This week, Intuit announced their update of their hosted application service, QuickBase. The application is designed to provide even small business with the kind of tools which used to be available only to corporations large enough to afford their own mainframes. With an entry-level cost of $249 a month that will support up to ten users, even mom and pop shops can take advantage of a wide range of customizable business management tools.
QuickBase’ integration with Microsoft Project bridges the gap between desktop tools and hosted data, and now it also supports iCal and vCard. The reporting and editing interface now uses AJAX to improve and expand the product’s usability and allows for the new dynamic reporting feature. Working online now looks and feels more like a desktop app. Anyone familiar with Intuit’s other products, like Quicken, will recognize the clean style and straightforward layouts and feel right at home.
Fully customizable, you can build your own tools from scratch and import your existing data. Or choose from basic tools designed for your Project Management, Marketing, IT Management or Human Resources needs along with 200 more user created applications available in their library. All of which you can tweak to suit. Finally, it’s scalability allows for plenty of room as your needs grow. It seems ideal for fast-growing startups looking to improve their workflow management. But will they use it?
Faced with the ridiculous cost of living in urban tech hubs like San Francisco, Seattle and New York, it’s no surprise that web workers would take advantage of their mobility and move where they’ll get a better value for their dollar. But as they fan across the country into exurban and even rural locales, the further you get from a major metro means the fewer data infrastructure options you’ll find.
Daniel Pentecost pointed this out to us in his recent guide about how to find providers, evaluate your options and account for costs in your budget. For instance, he notes that T1 access is often available even where DSL and cable isn’t, and the price can be mitigated by sharing the connection and costs with your neighbors. And though available almost anywhere, satellite service isn’t recommended unless it’s your only option.
Hopefully WiMax should develop into another last-mile solution for outlying communities, especially where the distance from a switch makes DSL impractical. Connectivity is but one of many tradeoffs when fleeing to the hinterlands, though, but the situation is slowly improving, making the country life look better and better.
Just heard about a little piece of software called ChatterBlocker that offers an assortment of background noise to help you tune out distracting sounds. While the advertised use is for shutting out annoying office-mates, there’s obvious applications for those of us who work out of even less controlled environments like cafes.
Chatterblocker, which is Windows-only, doesn’t seem to do anything terribly high-tech — for instance, cancel noise like those expensive headphones, or respond automatically to increases in volume around you — it simply plays sounds determined to be non-distracting. After getting panned by Slashdot readers last weekend, the company reduced its price from $40 to $20. That’s still an awful lot for some generic sound files, but hear me out.
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Here I was thinking that the height of office luxury, excess and whimsy was a nap room, video game system and a foosball table or two, possibly lubricated with free beverages. Davison Integration, a Pittsburgh-based company that helps inventors prototype, manufacture and bring their ideas to market, has just raised the bar quite a bit higher with “Inventionland.” Housed in an industrial park warehouse six miles from downtown is a workplace that looks and sounds more like a theme park than a design firm.
Creative professions in particular are often at the forefront of redefining workplaces. Design firms like IDEO, animation companies like Pixar and movie studios like Disney all come to mind as exciting and fun places to work, where cubicle walls are neccessarily knocked over to make room for big ideas. Software companies like Microsoft saw early on the power of the corporate campus over the lives of their workers — give them hiking trails, soccer fields, showers, cafeterias, day care and other amenities and you can burnish employee loyalty while diminishing their urge to ever leave the office.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s coverage, including a video piece, serves as the best kind of recruiting tool for young engineers from schools like Carnegie-Mellon. It certainly does look like a whole lot of fun! And it also represents yet another step towards blurring the line between work life and play life, which is certainly something any World of Warcraft-addicted web worker can appreciate.
By Ian Bell
The ferocity of a Blackberry’s vibration mode, which at last check was supposed to be a discrete form of notification, is a seismic event that has always made me cringe. Such hoopla should certainly be set aside to herald the arrival of a truly major life event — the birth of a third child, the location of a kidney donor, or the selection of a new Dalai Llama, for instance.
The recent dispute and subsequent litigation between the folks at RIM and patent-holder NTP is founded, effectively, on a delta between the arrival of a message in your inbox, and you knowing it’s there. This is the difference between “Push”, where new messages get sent by the server to the mobile device whether I want it or not, and “Pull”, where the client (my phone) regularly polls the network to see whether there’s new mail and, if there is, downloads all or part of it and reports the status to me. Unfortunately, much of the mobile industry seems to believe that this delta of mere minutes is worth the $450 million settlement that RIM paid to NTP.
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Folks if you are in the market for a faster wireless connection for your laptop, then there is good news for you. Sprint has started turning on its next generation wireless network, starting with San Diego, and will have 20 cities online by end of this year. This is a major upgrade from previous EVDO technologies and it is fast enough for making Skype calls and even an iChat video conversation in a pinch. The company is also offering a good deal on a USB modem, which is good for Macbook owners. There are other options of course.
The new EV-DO Rev A technology allows peak burst rates of 3.1 megabits per second (downlink) and 1.8 megabits per second (uplink.) But in reality the network can offer average speeds of between 450-to-800 kilobits per second and average upload speeds of 300 to 400 Kbit/s. Since it is Sprint, we will take that with a pinch of salt.
I use EVDO constantly, and have stopped searching for WiFi connections. There is a good chance Verizon is going to upgrade their network as well, but I am seriously contemplating switching to Sprint for an always on connection. I think this is a must have tool for all web workers.
Complete list of cities is after the fold:
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Joe Sharkey wrote an interesting article in the New York Times exploring the practice of computers being confiscated and searched at points of entry to the United States. It doesn’t seem to be particularly common or widespread, judging by a small number of accounts and that it’s not a well-known practice.
Last week, an informal survey by the [Association of Corporate Travel Executives], which has about 2,500 members worldwide, indicated that almost 90 percent of its members were not aware that customs officials have the authority to scrutinize the contents of travelers’ laptops and even confiscate laptops for a period of time, without giving a reason.
However you feel about the ethical and political ramifications of such seizures, that fact that it can happen to anyone who’s randomly selected means some caution should be merited when flying with sensitive data, be it personal or professional.
Obviously, backing up your laptop before leaving on a trip is always a good idea anyway, and it would mean that at least you can get back to work even if your machine is being held. While you’re at it, it might be a good idea to delete any data that you don’t want searched. Netscape Anchor Fabienne suggested a number of techniques to encrypt data on your hard drive to make sure that it stays private, including GnuPG, if you simply have to travel with sensitive documents.
By Michael Simon
Ten years ago, if you went to Europe and needed to download e-mail, you were looking at a 20-minute process. You’d pull out a heavy laptop, find a dataport, get an up-to-date local access number – and then wait while the modem connected, the information downloaded and the laptop shut down.
Today, the virtual office is a reality. Web-based tools have added efficiency, from intranets and calendars to remote access, collaboration spaces and shared document spaces. Of course, every minute you spend on setup and tear-down eats into your personal life. And you still need a piece of hardware.
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