In response to a post I did recently on collaboration tools, a reader pointed out Elluminate Vroom as a good application. Vroom is an applicaton that lets you mix and match videoconferencing,audio conferencing, whiteboarding, sharing presentations and unexpected features such as polling meeting participants. It’s a free application, and after trying it, it definitely may be of use to some web workers, although I wish the free plan allowed for more than three participants in a meeting.
Once you register to use the Vroom application, a Java console pops up with an extensive set of features. You can upload a presentation for others to view, and share your desktops back and forth, where you control the sharing if you’re the moderator. You can also enable videoconferencing with the click of a button, or not go with video if some participants aren’t set up for it.
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A lot of web workers carry a ton of data around in their laptops: everything from financial records to passwords to client code. If you’re one of them, have you given any thought to protecting that data if you lose the laptop? Hardware replacement costs can be tough, but losing sensitive data is devastating. If you’re in this situation, you might want to take a look at the just-released version 5.0 of TrueCrypt, which offers open-source on-the-fly data encryption.
With TrueCrypt, you can set aside an area on your drive to act as a virtual encrypted file system, encrypt an entire partition, or even (on Windows) encrypt the boot volume and require pre-boot authentication. In any case, your data can only be accessed by entering your password (or better, passphrase). Best new features of version 5.0: higher-security encryption algorithms and a Mac OS X version.
Search engine Quintura, who offer cloud-based visual searching for the web, have opened a new affiliate program to all comers. Search clouds are somewhat like tag clouds, except that they’re composed of terms that Quintura automatically mines out of the pages that it indexes. As you click on a term, the cloud animates to show related terms, with the relative size of the words showing the number of pages. It turns out to be a pretty decent way to browse through a space of related concepts.
Joining the affiliate program requires working through a signup and bouncing back and forth between email and several browser pages, but once in (it’s free) you end up on your affiliates dashboard site. Here you can tell Quintura your top-level URL so that it can start indexing, customize the visual look of your cloud, and get the HTML to embed it into your web site. This comes in several versions: Flash or JavaScript-based divs for embedding as a sidebar, or a full-size cloud with search results meant to take up an entire page.
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Got a great idea for something you and your team could build in 3 months? Willing to spend those three months living in Philadelphia from mid-May through August this year? Then you might want to head over to DreamIt Ventures and put in an application for one of their twelve pre-seed “Dollarships.” They’re looking for young hacker types with a great idea who can use business support - they’ll provide legal and business mentoring, help you find space, and help you put together your pitch for further funding at a Funding Day in August.
Of course, there’s no free lunch: they want a passive equity stake in your budding company if you sign on. And if you’re really successful, the $10-30,000 they’re putting into the pot to get that will be a mighty good investment. But if you’re struggling to jump start an idea, this may be the help you need.
Applications that make it easy to share and collaborate are often of much more use to web workers than they are to standard office workers. Especially if you work online with colleagues at disparate locations, some of the best collaboration tools you can choose are free. In this post, I’ll round up several examples that you can count on.
Although it’s still technically a beta product, I’ve had no problems using FolderShare, a Microsoft Windows Live service, to share files and folders securely with colleagues. FolderShare was acquired by Microsoft and is a full-featured application. The best aspect of it is that it lets you and colleagues share files and folders on a cross-platform basis. I’ve used it extensively to keep Windows and Mac systems in synch.
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What web worker has not dreamed of making a living through micropayments. Use the internet to provide useful information, charge each visitor a penny, and rake in the aggregated cash. The only problem: so far, micropayments have been a big flop; too much overhead and not enough people bothering to get signed up to donate money. Startup Tipjoy things they have the answer to this problem by removing as much friction from the process as possible. You put a Tipjoy button on your site, visitors click it and leave their email to give you a dime. When you get up to five bucks, you can draw your money out in the form of an Amazon gift card.
The only problem I see with this theory is that they may have made it too easy to leave a tip: you don’t have to provide any payment info when you leave someone money. When you get up to five bucks in tips waiting for payment, they start emailing you to hand over the money; until the actual tips are in hand, the page owners get nothing but a warm feeling. If you’re optimistic enough to trust the long-term honesty and generosity of your readers, though, the buttons are unobtrusive and easy to use.
LiquidPlanner touts itself as “a revolution in project management.” That’s probably overstating the case somewhat (there are a lot of project management applications in the world), but it does offer a sophisticated feature set, including some things that I haven’t seen in other online project management tools. If you’re feeling constrained by the features of whatever tool you’re using, then this one is worth a look.
The biggest selling point of LiquidPlanner is that they do ranged estimation and probabilistic scheduling. That is, instead of specifying that each task on your Gantt Chart (yes, they provide Gantt charts - right there they should be able to take some business from BaseCamp with its relentless refusal to implement this feature) takes an exact amount of time, you can supply a range. So the developer responsible for implementing a feature can say that it will take 3 to 5 days, instead of exactly 4. Then LiquidPlanner combines all these numbers to come up with a set of dates when your project will be done - and you can look at the curve for this to get a sense of your most likely delivery date, as well as what it’s safe to promise.
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I rely on my microblog communities as my connection to the outside world while I work from home on my various Web projects and client projects. Twitter is my watercooler. Pownce is where my Second Life friends tend to hang out so I can stay in touch with them when not inworld. Jaiku is my backup for Twitter when the watercooler is on the blink again. Tumblr is my tickler file for articles and events I’m working on. Facebook has suddenly become my networking tool for new clients.
Posting to all my microblogs is far too time-consuming, so I tend to spend most of my time on Twitter. But I recently learned about a new site from C.C. Chapman while we were doing presentations about the Web and social media at a travel conference in Baltimore.
In one word: HelloTxt
HelloTxt is a one-stop microblog posting site. Just type your post in once and check which microblogs you’d like HelloTxt to publish on including Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Plaxo, Tumblr and Facebook.
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