Since I’ve already got a couple of laptops, an iPod touch, and an old Palm Treo 755p smartphone, I decided to try reading books using these first before spending money on yet another gadget.

• The free eReader software for the Treo 755p seems to work fine, but for someone with middle-aged nearsightedness, the 755p’s screen is just too small.
• On a laptop, the Adobe Digital Editions and Calibre programs are also good. Even with a big screen and an ergonomic setup, though, I’m not excited about reading on a computer. I stare at a computer screen all day as it is. I want to get out of an office environment after hours. I can’t see myself using a laptop in bed.
• For the iPhone/iPod touch, the free Stanza software is very impressive. It displays well, has all the features one could want. But reading a novel on the iPod’s screeen won’t work very well, as I found that my battery started to go dead in about an hour.

So, I thought, maybe a dedicated e-book reader does make sense. I took a look at a few. The following observations are certainly not comprehensive. But they list a few of the reasons why I liked, and didn’t like, the ones I tried.

• Barnes & Noble Nook. I spent about an hour at my local B&N store looking at the Nook. It has lots of nice features, but even with the latest firmware update, it’s very slow. I’m a pretty fast reader, so waiting a few seconds each time I want to turn a page would drive me crazy. It’s also heavy; not something that I could hold in one hand.
• Sony Readers. After looking at the Nook, I went down the street to Borders and checked out the Sony Reader Touch Edition and the Sony Reader Pocket Edition. The Pocket is small and light, and lots of people enjoy it, but for us left-handers, it’s impossible to use with one hand, since the controls are laid out for righties. Surprisingly, the larger Touch has a more ambidextrous interface, but its touch screen is fuzzier, less bright, and prone to glare and fingerprints.
• Amazon Kindle. Since the Kindle is sold only online, there’s no place to check one out before ordering. Darrell likes it, though, and I looked at one belonging to a friend. It’s not as heavy as the Nook, but like the Nook, it still feels too heavy for one-handed reading. It also uses a proprietary format for its books, which my local public library does not offer.
• Bookeen Opus. My local Fry’s computer store was selling this lesser-known e-book reader on sale for $149, which was $60 to $100 or more cheaper than any of the other readers I looked at. (Unfortunately, that special price is no longer available.) The Opus is small, light, and has a simple interface. It doesn’t have wireless connectivity, it doesn’t play music, and it doesn’t have many of the bells and whistles that some of the other readers have. But as I said, I already have lots of other gadgets, so I don’t really need these features.

The Opus came closest to what I want, so I did decide to buy it. But the usefulness of the Opus — like that of all of its e-reader cousins — is totally hobbled by books that come with digital rights management. Illustrator Brad Colbow has  a great, only slightly tongue-in-cheek, observation on why DRM doesn’t work — just substitute e-books for audio books.

A lot of the tech bloggers, of course, are salivating about the upcoming Apple iPad. Darrell has some great observations on what will be needed to make it relevant for web workers. So far, I’m not seeing anything that makes me want to spend that kind of money. And there are several other e-readers arriving, too.

On the whole, I was disappointed by the whole e-reader experience. I can see how an e-reader would be useful if you mostly want to read free e-books, like the ones Celine suggests. But until the prices of the hardware come down, the technical issues are resolved, and the obnoxious DRM is dealt with, I’ll probably still read most of my books in print, obtained from the library or one of the independent bookstores.

Do you use an e-reader?

Cybook Opus image from Wikimedia Commons.

Related GigaOM pro content (sub req.): Irrational Exuberance Over E-Books?

And despite the angry rhetoric that often fills the airwaves, people on the “other side” generally aren’t monsters…most of the time. (That was a joke. Politics can be short on humor these days.)

Indeed, I’ve had many friends, going back to high school and college days, with whom I totally disagree politically — yet we are able to have perfectly civil conversations. We can even do business, to our mutual benefit.

While some web workers have made a niche for themselves by working exclusively with organizations representing one political point of view, most of us don’t have that option. And quite frankly, I’d get bored talking about the same issues, and presenting the same point of view, all of the time.

