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?

Goplan has been in development for some time now from the team at webreakstuff. The initial application was built because the team needed a way that they could stay on top of projects and didn’t think that the solutions on the market were scalable enough. This launch signifies the design and development company’s first foray into the online application environment.

Goplan, like Basecamp, is an online project management tool. It offers teams a secure location where they can collaborate on tasks, manage files, chat, and a place to build a centralized online calendar. Users can choose which features to activate for each project, ensuring an unclutted environment in the user interface. With Goplan sitting atop of Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and their S3 (Simple Storage Service), we are sure to see some extreme uptime numbers when this thing really gets rolling with users.

Goplan’s additional feature list includes:

• Manage multiple projects
• Manage task lists
• Control issues with issue tracking
• Publish public facing project news
• Synchronize everyone with a calendar
• Chat real-time with project members
• Control who sees what and how
• Store project-related files safely
• High-grade encrypted connection
• Hosted, always-on application

Goplan pricing starts with a free version that allows for 2 projects, and 5MB of storage. A personal account offers 12 projects and 100MB of storage for $10/month. Then there is the mother of all, an unlimited plan for $100/month with unlimited projects and 8GB of storage. The prices and offerings are pretty comparable to what Basecamp offers, with Basecamp hitting 20GB of data at $149/month for an unlimited option.

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.

Through Highrise, users can track all communication that occurs between business leads, employees, clients, and vendors, keeping tabs on who was spoken to and what was said. With the ability to have multiple users on a Highrise account, all information is securely stored and easily accessible by anyone that is plugged in. There are many benefits to using Highrise, of course the major one being sharing contact information company wide. Highrise also incorporates time-saving features like forwarding contact emails into contact accounts and receiving task reminders via email or as mobile alerts. If you are worried about communicating between other contact manager applications like Outlook, Highrise offers the ability to upload and download vCards.

We like the ease of use and simple interface design that 37signals employs in their products, and this approach is evident in Highrise. No need to read a manual, or struggle at figuring things out, everything this tool does is fairly simple to understand. Highrise also works nicely with other 37signals tools like Basecamp and Backpack, making it a well rounded suite of business tools.

Prices for Highrise accounts range from a free 2 user account with 25 contacts, to a $149/month unlimited user, 20GB of storage, and 50,000 contact accounts.

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.

Having your Nutshell account as the initial page you see when opening your daily browser window is quite helpful. No need to visit another site or open Outlook to your 100 inbox items and be overwhelmed. Simply take a peek at a few important notes and some stuff to do then go about your business.

Nutshell also has a built in search bar with search shortcuts. For instance if you wanted to search Google for Web Worker Daily, you would simply type “g webworkerdaily”. There is currently a list of 23 search shortcuts, and Nutshell gives users the ability to create their own.

We have been testing this out for a few days now, and if you are looking for a simple no distraction start page with just the basics, Alex Griffioen’s free Nutshell should be on your list of ones to test out.

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.

If you work on multiple Macs, Spanning Sync can hook them all up to pull information down from the same Google Calendar. Sharing group calendars through iCal is possible now by creating a shared Google Calendar and syncing it with iCal. That way any changes that are made in the shared calendar online, will also be made to your desktop iCal, and vice versa. Mac users can also easily sync up calendars to mobile phones and devices like iPods effortlessly as well with Apple’s iSync. Spanning Sync sure adds another level of productivity for users that work on multiple Macs, and with Apple’s iCal.

Spanning Sync has a 15 day trial period, with a $25 one-year subscription or a $65 one-time purchase.

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.

Projects are started with a Project Name and summary with start and due dates assigned, and a date to be entered when the project has been completed. Each project is assigned to a client, and a list of project services and materials are associated to that project. When projects have been marked completed, invoices can be sent out via email, or saved and printed out for mailing. Reports can be generated at any time to get the run down on completed projects and how much money they have brought in, in process projects and even projects that have been put on hold.

[starting a Project]

The setup of projects can be time-consuming, as you must enter client information and set up material lists with billing charges. However, you could save time later when you’re generating invoices over and over again.

[overview of projects in the works]

Creative types can customize invoices beyond the SideJobTrack defaults. Advanced settings allows users to create and customize both printed and email invoices, as well as printed and emailed estimates.

[completed invoice ready for emailing or printing]

This simple online project tracking and invoicing application unfortunately has one drawback, contacts and project information cannot be uploaded to SideJobTrack. They can be downloaded as XML data, though. Since SideJobTrack is aimed at those with freelance jobs on the side, this isn’t a huge limitation for those in the target market. If you need to occasionally invoice someone, you may want to try it out.

