Sync is a “Pro” feature, so it isn’t available to users with free accounts. Pro accounts start at $29 for 10GB per year. In addition to Sync, Pro users also get backup, “time travel” and file versioning functionality.

Here’ a short demo video showing how Wuala Sync works:

Wuala differentiates itself from other cloud backup solutions as files stored in Wuala get encrypted directly on the user’s computer before they are stored online. This means that no-one, not even LaCie’s employees, can view or access the user’s private data. Wuala users can also increase the amount of storage they get by trading some of their local storage with the service.

If you’re a Wuala user, let us know what you think of Wuala Sync in the comments.
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The Logic Behind Teamly

Scott Allison, the creator of Teamly, was scratching his own itch when he started creating the system: He’d gone from one employee to ten and was having trouble keeping track of the commitments each of those employees made. His organization was a little more loosely structured than other businesses might be, making most project management systems seem like overkill. All Allison needed was a clear picture of what his employees were doing and a way to comment on it. He wanted to make priorities a priority.

Teamly focuses on creating very short priority lists — just five things. The web application allows for setting daily, weekly and monthly priorities. It also allows managers and team members to review those priorities and provides real-time feedback for managers. The tool’s statistics make it easy to see how well an individual is doing at completing the priorities set on any given day.

Allison says, “Most to-do software suffers from the problem that they simply encourage very long and demotivating lists to be written, which you never get round to. By having a short list you think about what you are going to do, and what you are not going to do. Once you’ve achieved it you can be satisfied knowing you’ve done a good day’s work.”

The Right Place for Teamly

It’s unlikely that Teamly would be a good fit in a structured enterprise. Rather, its approach is better with loose systems because it allows for more self-direction for each team member. It can be a good fit for creatives or other professionals who have their own ways of doing things — Allison has gotten responses from GTD users saying it has been particularly useful for providing a high-level view for managers while allowing employees to work within the task management structures that work for them. The best indicator that Teamly would be a good fit for your team is if you’ve felt overwhelmed by the features built into more robust collaboration tools.

Allison notes that Teamly’s future growth will be constrained by the need to keep the tool simple: Additional privacy controls on individual team members’ priorities, a way to keep notes on tasks that aren’t priorities but shouldn’t be lost in the shuffle, and similar features are in the pipeline. Teamly’s creators are also looking at opportunities to integrate Teamly into other applications and create mobile versions.

Teamly is currently in beta and offers a free version for a single user.

Let us know what you think of Teamly in the comments.

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Despite (or maybe because of) these adjustments to my work day, I manage to meet or exceed the expectations for my job. My employer is flexible about when I work as long as I get the job done, and I occasionally pull some late nights, early mornings or do work on the weekend to make sure that I’m taking care of the community that I manage.

All of this flexibility works for me, and it looks like I’m not alone. According to a recent study by a group of researchers at Brigham Young University, people who telecommute balance work and family life better than those who work in an office, but only when flextime is also part of the plan. These researchers analyzed data from more than 24,000 IBM employees from 75 countries to find that telecommuters using flextime could work 57 hours per week before work starts to interfere with their personal lives, while the number was a paltry 38 hours per week for traditional office workers.

This isn’t just an IBM phenomenon, either. About a year ago, I looked at a Cisco study of its telecommuting employees that found:

69 percent of the telecommuting employees see increased productivity.

67 percent said that their work quality improved.

80 percent had an improved quality of life.

One of the biggest surprises for Cisco was that people actually spend more time working when they telecommute. This isn’t really surprising to me as I spend more time working when I telecommute. For one thing, I shave over 1.5 hours of driving time out of my daily schedule. I also tend to start work as soon as I get up around 6am and then take a little break later in the day to go for a quick run, take a shower and put on something other than my pajamas. This lets me get a jump on the work day and take a break when I need it, thus increasing my productivity while allowing me to be flexible with my time.

Smart companies should be taking a serious look at web working as a way to improve employee productivity while saving money that they would spending on extra office space. By being creative and flexible about working arrangements, both companies and employees can benefit.

How do you benefit from telecommuting and flextime without sacrificing productivity?

Photo by Flickr user gibsonsgolfer used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Getting started is straightforward: Download and install the plugin (versions available for both Windows and Mac) and give it your Gmail account credentials (which are only stored locally on your machine, as it’s not a web app). It uses IMAP to connect to your Gmail and Google Apps accounts; once connected, it trawls through your emails looking for contacts and attachments. As soon as it’s finished indexing your emails, you’re ready to go.