Without compromising one’s principles, then, here are my guidelines for navigating today’s rocky political landscape:

• Don’t assume that a potential client shares your political beliefs. I live in a place that leans heavily toward one political party, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t many folks of the other party in my neighborhood. Besides, there are many issues that divide people of the same party.
• In many cases, disagreeing on politics doesn’t matter. If a potential client wants my company to create a web site for selling handmade crafts, their personal politics should have no effect on our ability to develop a site for them.
• Sometimes, however, you should turn down a job if you’re not comfortable. I recently started work on a project with an existing client, only to discover that it was going in a direction I hadn’t anticipated. The client (with whom I continue to do other work) agreed that we would part ways on this specific project, if for no other reason that I couldn’t give them my best work — it’s hard to create an effective web site for something that I don’t agree with.
• Know how your colleagues feel. Since my company is a three-person team, and we’ve worked together for a decade, I have a pretty good idea where my colleagues stand on issues. So when I talk with clients about a potentially controversial project, I can generally avoid jobs that may make my fellow workers unhappy. No job is worth upsetting an excellent working relationship in our team.
• Don’t hide your beliefs, but don’t flaunt them either. I’ve been involved in local politics for many years, and while I haven’t (and don’t plan to) run for elected office, I’ve been a visible participant in several issues. So it’s not hard to find out where I stand on some things. But in this era of social media, I do try to keep my professional and political lives separate — with multiple Twitter accounts, posting only to certain Facebook friend groups, and, as Doriano suggests, by limiting cross-posting.
• Select your donations carefully. We are frequently asked donate our services, in whole or in part. We have an informal policy of regularly giving discounts to non-profit organizations, and sometimes (about once a year) may donate an entire site to a cause. But especially with discounted or donated work, we make sure to agree on project scope with clients; otherwise, it’s easy for the time spent to get out of hand. It seems to be a truism that “the smaller the budget, the more the client wants.”
• Just because someone agrees with your political views, that doesn’t necessarily make them easy to work with. Some clients may try to take advantage of us, as it’s “for a good cause.” Politicians are a strange bunch, who have pretty good opinions of themselves. I guess that one can’t be short on self-esteem to run for office. But web workers need to make sure that clients understand, and value, your professional skills.
• Keep track of time spent on political activities. Check to see whether professional activities can be counted as donations for tax purposes. Also, check to see whether professional time must be reported as a donation under campaign finance laws.

With these ideas in mind, I find that it’s relatively simple to manage one’s business and political lives without compromising one’s beliefs, and without limiting one’s potential markets.

How do you reconcile your personal politics with serving your customers effectively?

Image by sxc.hu user wvpress

Since the dawn of the Internet, it’s been an article of faith that connection speeds will get faster and costs will drop. We might be seeing the end of that trend. If predictions are correct, we’ll be facing a mobile bandwidth shortage in just a couple of years.

Once upon a time, web developers knew that we had to keep graphics to a minimum, since many Internet users had slow dial-up connections. Today, we’ve become dependent on multimedia, which, in many cases, is a crutch for those who don’t have the time or just don’t want to bother to write effective site content. This is a bad idea. Sites with content that is wholly, or mostly, contained in videos are probably not reaching:

• Most of the people who use mobile devices, including iPhones. Over 50 percent of Internet shoppers are using mobile devices, most of which don’t support Flash, and have small screens that don’t display images — especially moving images — well.
• Many people with mobile connections who have data plans that cap bandwidth use. Exceeding those caps can be very expensive. You and I are probably already considered part of the “mobile workforce,” and this category is growing rapidly. One-third of all workers are anticipated to be mobile by 2013. These users will likely be on capped connections.
• People who don’t install Flash for security reasons.
• People with old browsers.
• People with visual disabilities.
• People who are behind corporate firewalls.
• People who use software or browser add-ons that block multimedia content.

If you’re a web developer, or are updating your web presence, try not to get too dependent on video, audio and other bandwidth hogs. I like a friendly multimedia experience as much as anyone. But do yourself a favor and ask these questions.

• Is this video (or audio) really necessary, or is it being included because it’s easier than actually writing a cogent description of what the site is about?
• If you must include a video, then what will people see if they can’t load the file? Will the site degrade gracefully? That is, will people see helpful alternative content?

It’s possible that faster, better and cheaper bandwidth may be on the horizon. Google seems to want that. But they are also pushing projects to increase the efficiency of the web. So living with limited bandwidth may be the next “inconvenient tech truth,” and we should plan our web projects accordingly.

How can you make your web projects more bandwidth-efficient?

