One of the more exciting services I’ve had the chance to use over the past year is Gist, a personal relationship manager / news aggregator. In my review from last October, I was impressed with how well it mixes your inbox with the web to compile useful information about your contacts.
As Jennifer reports over on GigaOM, after approximately a year of limited closed beta they’ve decided to open up the gates and make the Gist beta public. The folks at Gist had taken a bit of a different take for their beta. A carefully vetted group of participants were given access over an extended period of time, along with direct access to support and incredibly responsive feedback channels. As a result, Gist has improved substantially since our last look and is a highly recommended tool to add to your business arsenal.
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In a recent post, Meryl discussed careers in remote tech support and customer service. In my business, providing remote support is a very important part of my service offering. I’ve spent a lot of time researching the tools and services available to help me accomplish this most effectively.
The folks over at NTRglobal have just released what seems to be the perfect solution. NTRsupport Pro is designed for individuals just like me who need to be able to offer remote services like training and tech support from anywhere, without headaches.
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Sometimes I find myself guilty of making the assumption that all web workers are like I am, and that my needs and requirements are typical of everyone. As someone who reviews web services and applications, I find I need to step back and try to look at things with a different perspective.
I’ve found that to be particularly true during my evaluation of ZooLoo , a new service offering a complete online environment for your web-based activities, including a personal dashboard, social networking, a site builder and more.
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The other day, some friends and I were discussing the various productivity tools and services that we rely on to manage our lives and our businesses. The usual question came up, “What application or service do you really rely on the most?”
To answer this question, I wanted to move beyond the standard CRM and invoicing tools which are critical to the day-to-day functioning of my business, and share something that might not be so obvious. The first thing that popped into my mind was file sharing and syncing app Dropbox, and even after more discussion and heated conversation, nothing could change my answer. The benefit of synchronized files and access from any PC is obvious, but as I’ve been using the service it has really become a critical part of my daily process.
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In a great post from a couple of weeks ago, Charles wrote about some options for managing many online identities. As we branch out and use more and more services on the social web, sites like DandyID, GizaPage and Retaggr, which can help us to keep things organized and assemble together all of the parts that make up our online brand, are only going to become more popular.
Charles liked the wide array of services you could claim with DandyID, along with its handy Facebook integration. I’ve been a user of DandyID for a while now, so I wanted to dig a bit deeper into what it has to offer and what differentiates it from the other providers in this space that I’ve looked at.
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Here at WebWorkerDaily we’ve written a lot about Twitter and its increasing usefulness for productivity, business and networking. As it grows in popularity, there have been a multitude of businesses that have been formed around the service. One such service is Idea Anglers, a community for entrepreneurs looking for help in shaping their business ideas.
It’s been a real pleasure to watch Idea Anglers take form right before my very eyes. Founders Neal Rohrbach and Bradford Shimp met in a weekly Twitter chat and began exchanging occasional tweets in the weeks that followed. An off-handed comment by Bradford about being an “Idea Wrangler” led Neal on a domain search, and thus the business was born.
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Online organizer and notepad tool springpad is one of those apps that has impressed me from the start. I love the ready-made springpads and the ability to clip items in to my notebooks as I move about the web, but the recent introduction of mobile access makes the service eminently more useful. The ability to view and modify my data from any web-enabled device makes those shopping and other lists available without the need to print them out before my trip.
Once you have your account set up, visit my.springpadit.com to view the pages from your mobile device. The mobile site isn’t as feature-rich as the main site but it’s quite usable for quick access to your springpads while on the go.
I did receive error messages about lack of support for Opera Mobile, which I hope they will address soon. The minimalist pages I was directed to using that browser pale in comparison to the full mobile app that displays with Pocket IE on my Windows Mobile.
With an eye to being a “whole life” organizer, springpad has always been more than just a productivity app. The addition of mobile access goes a long way to making it much more ubiquitous, and thus much more useful.
How do you use your mobile springpads?
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