MailBrowser sits as a sidebar in your browser that you can expand or collapse as needed, and sports two main tabs: “Contacts” and “Files.” By default, it opens on the “Contacts” tab, displaying an alphabetized list. If, like me, your list of contacts is long and unwieldy, the built-in search functionality is useful. Clicking on a contact’s name gives you a more detailed view, with a photo (if available), URLs, a bio and any recent conversations. You can add tags and notes, “star” important contacts and create Google Calendar events for a contact right from the interface.

The “Files” tab displays a list of files you’ve received, with rich previews available, enabling you to skim through them quickly to find the files you need. The search functionality also works well with attachments.

MailBrowser is currently in beta so you may find some gremlins (I had some problems importing mail from one of my older Gmail accounts, for example), but it’s nonetheless a useful plugin that adds better contact management capabilities to the Google mail service. While it doesn’t yet have the power of tools like Xobni and Gist, it’s a great platform to build on, and Webyog’s Rohit Nadhani says that there are plans for many more Xobni-like features in MailBrowser, including social media integration, integration with enterprise apps (like Salesforce) and the ability to sort contacts by importance.

Have you tried MailBrowser? let us know what you think of it, and how it compares to tools like Xobni and Gist, below.

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Capturx for Microsoft OneNote 2007 2.0 is a digital pen product from Adapx that offers tight integration with OneNote 2007, with a suggested retail price of $349. The pen includes a docking station with a USB cable and software. Adapx kindly loaned me a trial unit so I’ve had the opportunity to spend some quality time with the product, putting it through its paces in various note-taking scenarios, and came away impressed with it. The pen is a bit chunkier than normal ink pens but still felt comfortable in my hand. It runs on a lithium-ion battery which you can recharge by placing it in its docking station.

OneNote is a great integration choice for this product, because of the searching and organizational tools it provides for your notes. You can also use it as a jumping-off point for transferring your notes into Microsoft Word 2007 or PowerPoint 2007.

Using the Capturx Digital Pen and Notebook

Capturx requires OneNote 2007, and either 32-bit Windows Vista or Windows 7. Like other digital pens out on the market, Capturx works with a special paper that you can purchase directly from Adapx or print out yourself. The software enables you to print the paper directly from Capturx to a four-color PostScript laser printer.

For purposes of my review, I used one of Adapx’s digital notebooks with the pen. The notebooks resemble a loose leaf binder but the paper inside is a bit thicker and glossier than normal notebook paper. I brought my poor penmanship along and started taking notes in the provided notebook and on some of the paper printed from my printer. Downloading my notes was as simple as docking the pen in the included dock.

Once you dock your pen to download your notes, Capturx prompts you to name the notebook, or choose a notebook for your notes. Your notes then appear in OneNote:

Choose Tools -> Convert Handwriting to Text and your handwriting is converted to text:

While I’m not going to say that the conversion was always perfect during my testing, even with my poor penmanship the conversion left me with enough to work with. I could easily see myself taking the Capturx digital pen to a client meeting for taking notes and getting enough out of the conversion to start a technical document after making some edits to the converted text. My handwritten notes have become a bit chunkier and boxier over the years, so I don’t write using cursive script, but I still found myself paying a little more attention to how I formed my letters, which seemed to help in how the software understood my handwritten notes.

While you can’t convert your hand-drawn diagrams for use in a tool like Visio, I did like the way I could archive the diagrams in OneNote for searching later. This would help me stay more organized and give me another reason to move past the old-school yellow legal pads that I use for taking notes.

If you’re like me and looking to better bridge the gap between your handwritten notes and your PC but have been hesitant about digital pen technologies, I recommend checking out Capturx for Microsoft OneNote 2007 2.0.

I give it high marks for its tight integration with OneNote and handwriting recognition that even worked with my poor penmanship. I can envision myself using this tool to digitize my own notes from client meetings and doing away with unnecessary transcription of my handwritten notes or having to retain paper notes, and avoiding the ever-embarrassing situation of not understanding my own notes a week or two after the call or meeting.

Have you tried out Capturx for Microsoft OneNote 2007 2.0, or other digital pen? How did it work for you?

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Here’s a video showing it in action:

The app has useful extra features, like multilevel undo, multitouch gestures, JPEG export, an eraser and auto-advance, which makes taking longer notes quicker.

