Web Worker Daily

As reported on our parent blog GigaOm, this is a good day for web workers who are forced to travel by air: American Airlines has become the first domestic carrier to offer full in-flight broadband internet access. This won’t necessarily make up for all the rising costs, security tightening, and general hassles of flying these days, but at least you’ll be able to be more easily productive in the air.

The service is launching on nonstop flights between New York and San Francisco, New York and LA, and New York and Miami. Like everything else about air travel, it’s not free - but the $12.95 per flight charge should be easier to swallow than $15 to check another bag.

When we looked at last year’s Telework Report from CDW, the federal government stood out as a leader in encouraging telecommuting. This year’s report, which should be available on the CDW site shortly, paints a different picture. Thanks to strong growth in support from corporate IT departments, as well as price pressure at the gas pump, private sector telework has surged.

The simplest bottom-line numbers: 17% of Federal employees telework on a regular basis, as do 14% of private-sector employees. There’s been a marked change in the reasons employees offer for being interested in telework as well. Compared to last year, the number of people who are motivated by lowered expenses - primarily commuting expenses - has jumped from 31% to 67%. (This data correlates well with an IBM study from earlier this year that found $4.50 per gallon gas would be the breaking point for many commuters).

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Do distributed teams need a better solution for tracking and making decisions? Zapproved thinks so, and they’ve built a tool to be that solution. The idea is relatively simple: when you’ve got a proposal that needs to be signed off on by everyone on your team, you create it in Zapproved’s web interface. The service then sends emails to everyone with great big “Approve”, “Deny”, and “Comment” buttons. An online console lets you track the progress of your proposals towards (hopefully) group acceptance.

Zapproved also lets you attach files to documents, as well as setting due dates, priorities, and project names. Although you need an account to use the service, the others on your team do no. If your team is distributed and you spend an inordinate amount of time chasing down consensus on routine matters, it’s worth a look. Zapproved is free while in beta, though they do say there will be a charge at launch.

As a web worker, you likely gave up sending out paper resumes long ago. But is the online profile that you show prospective employers anything more than a marked-up copy of that old version? If so, VisualCV wants to help you bring that hoary old document into the web age. After a free registration, you can create your VisualCV, you end up in the company’s browser-based editor. Here you can add and edit typical sections like “Objective”, “Work History”, and “Education” to your CV.

But things don’t stop there. What makes VisualCV stand out is the variety of content that you can add to areas like the Portfolio sidebar. Web sites you’re proud of creating? Put up screenshots. Video or audio recordings to show off your people skills? Put those in too. The end result is somewhere between a traditional resume and a single-page portfolio web site. VisualCV also offers you control over who can see your work, and lets you create multiple versions to put forth a different persona to different readers. Best of all, it’s all free.

There are plenty of ways to point other people at content on the web that you find useful or interesting: services like del.icio.us, email, instant messaging. But sometimes link sharing can get to be a nuisance. That’s where BrowsePal comes in: it’s a no-setup, no-cost co-browsing system.

Using BrowsePal is easy: navigate to their home page and click the “Co-browse” link, and then send the URL they give you in return to another user (or many other users). They support directly sending via email or Twitter, or you can cut and paste the link to your IM application of choice. Your friend opens that link in your browser, and voila, they see your BrowsePal session and can follow along.

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Between the iPhone and MobileMe, we’re starting to see some complaints about Apple quality and support - widely regarded as the cornerstones of the company’s reputation. Twitter is full of complaints about MobileMe, and the company has gone so far as to add another 60 days of free service for suffering subscribers. Some prominent bloggers have also weighed in on the issue of Apple quality recently, with negative views.

And yet…despite some high-profile complaints, the bulk of Apple users still seem to be satisfied. A survey at our parent blog GigaOM is finding most respondents to be satisfied, and the just-released American Customer Satisfaction Index scores put Apple ahead of all other computer manufacturers for Q2. So despite some stumbles, it looks like Apple hasn’t yet lost its shine.

What’s your take on the state of Apple products?

Although most of us on the web working front have been out of school for at least a few years, this is the time of year that it can pay off to pay attention to the student world. That’s because all of the big retailers are desperately trying to jump-start their fourth quarter sales with back-to-school promotions. Most of these aren’t really for web workers - I don’t know about you, but dropping a pile of money on the latest “must-have” college clothing doesn’t appeal to me - but there are a few out there that it’s worth knowing about.

When we’ve mentioned laptop bags in the past, RadTech has come up on our readers’ lists. Today only they’re having a 20% off sale on all laptop bags and sleeves, including ones with solar cells built in and the minimal NeoCase. They also sell the aluminum allow MacTruck heavy-duty case - worth a look if you’re hard on laptops.

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We’ve looked at laptop security several times - it’s a critical issue of those who are mobile with our (or our clients’) critical data. CMS Products is out with another solution in this area: the EasyEncrypt Upgrade Kit. CMS has been making drives with hardware-based AES encryption for a while now; this kit makes it possible to get one of their drives into your laptop without losing data.

The basic idea is simple: they send you a drive, enclosure, and software. You use the software to clone your old drive on to the new one, encrypting it in the process. Then you put the new one in your computer, and mount the old one in the enclosure, giving you extra storage for low-risk files. The whole kit costs $299 with a 160GB 2.5″ drive, and is available for Windows only.