Image from sxc.hu user CDWaldi

O’Reilly Media was kind enough to provide me with a copy of its new book, “Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice,” edited by Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma. It’s available in print and as an e-book and is an interesting compilation of essays discussing the problems and successes that governments and citizens face as they struggle to catch up with the openness that we’ve come to expect in the era of social media, crowdsourcing and user-generated content. The snooze-inducing subtitle is actually taken from President Obama’s memorandum on transparency and open government, reprinted as an appendix to the book.

What do the authors mean by “open government?” As Tim O’Reilly puts it in one of the opening chapters:

[G]overnment is, at bottom, a mechanism for collective action. We band together, make laws, pay taxes, and build the institutions of government to manage problems that are too large for us individually and whose solution is in our common interest. Government 2.0… is the use of technology — especially the collaborative technologies at the heart of Web 2.0 — to better solve collective problems at a city, state, national, and international level.

Some of “Open Government,” especially its earlier chapters, will probably be of more interest to policy wonks than to most web workers. But later in the book, readers are presented with detailed case studies of web sites that are improving interaction between citizens and their government. In these chapters, I found some really good ideas (and some cautionary tales) that I think many web workers will find interesting and thought-provoking. I found the story of the state of Utah’s web presence of particular interest, as it leverages its own resources by taking advantage of social media and user-generated content sites.

This book will be of particular interest to those working in and with the public sector, but much of its content will be enlightening to anyone who cares about public participation in all levels of government.

How do you think that governments can improve their accessibility using web tools?

So I’m pleased that I’ve discovered MailboxMap. It’s a simple web site built around a Google Maps mashup. Just enter an address or zip code, and it will display a map showing the locations of mailboxes in the neighborhood. Click on a mailbox icon, and it will display pickup times.

MailboxMap also shows post offices and UPS locations, complete with hours. And there’s a mobile version, which has the advantage of displaying search results in a list, making it easier to skim for late pickups. It would be nice, though, if one could search for, say, pickups after 3:00 pm, or for Saturday pickups.

It’s not a perfect service; for example, it locates Seattle’s downtown post office on the wrong side of the street. Google Maps itself locates the same address correctly, so it’s unclear what the problem is. Nevertheless, MailboxMap is a useful service.

The site has been around for a couple of years, but it seems to be up to date, as it shows a recent pickup time change for my local box. It’s probably too much to hope that USPS will buy this site and add it to usps.com.

How often do you mail letters?

Related GigaOM Pro Research (sub req’d) :

Location: The Epicenter of Mobile Innovation

I think that Google Buzz feels slow to me because it has an interface that isn’t very mouse-friendly. It is laid out like Twitter’s web site, with one long timeline. But it also incorporates comments to the original posts in that timeline, so if a post gets lots of comments, it takes forever to scroll past it. Buzz does have keyboard shortcuts similar to the ones in Gmail or Google Reader, but using them means that I have to look at, and decide how to dispose of, each post individually. There doesn’t seem to be an “archive all” option similar to the “mark all as read” button in Reader.

Together with a lot of web workers, I depend on being able to skim through information sources quickly. Services like Google Reader are well-optimized for doing this, especially in List mode. (To turn on List mode, from the “All Items” view, click on “Show: List” in the blue bar at the top right of the screen.)

The List views in Gmail and Google Reader make it easy to look at the subjects of posts, and scroll through them quickly. Google Buzz, unfortunately, uses the threaded conversation approach of Google Wave, but without the tools for controlling what appears on the screen that Wave has.

I hope that the limitations of Google Buzz’s interface are just growing pains. Maybe the designers of Buzz didn’t anticipate that some posts would generate hundreds of comments. So let’s hope that they’ll give us the tools to use the service efficiently, or, as one commenter suggests, Google Buzz users might give up on it before it’s a week old.

Do you find using Buzz’s web interface slow and inefficient, too?

These days, though, I’ve been getting up at 5 or 6 a.m. In a lot of ways, the early morning hours are a great time to write and do projects that require uninterrupted effort. But I find that it’s way too easy to get sidetracked. Since I work at home, I’m tempted to sit down at the computer first thing in the morning to “check my email.” Unfortunately, too often, I find that “checking the email” has turned into a marathon session of “checking the email, responding to email, reading online news, and catching up on Facebook and Twitter…” and the next thing I know, it’s already 9:30, and I haven’t yet eaten or gotten dressed.