Bricklin says that he created the app because he found fumbling with the iPhone’s soft keyboard while jotting down notes, phone numbers and addresses frustratingly slow and error-prone. Handwritten notes are faster and mean you can also use annotations, layout and symbols to give them extra meaning.

The app is easy to use and includes a full tutorial to get you up to speed. I found that the tutorial crashed my iPhone 3G a few times, but the main sections of the app seem fine. Personally, now that I’m used to the iPhone’s keyboard, I don’t find entering notes using it that slow (and I would rather avoid having to transcribe written notes later), but if you do, you might like to try Bricklin’s app. It’s available from the App Store in two flavors: The free Lite version (iTunes link) limits you to four pages, while the full version (iTunes link) costs $1.99 and has unlimited notepads, and also includes a keyboard for transcribing notes to add them to the Address Book or paste them into other apps.

Do you find entering notes on your iPhone cumbersome?

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We might like to think we know it all, and many of us spend innumerable hours reading, researching and learning so that we do actually know a heck of a lot. But for all of us, there are times when things get hairy — times when we wrestle with technology and struggle to get even the (apparently) simplest things done. Although web workers may not like to admit it, we too experience technical challenges from time to time.

When I think about the people I know who aren’t tech-savvy, their responses to tech problems seem to encompass these options:

1. Employ strong language in questioning the piece of technology’s intentions.
2. Strike the device in use, or one of its peripherals.
3. Ask “what kind of idiot designed this thing.”
4. Call offspring or partners for advice.
5. Complain to friends.
6. Hack an improbable and unproductive workaround at best; give up at worst.

Fortunately, as web workers, we don’t have to resort to such tactics. We have access to a veritable treasure trove of possible solutions to technical problems, courtesy of the web and in-the-know contacts. So what techniques do we use to solve tech issues? Here, in no particular order, are my usual ports of call when my knowledge of technology falls short.

• Check Preferences. If I’m having trouble using a service or piece of software, my first thought is that I must have specified something incorrectly in my preferences for the service. So I check my preferences — for the service itself or for the piece of functionality that I’m trying to use — to ensure I haven’t missed some crucial checkbox that will enable the facility I need.
• Check the Help files. Yes, I do read the Help files for software, services, and so on. If I’m having trouble using a device, I’ll read its instruction manual. In my experience, much of the proprietary software products and physical devices I use offer reasonably helpful Help and instructional content, while few online services do. I use the Help search tools (which often leave much to be desired) as well as browsing the contents listings. Despite the failings of many service’s Help files, I frequently find the answers to my questions using this approach.
• Check development blogs and service updates. The developers of some services contribute to company blogs or publish service development updates to some part of the organization’s web site. These pages can be fabulous sources of to-the-minute information on functionality issues, service problems and bugs. More than once I’ve found the answers to my problems via these sources — most recently, for diagnosing issues with web hosting and RSS services.
• Search the web. If I can’t find what I need in the service’s Help files, I usually search online to see if anyone’s discussed the feature or issue I’m facing. Even if I can’t find a precise phrase match for my issue, some quick searching will usually lead me in a roundabout way to a solution to my problem — someone will have mentioned it as they’ve developed a separate service, for example, which will give me an inside hint about what I need to look for next.
• Ask a question in Help forums. Some services have active, passionate Help forums, which can be a real boon. I remember the first time I used NeoOffice/J and had a problem. I asked a support question in what were the small hours for those in the USA, and expected to wait days for a reply, if indeed one might ever come. But the reply came inside ten minutes, and it worked. Help forums can be a great way to get useful assistance from real people who understand both the service you’re using and how it feels to be stuck with a problem.
• Phone a friend. If I know someone who deals with the service I’m using, I may contact them to ask them if they’re familiar with the functionality I’m wrestling with, or have any advice to help me solve it. But, as a remote worker, I tend to use this option only as a last resort, primarily because my contacts are busy and may not be able to help me as quickly as I’ll be able to help myself.

These are the basic tactics I use to overcome any … ahem … “technology challenges” I may face in the course of my work. What do you do to solve the technology problems that inevitably crop up for web workers?

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FormSpring now has one more feature to recommend it, and it’s a big one for web workers: extensive third-party integrations. Using said integrations, you can now use any form you create in FormSpring with a laundry list of web apps that many readers of this blog will immediately recognize.

I want to take a look first at what FormSpring offers as a forms creation suite, and then go into a little more detail about the new third-party integration feature.

