Now you can read your paper mail online with RemoteControlMail. RemoteControlMail is an online service that was launched last year in Portland and is expanding to 18 additional cities. The service receives and scans all of your postal mail for you then provides it in an easy to browse online account. It will even ship out mail that you request after seeing online. It’s similar to Paytrust, who will review, pay and organize your bills for you online.
As for security, the CEO of RemoteControlMail has said that the individuals that open and scan mail are disabled veterans with Department of Defense security clearances. They work in a clean room with no pockets in their uniforms. Every piece of mail is supposedly videotaped. The video recording can be watched at anytime by users interested in seeing a certain letter being opened.
If the security part hasn’t made you too wary, let’s look at the other benefits. RemoteControlMail is a green friendly company who recycles and shreds the contents of mail after opening, scanning and archiving occurs. Pricing starts at $9.95 a month for a personal account, but if you choose one of the higher plans you receive more storage for electronic archiving and additional credits for mail forwarding.
It sounds like an interesting way to get your mail on the go; however, I know most people are just not digging the fact that someone else is opening their private mail. Think I will stick to the traditional methods for now.
Managing projects successfully is a challenge for any organization. There are plenty of online tools on the market today that do this, but only one that has been doing it with much mind share, Basecamp. Could the newly launched Goplan step in and steal some market share from 37signals?
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At the flick of a finger from team 37signals, the switch went live on Highrise yesterday afternoon. We dropped the news back in February that 37signals, the founders of the popular Basecamp project manager, were getting ready to launch a new online contact manager. Unfortunately we didn’t get to try it out back then, but have been playing with this online contact management tool as soon as we discovered the launch yesterday. We think it’s going to make a lot of people happy, especially those who are satisfied with 37signals’ other web applications.
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With plenty of start pages on the market, it’s about time one gets back to the simple things that life needs with no distractions. Our former favorite simple active desktop application for PCs that we reviewed in January called Wallnote has since been upgraded with a clean and fresh interface now called Nutshell. Unfortunately, the active desktop feature is no longer supported, hence the reason for the upgrade to this new start page option. Nutshell comes with just the basics, no RSS feed reading, no widgets, no gadgets, just a search bar, Note area, and stuff to do area that can be exported to RSS, printed, or emailed.
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GCalSync was the first to hit the stage allowing syncing capabilities between Google Calendar with mobile phones’ built-in calendars. Now there’s a new player in town that hooks up multiple Google Calendar accounts with Apple’s iCal running on desktops.
Spanning Sync v1.0 has been in development for seven months, and has just come out of a quiet beta period. The application allows users to sync Google Calendars and iCal’s between multiple accounts, multiple Macs and with iSync compatible devices.
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Whether you have a small business or side job that you do every once in a while, SideJobTrack can help you track projects and invoice your time and materials.
SideJobTrack is a free and simple online solution aimed at part-time independent contractors for tracking projects and managing workflows through a set of four project tools: Create Projects, Send Estimates, Track Services, and Invoice Clients.
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Invoicing through your Basecamp projects just got a whole lot fresher. FreshBooks, the online invoicing and time tracking tool, has just announced that they have integrated with Basecamp.
The new integration will offer increased productivity with users of Basecamp having the ability to invoice projects directly through their FreshBooks account. FreshBooks picked two workflow scenarios that should meet the most important needs of 80% of users. The first system integration from Freshbooks is the ability to generate invoices based on time entries or To-Do lists. Project importing is the second integration. This allows Basecamp projects to become FreshBooks projects; To-Dos in Basecamp become tasks in FreshBooks.
FreshBooks’ new build certainly sounds like it will speed up the process of invoicing, while streamlining Basecamp users’ invoicing tasks. Things look pretty straightforward to set up through the Freshbooks interface.
You can check out a few screencasts of both cases here:
What good is creating a task list if we can’t get things done? This is where Neptune steps in. Neptune is a web based tool that allows users to set reminders for tasks and events through an easy to use interface.
Sign up and start off by creating a new Project, then create a list of Reminders for that project. For added convenience as tasks come in, users can send an email to a unique address for setting new reminders. For daily overviews, your Neptune account can send out email notifications daily for your next actions and reminders, which is extremely handy for quickly looking at upcoming items.
Neptune is free for 16 days, and then users have the option for upgrading to a Premium account for $10. The account options are not evident on the site, and we would have been in for a big surprise when the 16 day “trial” expired if we had not found a small “renew” button under settings. Neptune is worth trying out for daily task reminders, but you can also look into Nozbe, WorkHack, RememberTheMilk, and Ta-da List to help out with completing your main objectives for the day.