So I’m going to try a few things to regain my mornings:

• Turn off my computer at night. Not only will I save energy, it will require an extra effort to turn it back on in the morning.
• If I must leave my computer on for some reason, I plan to shut down my mail software, web browser, RSS reader, Twitter client and anything else that’s likely to send notifications overnight. I’ll probably leave my IM client on, but will set my status to “away” or “not at desk.”
• Route my business email accounts through a service like AwayFind. I used this a while ago, but haven’t tried it since Thursday wrote about its new features.
• Use a VoIP service like onSip to set my business phone lines to take messages, or forward calls to me in an emergency. I’ve found that most clients are quite understanding about what’s really an emergency.
• If I do turn on the computer in the early morning hours (for instance, if I get an idea that I want to write down), I won’t fire up my email client or my browser, but will instead go directly to my word processor or to Evernote.

It’s going to be a challenge to follow these recommendations, especially since I live on the U.S. West Coast, and most of the rest of the world is already working by the time I get up. We’ll see how I do.

How do you keep your mornings to yourself?

Photo by stock.xchng user swissboy

In the past, profiles have been structured like standard résumés, with elements appearing in fixed order: a header, a text summary, optional applications like blog links, experience, education, recommendations, and an “additional information” section with web links, awards and such.

Now, when you click on “Edit Profile,”you’ll see a four-way arrow to the left of the section names. Drag it to rearrange the sections. Check out the video to see how it works.

This will be a boon to students, who may wish to make their educational backgrounds more prominent, as well as to entrepreneurs and career changers, who may wish to highlight other parts of their backgrounds besides their “day jobs.”

LinkedIn plans to offer more enhancements to LinkedIn profiles soon.

Will you rearrange your LinkedIn profile? What other editing abilities would you like to see on the site?

But when I upgraded from Firefox 3.5.7 to 3.6 the other day, I discovered that a few of the add-ons that weren’t yet compatible were important to me. In fact, they had become such an integral part of my daily workflow that I was significantly slowed down without them. Luckily, almost all of the add-ons were updated within a couple of days so I’m back up to speed now, but I realized how much I missed them when they weren’t available. In this post I’m going to share the add-ons that I find it hard to be without.

Some of us at WWD have ditched Firefox in favor of the faster Chrome, but until these add-ons are also available in Chrome for Mac, I won’t switch. In the meantime, I’m sticking with Firefox, and hoping that 3.6, the newest version, lives up to its claims of increased speed.

Mozilla Prism. This add-on allows me to create a site-specific browser for locations I visit frequently. I’ve used it to create a “Google Reader” application that appears in my dock, can be placed in a separate Space, and operates separately from Firefox. I’m not sure why Mozilla hasn’t updated this yet; I’m using Chrome to view Google Reader for now.

LastPass. This password manager not only keeps track of my passwords, it syncs them between browsers and computers. I imagine most web workers have as many passwords as I do — they’d be impossible to keep track of without a program like LastPass. I also use 1Password for the Mac, and sync its data using Dropbox, figuring that it doesn’t hurt to keep such important data in multiple places.

Xmarks. This handy extension syncs my bookmarks between browsers and computers.

Adblock Plus. I appreciate all of the content that is available on the web, including WebWorkerDaily, thanks to the support of advertisers. But some sites have such obtrusive advertising that they are unusable. Google (which makes most of its money from advertising) is allowing ad blockers in its Chrome browser in the hope that advertisers will make “useful” ads that no one will want to block. Until then, Adblock Plus is a necessity for me.

Gmail Manager. This is the Firefox add-on that I use the most. It’s the best way I know to manage multiple Gmail and Google Apps mail accounts.

I’ll also add two tools that are incredibly helpful to web developers: Firebug and Web Developer. Both help me and my colleagues to test and debug web sites.

…and finally, Cards. Well, OK, I guess I can live without this one, but I’ll have find something else to do while I’m on the phone.

What browser add-ons do you rely on?

The organizers approached me to develop a web site to aggregate these posts in real-time before, during and after the event. In the process, I learned how such a site can reinforce the development of community.

I’m sure that you’ve been to events where good ideas are hatched and projects are planned, but often, despite the best of intentions, activity loses steam after the event is over, and nothing much gets done. It’s too early yet to judge the long-term effectiveness of this particular event, but I’m optimistic that it will make more of a difference than many such gatherings.