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:

• Case 1 – Invoice on time/ todo lists
• Case 2 – Basecamp projects become a FreshBooks project; To-Dos in Basecamp become tasks in FreshBooks.

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.

There’s nothing worse than walking down to the cafe or office with your iPod on singing away with Britney Spears when suddenly… sound is gone, the battery is dead, and you still have another 15 minute commute. Imagine if the same thing happened with your cell phone and you didn’t have your charger!

What are your choices? You can walk it out listening to cars zoom by, or pull that MintyBoost out of your bag. What is a MintyBoost? It’s a little convenient USB battery pack and recharger made from a mint tin, USB port, and a few AA’s. This little pack can be used to power anything that has a USB connection from cameras, cell phones, iPods, to any other USB gadget. Its small and easily portable and when tested was able to last for 3hrs on 2AA batteries watching video on an iPod video, or 26 hours with an iPod mini.

The kit has been tested on multiple devices, and has been reported to work on iPods, Zunes, Sony PSP’s, Blackberry, Treo 700, Garmin Edge, and Palm TX among others. The kit is listed at $19.50 US.

Ok, let’s face it, as far as web workers are concerned, Starbucks is an almost daily pitstop. We usually hit the same one everyday, or maybe have a few locations that we love to work from. But what happens when you are on vacation, working from a new location, or in another city?

How on earth can we hunt down our beloved latte headquarters? Usually we would power on our laptop and hunt a Starbucks location down from their official site. Well now there is a better way, built exclusively for web workers in mind, almost. Caffeine addicts can now send a text message with a zip code to “MYSBUX”. You will get a text back with three of your nearest locations with their address and phone numbers. What would be interesting if there was a Google Map mash-up of Starbucks, and a link to the map is embedded in the SMS we receive.

Only drawback, how can you locate a zip code if you are traveling, or in a new area? Find a phone book, ask a stranger, or boot up that laptop again.

Starbucks does have a mobile site at mobile.starbucks.com, where users can punch in their zip code or postal code, or do a city search to locate the Starbucks in your area that has Wifi. A far better alternative if you have a mobile browser on your phone, and less hassle to locate the zip or postal code you’re in.

Don’t forget to pop into your local Starbucks on March 15th from 10am to Noon to get a free freshly brewed cup of coffee they are using to promote the new service.

For a lot of people, ideas flow throughout the day, and if we don’t snatch them and write them down, we usually end up forgetting them. Then there are the multiple hours spent trying to regain our thoughts. I have found that carrying a simple notebook wherever I go is an easy way to alleviate losing ideas. When it comes to packing light however, my trusty Blackberry MemoPad does the trick. When I get to my computer, I can easily sync and store it in my Outlook. However, it’s not always easy to search using tags to locate a specific note when needed, and sharing is impossible with this route. Enter Acorn.

I’m always on the lookout for applications that can organize my thoughts and help me manage them a bit more. That’s why I was excited when Emily posted about Acorn. It’s a free web-based application that organizes and shares thoughts and ideas. Users can create and store ideas in an Idea List, complete with an idea title, tags, and descriptions, making for easy searchablity through the search tool. Any time you wish to add to your idea, you can simply update it. If you wish to share notes to team members or contacts, send an invite to their email address and give them permissions on your idea document.

I will be trying this out for the next little while to see how it works for my ideas. Given that there is no way to export idea text, unfortunately I don’t think it will fair out to well for me. I like to archive and store documents on my machine and transfer them around at will.

One can’t underscore the importance of backing up data. We have all had a terrible experience when we have lost our data. Of course there are hard drives, and other data back solutions. Lately online storage solutions like Box.net and Xdrive, DivShare, Crashplan, and Dropboks have become popular. Add hosted file service for sending large data files called YouBackItUp to this ever growing list of solutions.

Similar to YouSendIt and senduit, YouBackItUp holds your uploaded files for up to 20 days, and provides a link for downloading. This free ad supported service can be used for sending large files that they cannot receive over email. You can also use this service as a temporary backup solution if you are switching computers and have to transfer large files to different locations.

Drag the files you want to temporarily archive onto the Java uploading square in your browser on YouBackItUp.com, and grab the unique URL that is supplied or email it to yourself from the form supplied. No logging in or remembering passwords required and you have a cheap and easy data backup or transfer solution.

