications for one platform (Gmail) but also have the same app work in another (Outlook). That’s good news for web app developers, like Huddle, who may have previously found integrating with a desktop email client like Outlook tricky, although it should be noted that only a small percentage of Outlook users will have Xobni installed.

Xobni is available for download from xobni.com. The basic version is free, while Xobni Plus, with additional features, costs $49.95 (currently on sale at $29.95)

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Extend LinkedIn Into an Online Document Collaboration Platform

Will Kelly — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 23:00:49 +0000

While we have covered the social media aspects of LinkedIn in the past, the service is now being extended with third-party applications. Right now, Box.net Files and Huddle WorkSpaces enable you to use LinkedIn as an online document collaboration platform. These free tools are light versions of more full-featured products, but should serve you just fine for one-off collaboration needs.

The potential of LinkedIn for document collaboration may sound hinky to some, but there are some real benefits, including:

Secure access via the LinkedIn social network of contacts.
No infrastructure or administrative costs.
Access documents anywhere via the web, as long as you are a LinkedIn member.

However, there is a flip side, in that that there are basically two types of LinkedIn users — those who log in faithfully on a regular basis, and those who log in just often enough to respond to network invites, and otherwise spend little time on the site. Online document collaboration via LinkedIn is going to work best for organizations where LinkedIn is already part of the corporate culture. In other words, frequent LinkedIn users are going to be the best adopters of these applications.

Both of these applications are accessible from your LinkedIn profile, via the “Featured Applications” section.

Collaborating With Box.net Files

LinkedIn offers Box.net Files as an application you can add to your LinkedIn Profile offering the following:

Posting files to your LinkedIn profile.
Sharing files with your LinkedIn contacts.

You can view and edit files via your LinkedIn profile:

Collaborating With Huddle WorkSpaces

Huddle WorkSpaces is another LinkedIn application offering online document collaboration features, allowing users to work together with unlimited connections. It includes private online workspaces with 1GB of online storage space free. While this may not seem like a lot for document storage, it should more than accommodate your ad-hoc online collaboration needs.

It also includes an online discussion forum for the exchange of information and ideas. The Huddle Workspace forum should be familiar to those who spend even a minimal amount of time in online discussion forums.

While Huddle WorkSpaces touts that there is no need for Microsoft Office or OpenOffice.org because you can create and edit documents online using the app, it’s probably better not to stray from your desktop apps when creating a document you are sharing online, because you’ll only suffer for it with incompatibility issues down the road.

You can also post comments and request approvals from your browser.

Online Collaboration with LinkedIn

If you’re on a budget, you can definitely find some good online collaboration options via LinkedIn, providing your group is comfortable with using it.

Have you tried LinkedIn’s online collaboration applications? What do you use them for?

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