Small-and medium-sized businesses are the hot target markets right now, whether it’s voice and broadband or web services. The biggest opportunity, however, seems to be in hosted email, as Yahoo’s (YHOO) $350 million bet on Zimbra and Google’s (GOOG) Apps initiative demonstrate. Rackspace, a San Antonio, Tex.-based managed hosting company, today made its own move to tap the opportunity by acquiring eight-year-old Webmail.us of Blacksberg, Va. Continue Reading @ GigaOM
A Long Wait is Over - The Chandler project, which has been building an open-source PIM with group collaboration and GTD baked in for quite a while, is out with their preview release, which they say is stable enough to trust your data to. Looks ambitious and potentially interesting.
Internet Safety Net - MyPrepaidInternet.com offers 60 hours of dialup for $24.99 with no monthly recurring charges and local numbers across the country. They suggest traveling with their access disk for those times when your wireless or broadband connection inexplicably fail you.
Have an iBrick - Everyone else in the universe covered the Apple-vs-iPhone-hackers battle, so we skipped it. The Gizmodo editorial pretty well sums up the angst of those who had been enjoying a sexy phone with an extensible software platform up until the most recent firmware revision. Those who had been enjoying a sexy phone on its own merits are still cool.
The Truth Behind Videoconferencing - As this cartoon points out, it’s not always about efficiency and saving travel dollars.
You Folks Aren’t Real Friends - We seem to be having another round of social network backlash lately, as various studies tell us we can’t make close friends without face-to-face contact. Blonde 2.0 takes a more nuanced view, pointing out the obvious that new types of relationships don’t mean we have to give up old ones; it’s not a zero-sum game.
QuickSilver for Windows? - Well, they say it isn’t, but Enso by Humanized is certainly in the same arena - a series of little applications that are easy to pop into, including a program launcher, that do stuff as part of a keystroke-driven workflow. They look slick, but I can’t help thinking that this is a return to the era of TSRs from many years ago; power users have always looked to the keyboard to get things done fast.
Sick of Web 2.0? - Perhaps you’d like to relax for a few minutes with the Web 2.0 app GeNerAtor, which comes up with a seemingly endless variety of pointless services, all in beta. This morning it offered me Wamxor, to “churn your favorite documents easily and effectively with your frat brothers!” Only problem: I can’t always tell the difference between this generator and the press releases folder of my inbox.
A few posts back I made the point that many computer users, including lots of web workers, reach for Microsoft Excel to do much more than just standard spreadsheets. Many people reach for it as their preferred way to produce charts and graphics, or do graphical prototyping. In this post, I’ll collect some useful ways to do Excel graphics and charts more efficiently, and make them look better.
Speed Charts. Before you start going to work on formatting a chart and making it look pretty, take a peek at it. Just select the data you’re going to chart and hit F11 to get a nice big view of it. Use the tabs at the bottom of the sheet to return to your original view. You’ll most likely see a column chart. If you want a different default chart type, right click on a finished chart that you like, and select Chart Type. Then click the Set as Default Chart button.
Add Patterns, Colors and Labels to Charts. In an Excel column chart, double click on a bar to bring up formatting choices. Select patterns, colors and more for your columns. This also works with other chart types.
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As you enter a career of being an independent web worker, you can hardly avoid negotiating contracts with potential clients. Inevitably, the first questions that will come up are “how much is this going to cost?” and the closely-related “how long is it going to take?” Providing reasonable (and acceptable) answers to these questions is often the difference between a signed contract and an insincere commitment to call you back later. Whatever your skills as software developer or web designer (or whatever your web work career entails), you need to also understand the basics of estimating.
Unless you’re doing utterly routine piecework (data entry from paper forms or perhaps transcription), estimating is more art than science. But there are some things you can do to increase your chance of turning out a good estimate: one that ends up bearing some resemblance to the time it takes to do the actual work. Here are five tips to help you get started on refining your own time estimates. Read the rest of this entry »
Recently Get Rich Slowly did an excellent article on Getting to Now: How to Beat the Procrastination Habit, with good tips on doing things immediately instead of putting them off.
While the article doesn’t address this directly, the Habit of Now is one of the most important factors in how organized you are. If you want to get organized, you must develop the Habit of Now.
The other important factors in getting organized? There are three:
- Have a place for everything. If you have an item in your hands, you should know where it belongs.
- Put everything in its place. Instead of just tossing a paper any old place, or pasting a scrap of information in a random text file, put it where it belongs.
- Keep your information in one place. This is related to #2 above, but if your information is in multiple places, you’ll waste time looking for it. Try to keep everything centralized, to save time and searching.
But even with those three factors, if you don’t develop the Habit of Now, things will fall apart. Instead of stacking a bunch of papers to put away where they belong later, do it now. If you don’t have a place for something, such as a folder, make one now instead of later.
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Although many people swear by the Mozilla Firefox browser, there are still armies of web workers who use Internet Explorer, it retains leading market share, and many organizations are standardized on it. If you sit in front of Internet Explorer all day, using some of the free downloadable extensions and enhancements available for it is one of the best ways to upgrade what you get out of the browser. In this post, I’ll collect some of the most useful tools I’ve found.
Snipshot. If you happen to work with web graphics all day, Snipshot is a great Internet Explorer extension that you can download for free. It lets you right-click on a picture, and then select “Edit in Snipshot” from a context menu. You can also use it as a browser-based service and not an extension, and it’s a good Firefox extension as well. It eliminates the waiting and program launching that goes along with capturing and copying images into image editors. It’s fast and easy.
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If you asked web workers what protocols we couldn’t do without, RSS would be right up there with HTTP and SMTP. Having the information that we want to see come to us, instead of having to go out on the web and hunt it down, is a big win. We may argue over which RSS reader to use, but most of us couldn’t imagine going back to a life without one.
But even though there are already plenty of feed readers out there, innovation in the field hasn’t stopped. New entrant Feed Each Other has come up with what they hope will be a winning strategy to entice you to try their online reader: they’ve mixed it in with a social network. Just out of a private beta period, it combines a fairly standard set of reading and tagging features with sharing, networking, and discovery to (they hope) enhance the RSS experience.
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As social interactions and contact information get distributed across different services like Facebook and Twitter, it’s harder for you to keep track of all your contacts and what’s happening with them. Yesterday, Web Worker Daily’s Samuel Dean reviewed Fuser, a universal inbox that lets you get email from all your accounts and messages from your social networks in one place. That addresses part of the problem. But it doesn’t make it easy for you to update all those social networks or keep track of what other people are doing on them.
If you’re a Gmail user, you probably already know you can consolidate other email accounts into it, with Mail Fetcher or simply by having messages forwarded to your Gmail and adding “from” email addresses on the Settings page. Steve Rubel goes a step beyond that and turns Gmail (or any email client) into a social network hub — an outboard social brain.
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