The electronic component of the event was relatively simple. We created a content-managed web site that would act as the hub for the many places that participants would post their contributions and reflections. We didn’t require participants to use a specific CMS tool (although they were welcome to use ours). Instead, before, during and after the conference, participants were encouraged to use existing technologies with which they were familiar to document their thoughts, and we then created links to their contributions.

Before the Event

The web site went live a couple of weeks before the event began. By that time, event announcements and registration had already been posted to a section on the sponsoring organization’s web site. Participants had been asked to interview another attendee as a “get-to-know-you” exercise. The results were to have been posted, but very few did so — I suspect because the CMS used by the sponsoring organization has a significant learning curve.

In the future, I would recommend creating the event-specific web site much sooner, and using a simpler CMS-, group-blog, social-network or wiki-based system for posting pre-event discussions and comments.

During the Event

The venue at our local university had limited wired connectivity, but it was sufficient for a video stream, an audio stream, and the web updates that I was doing. The video stream worked fine; the audio stream was less successful because the university had blocked the ports we needed. For the same reason, we had to use a MiFi connection to use FTP. Thankfully, this did not affect access to our CMS.

Participants were able to connect using Wi-Fi, which worked well, aside from some issues with entering passwords. I’m guessing that perhaps fifty people were connected at any one time.

The event web site included the following, all of which was updated frequently:

• An attendee list, with links to participants’ web sites and Twitter feeds.
• The event agenda. Since the event was an “un-conference” using the “open space” approach, much of the agenda was developed on the spot by attendees.
• A Twitter statuses JavaScript badge showing posts from the event. These tweets were mostly done by me on behalf of event organizers, but other committee members also tweeted through the conference account.
• A Twitter search widget showing a real-time feed of all posts using the conference hashtag. A full-screen version of this widget was projected in the room where most discussions took place, and it proved very popular.
• A link to a Twapperkeeper archive of the Twitter hashtag feed.
• A Facebook fan box linking to the event’s Facebook page.
• A Flickr badge and links to tagged photos and videos. Flipcharts and graphs were scanned or photographed, then posted to Flickr and to the web site as JPGs and PDFs. We also put up a Picasa link at the request of attendees, but it didn’t get used.
• A Ustream video feed. Video of many sessions was fed live into the site, then archived.
• A link to YouTube search results tagged with the event’s tag.
• An audio feed. Podcasts of many sessions were made available later.
• Links to blogs of those attendees who were writing about the event.
• A wiki for allowing attendees to post notes from event sessions. We chose to use a wiki rather than giving all users access to the CMS, although I think that in future we might go the other way, as some found editing the wiki difficult.
• An RSS feed for tracking changes to all of the above.

After the Event

We had not created a LinkedIn group before the event. However, participants indicated that they wanted to have an electronic venue for continuing the discussion after the conference. We surveyed the room, and discovered that almost everyone was already a LinkedIn user. Since LinkedIn groups and subgroups can be created immediately, we chose to use that service. We could have selected another group conversation service, though, and participants may move to more sophisticated collaborative tools as their discussions continue.

Planning and Setup

If you are ever called upon to provide this sort of support to an event, it can be fun and educational. Here are some tips to make things go smoothly.

• Get involved with the planning committee as soon as possible, and get an event-specific web site posted early.
• Agree on the hashtag for the event, and publicize it.
• Coordinate with the meeting venue to make sure that it has adequate power and bandwidth (both wired and Wi-Fi), and that it does not block ports.
• Plan to bring your own equipment if possible, or make sure that you have everything you’ll need.
• Set up a “tech table” in a convenient location.
• Have a group of volunteers who can cover the full event.
• Give yourself lots of time for setup and breakdown.
• Have a dedicated laptop and projector for displaying the Twitter hashtag feed — participants will love it.
• Consider what you’ll need in the way of cameras, scanners and printers. We had them all, and they were handy to have, but we could probably have done without them.

I found that attendees’ blogging, tweeting, recording and instant posting about the event reinforced what they were thinking and learning. Thus, the effectiveness of the event was increased, along with the potential for new learning and insights to cause change in the wider world.

How do you use social media and the web for events?

Images by Flickr users Choconancy1 and hajush

The book is divided into sections on blogging; Twitter and microblogging; social networking; media sharing; social news and bookmarking; ratings and reviews; forums; and virtual worlds. In each section, Zarrella provides very short descriptions of leading web sites in the particular category, together with quick discussions of how they work, and how businesses could benefit from using them.