Creating a Form

Making your first form with FormSpring is not very complicated at all. You can start from scratch, use a template, copy an existing form from another web page (ethically questionable?), or upload a pre-existing HTML form. FormSpring’s template list is fairly comprehensive, without being overwhelming, and it’s broken down into categories to make it that much easier to find what you’re looking for.

Once you’ve chosen a type of form, you’re presented with the form editor. The editor’s clean layout gives you a WYSIWYG view of the form you’re building, including preset fields if you chose to start building from a template. Any field can be edited using a convenient pop-up window, where you can customize the field type, size, label and a number of other options. Fields can be dragged and rearranged, and you can add new fields, sections, and extras using a convenient sticky toolbar at the bottom of the editor.

Form Extras include options like global layout settings, form progress indicators and saving options for end users, submit button customization and CAPTCHA options. The nice thing about these options is that they exist for people who need them, but if beginner users don’t notice or take advantage of them, it really won’t detract from the quality of their final form.

Using a Form

Having a great form creation engine is great, but it’s all for nothing if you can’t get that form out to the people you want to use it in an easy and effective manner. FormSpring provides you with a number of easy-to-use options for distributing your creations, so that you can target different users in the way you deem best.

You can choose from having FormSpring generate a unique URL at which your form can be reached, embedding the form using JavaScript code or HTML, installing a widget in your TypePad-enabled blog, or using an intermediate form that gathers data from your user before forwarding them to the form you’ve created.

Providing so many options ensures that you can tailor your form distribution strategy to specific target respondents, and also allows users with varying levels of technical expertise to take advantage of what FormSpring has to offer.

Third-party Integrations

As I mentioned earlier, FormSpring recently introduced new third-party integrations that makes it easier to use forms created via the web app, and to use the data gathered with said forms in other popular online applications.

The list of new integrations includes Campaign Monitor, FreshBooks, Google Apps and Salesforce.com, among others. For Campaign Monitor, integration allows you to add subscribers from your forms directly into your email marketing software. FreshBooks integration allows you to create clients, invoices and estimates automatically using data collected with FormSpring forms. Salesforce.com integration means you can make web forms for any Salesforce object, and update existing records using web form data.

Integrations finally allow some of the promise of a web-based information management system to be fully realized. “Synergy” is an old buzzword that’s been stripped of much of its significance over time, but it truly applies here, in a good way.

Let us know your thoughts on FormSpring on the comments.

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Outright

Outright is part of the Small Business Web, a movement that we’ve written about before, which aims to bring closer collaboration between web apps in order to make their offerings stronger. Expensify and Outright are certainly a very natural fit — hopefully more companies will be persuaded that joining together like this results in a better product.

What other apps would work well together like this?

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My obsession with portable solar energy continues — in the past I’ve written about Suntrica’s portable chargers, Reware’s Juice Bags and Noon Solar’s range of bags. Suntrica’s chargers, though difficult to purchase outside Finland, currently offer the most elegant and practical solution for cheap, mobile and clean solar energy.

Interestingly, a unique field test of mobile solar power is taking place in a handful of African nations, where electrical power is often unreliable: AfriGadget’s Flexible Light And Power (FLAP) initiative.

FLAP is a collaboration between San Francisco’s iconic messenger bag company, Timbuk2, the Pop!Tech conference, and Portable Light. Timbuk2 has modified one of its standard messenger bags with a removable flap that contains a photovoltaic solar panel connected to an LED light and a USB power outlet, which can be used for charging portable electronics such as phones and MP3 players.

AfriGadget’s founder, Erik Hersman, has been traveling through communities in Ghana, Kenya and Uganda, assessing the usability, usefulness and adaptability of FLAP for everyday use. So far it seems the solar-charged light is the key feature, with the bag’s built-in USB charging being less crucial. However, given the crucial cultural role that mobile communication is playing in countries such as Kenya and Uganda, I’d be surprised if this feature doesn’t become more popular.

Interestingly, Timbuk2 plan to offer the solar flap as part of their own range of accessories — bringing technology tested and evaluated in the developing world to its geek-dense customer base in the developed world.

With the popularity and utility of Timbuk2 bags among web workers, combined with the emerging interest in solar power, this seems like a great collaboration. I hope some benefit will accrue to those developing nations’ communities, and not simply to more affluent buyers elsewhere.

Would you buy a bag with a solar charger or solar accessories?

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