Simply visit the URL and download away. Just remember to grab the data before your 20 days is up. Is the data you upload secure? That’s another question, there is no company or security information supplied on the site.

You know 37 Signals for their famous Basecamp project management application, and the Ta-da List to do manager. Get ready for their new application, a Contact manager called Highrise, likely to be released very soon.

Highrise is a shared contact manager, and similar to Basecamp, and is built around the concept of collaboration. It can be used as a personal contact directory, or as a shared address book between co-workers.

The application can be used to keep track of contacts, what they said, and make notes attached to contacts. It sounds like a fully rounded address book application that is done right is going to make a lot of people more productive.

Jason Fried recently wrote about the new application on the 37 Signals blog, and gave a run down of their development and launch process. The next few weeks, 37Signals will release screenshots, concepts, and videos  until the team is happy with the product. They are currently using the product and ironing out the kinks. To get an early preview you sign up on the site to be notified.

Highrise sounds pretty exciting. It better be because one thing the world doesn’t  need is yet another online address book!

Everything takes batteries, from phones, cameras, mp3 players, and that wireless mouse on your desk. How many times do you carry a few spares when you travel? Sadly, I never do, and always kick myself when my wireless mouse starts getting jumpy from low juice. In devices like my digital camera I usually have rechargeables powering it. Now how often do I have the charging base with me? Never.

That’s why I’m so excited about coming across USBCELL. This company offers batteries that charge conveniently by USB. As web workers we always have our laptops with us, so what better way to utilize power, and always have it accessible when we need it? Supposedly just a few minutes of charging AAs is all a wireless mouse needs for several hours of usage. These AA batteries are priced at just over $17US for a pack of two. USBCELL also has 9V batteries, AAAs, and a range of batteries for major phones, handheld devices, and of course Blackberries that will be released shortly.

[via scifitech]

Music is at the core of a lot of peoples lives. Being able to listen to music on the go wherever you are is also extremely important. I for one find it an absolute must when pounding away at the keys of my computer. But what happens when you’re on the road and don’t necessarily have access to your important music collection? That’s where MP3tunes new Oboe music locker can come into play.

The new music locker has free unlimited music storage, and an unlimited streaming service with a web player that streams a user’s personal music library from within any IE of Firefox browser window. The Oboe Sync software syncs up the users Oboe locker with their PC music collection, along with album artwork, allowing users to enjoy their music collection wherever they are. Not only can Oboe be accessed with any computer that is connected to the internet, it can also be accessed via web-enabled devices.

If you choose not to listen to music in your browser and prefer to use your trusty Winamp or iTunes music players, thankfully you can do that as well. To do this, you require a special media plug-in that MP3tunes offers for download. For instance, if you wish to stream into iTunes, you need the Oboe for iTunes Media Player plug-in [available for Mac or PC] and version 6.0 or newer iTunes. Once the plug-in has been installed, you can instantly start using your iTunes to listen to your streaming remote music library through the Shared Music panel.

The free version of Oboe has unlimited space in your music locker. The unlimited storage for $39.95 allows users to store music that is up to 50MB each, backs up DRM tracks, shows album art, and takes off all advertising from the online player.

Imagine walking into a cafe, ordering a coffee and a biscuit, grabbing a seat and plugging away on your laptop. Then at the end of the week you drop a $20 into the anonymous drop box. Notice the missing step? The coins and bills to pay for your order when you receive it? Welcome to the Terra Bite cafe. It’s all about pure karma.

Terra Bite plays on the term “terabyte”, and references earth and food. It’s a dream turned into reality by Google programmer Ervin Peretz. Ervin came up with the idea of the pay-what-you-can cafe located in downtown Kirkland Washington, while arguing in a bar with a friend. Peretz put his money on the fact that people are for the most part good, but can be influenced by their environment. If people see good, they’ll do good as well.

Peretz ponied up $4000k/month for a lease on some space to set up the cafe. The break-even point for the Terra Bite cafe is about 100 customers, with $3 per transaction. So far they are sitting at 80 per day. It seems like most people are overpaying for their coffee and treats as well. The idea is built on wanting to contribute something, because of the open, honest environment. Ervin has plans to open up other locations if the idea pans out. If it turns out that 20% of customers are dishonest, then he might also think about installing cash registers.

What do you think about this social experiment? Could it become the ultimate web working location? Or will the pressures of overpaying be too much to handle?