The book’s author dedicates it to his grandparents, which is appropriate, since this is the sort of book that I’d give to someone older and less computer-savvy. It sometimes gets a little technical for this audience, but the writing style is clear and friendly.

The book feels like a bit of a departure for O’Reilly Media (who kindly provided the book to me). I tend to think of O’Reilly as publishers of dense software and programming manuals. I was amused to note that the book is listed in O’Reilly’s catalog as “First Edition.” The book will need updating frequently if it’s to stay relevant — some of the screenshots are already out of date.

“The Social Media Marketing Book” is a little book. At 239 8″ x 6″ pages (in paperback or as an e-book), with lots of illustrations and white space, the content is frankly limited. But it’s well-organized, easy to understand, inviting to flip through,and approachable. I doubt that many WWD readers will learn anything new from this book, but it might be useful for lending to clients, family and friends.

How do you explain social media to clients?

As I look back, I realize that our success was based not just on our technical skills. After all, anything technical can be done, and done well, by lots of people. Our products and services aren’t that different than those offered by our competitors. So what did we do right?

• We listened to our customers, so we could tailor our offerings to their current and near-future needs. We don’t speculate about technologies in decades to come, but we do keep up with the latest technologies, products and services that are available today. Our informal slogan (with apologies to the old Panasonic commercials) is: “Just slightly ahead of our customers.”
• We were flexible. We were able to change our pricing structure, create new packages of products and services, and experiment with special deals, quickly and easily. My friends in marketing would be horrified at the lack of research we did before embarking on some of these changes, but we didn’t have the time or the money. Since we spent zero dollars on advertising, though, any success went straight to the bottom line, and unsuccessful experiments cost only our time.
• We took advantage of our reputation. After almost 25 years in business, our customers knew that we could provide creative solutions and personal service. In tough times, people were much more willing to do business with folks they knew and trusted, which put us in an excellent position to meet their needs.
• We could afford to be selective about the projects we took on. Even in tough times, we’ve learned that it’s just not worth the hassle of working with customers with whom we don’t see eye to eye.
• We minimized our overhead. As WWD readers know well, there are tons of products and services available to let small businesses work from home (or anywhere with a Wi-Fi connection) easily, and just as effectively as businesses with expensive office space. I’ve worked from home since 1991, and thanks to the latest technologies, it’s never been easier than it was this past year.
• Networking was more important than ever, and social network sites like LinkedIn and Facebook expanded who I could reach easily. Such sites didn’t create new friends, but they made it easy to keep in contact, and reconnect, with old friends. In 2009, I actually did business with an old high-school friend who I hadn’t heard from in many years, as well as my very first client from 1985. Of course, I didn’t give up networking locally; I acquired several clients who got to know me through professional and community groups.
• We maintained a diverse customer base. We’ve all heard the stories about car parts manufacturers who were dependent on one client, like GM or Ford. When the auto companies crashed, the parts companies did, too. It’s easy to fall into the trap of relying too heavily on one customer, one sector, or one type of business. It’s a mistake I’ve made in the past, too, but my company now has a customer base that’s about evenly divided between small businesses, medium-sized businesses, and nonprofit organizations. And while many of our customers are in the Northwest, we have lots of clients elsewhere, as the Seattle area tends to be tied to a couple of large employers that have their own booms and busts.
• We did everything necessary to retain a strong team. I’ve been fortunate to work with many talented people over the years, but my current colleagues are the best. We’ve developed a skill set that makes our small company competitive with much larger organizations. When we reorganized the company in 2001 as an LLC, we agreed that our first priority was to have fun and make a living doing so. It was sometimes tough to do that this year, but we managed it most of the time.

In 2010, my company will mark its 25th anniversary. I’m already working on planning the party. Let’s hope 2010 will be a better year for everyone. In the meantime, best wishes to you for a prosperous new year!

What techniques did you use to survive 2009?

Photo credit: stock.xchng user gtrfrkbob

RDM+ allows users to control desktop computers from mobile devices. The software comes in several versions covering many mobile devices, including the iPhone/iPod touch, BlackBerry (which WWD reviewed in 2008), Windows Mobile, Palm and Java-enabled phones. There is also a web version.

In order to control a computer, one must have the desktop software (free, available for Windows or Mac) running. Setup is easy, and doesn’t require any special rules to deal with firewalls or dynamic IP addresses. During the setup process, one registers the desktop, and it is assigned a computer number, which is then used to access the machine remotely, together with a username and password combination you create.

RDM+ works well. With the software that the company provided to me, I found the interface easy to use. It takes good advantage of the iPhone’s landscape mode and zoom capabilities. There was only minimal delay in response time on an iPod touch connected via Wi-Fi, although I’m sure that data speeds will affect performance, depending on which network you are using. The software has an impressive list of other features, but doesn’t have file transfer capabilities.

There is a free trial, but don’t wait too long, as the sale on the iPhone version probably ends today; it’s unclear from the RDM+ web site when the normal price will return. The other mobile versions are also on sale, reduced by $5 – $10, depending on the version. Web access is also reduced — the basic price is down $5 to $24.95, or you can choose to buy a subscription for $5.95 per month. Costs for remote control software on mobile phones are definitely coming down — a similar product, LogMeIn Ignition (which Samuel wrote about back in September) was recently also on sale, with its normal $30 price reduced to $20.

Do you use RDM+ or other remote desktop software on your mobile phone?

Liaise stakes its niche in the crowded project management field between personal information managers such as Gist and Threadsy, and full-blown group project management tools like Microsoft Project, Basecamp and their many competitors. Liaise claims that its users do not need to make changes in work habits in order to benefit from the software, since users can participate in, and manage, projects and tasks directly from Outlook.

The system automatically captures action items and issues (called “KeyPoints”) as users type emails to others, and organizes them by person, initiative, date and priority. A summary of these action items are available on demand, and they are also integrated into Outlook calendars.

As Liaise enters public beta, it is offering several new enhancements, most notably the ability to sync between users in various locations via the cloud. Cloud storage allows organizations using Liaise to sync project status, due dates, priority and other information with suppliers and customers. For security reasons, only pointers to project data are stored in the cloud, not the data itself.

The updated version of Liaise also gives users more control over whether, and how much, project data is displayed in emails to specific email recipients, even those who aren’t using Liaise or Outlook. One can also choose to have project data display immediately as one types an email, or have it show up after a message has been composed. Other enhancements include the ability to receive an emailed daily summary of project progress and items due.

The Liaise service is free during the beta period, but is planned to be priced at between $4.95 and $9.95 per month per user when the final version is released.

If you’ve tried Liaise, let us know how it worked for you in the comments.

Image by sxc.hu user muresan113

“Excuse me, I have to run to the bank to make a deposit.” How many times have you had to interrupt your day to make sure that checks get into your account quickly?

My company accepts credit cards, but many of our customers still prefer to pay by check — which, until now, has meant having to trek to the bank, or make a deposit by mail and waiting a couple of days for it to be processed.

Now, however, my credit union here in Seattle is offering remote deposit capture, meaning I can deposit checks by scanning them and transmitting the images through the credit union’s web site, using the My Deposit service from Ensenta. No special software is required, although a Windows app is available; the web site offers instructions on the image format needed for deposits.

Checks deposited this way show up in my online account ledger almost immediately, although funds can be held under the institution’s standard “funds availability” rules. I have not run into any fees for this service — after all, we’re doing part of what financial institutions need to do under “Check 21,” which mandates the use of electronic checks.

Remote deposit capture, under such names as My Deposit, eDeposit, and Online Deposit, seems to be widely available among credit unions and smaller banks. USAA, which caters to service members and their families, also offers a similar service under the name Deposit@Home. Some institutions are even offering iPhone apps that allow you to use the iPhone’s camera to capture check images.

Check with your credit union or bank, and ask them if they offer remote deposit services. Or search for a credit union location near you.

Do you deposit checks electronically?

The Google Apps version of Google Groups looks much like the public version of Groups that can be used by anyone. It has a plain but functional interface. However, groups created through Google Apps can be branded with an organization’s logo, and can be administered through the Google Apps dashboard to, for example, make Groups visible only to those with email addresses from the organization.

This new feature is not available in the free Standard Edition of Google Apps. To get access to Groups, you must purchase Google Apps Premier Edition, which costs $50 per user per year (a free 30-day trial is available). Groups are also available to users of Google Apps Education Edition, which, despite the name, is available to any registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization in the U.S., as well as to schools. The Premier Edition also offers video hosting through Google Video, technical support, uptime guarantees, email archiving, and other features.

Do you use Google Apps? Will the addition of Groups enhance your collaboration abilities?