A new study suggests that almost half (45 percent) of the workers at small- and medium-sized businesses spend most (75 percent) of their time out of their offices. In fact, only 15 percent of the businesses surveyed reported that all of their employees work in a single location.
The survey indicates that these trends will continue. In 2010, nearly half of the businesses surveyed are planning to hire new employees who will work remotely at least part of the time.
The survey was conducted online by virtual phone service RingCentral (which we recently reviewed) among their customers, so it is probably not representative of all businesses. However, it is certainly indicative of a trend that should hardly come as a surprise to web workers.
How much time do you spend out of the office?
Image by sxc.hu user sykicktb
Last week, Mozilla celebrated Firefox’s fifth birthday. While it may seem hard to believe that it’s really been that long since Firefox first burst onto the browser scene, it’s equally hard to understate just how important it has been for the development of the web. While IE is still the most popular browser, according to Net Applications, the browser market is much healthier than it was five years ago. Several major desktop and mobile browsers are in active development, notably IE, Firefox, the WebKit-based Apple Safari and Google Chrome, and Opera. The intense competition among these vendors is causing a climate of innovation, and the start of a new browser war.
So what might the future hold for browsers? In my latest Long View over on our subscription research service, GigaOM Pro, “What Does the Future Hold for Browsers?“, with comments from Chris Wilson (Microsoft), Chris Blizzard (Mozilla) and Bruce Lawson (Opera), I look at where this new browser war might lead, and the battlefields that it will be fought on: innovative new technologies, browser performance, security and privacy, and the ability to browse from multiple, diverse devices.
How do you think browsers will change over the next five years?
Adobe has released new betas of AIR 2 and Flash 10.1, James over at jkOnTheRun reports. Both products now support multitouch, but most interesting for me in this news is that AIR 2 promises to be less memory-hungry than the previous version. I’ve shied away from many useful desktop apps that rely on AIR (TweetDeck, for example) because they hog so much memory — hopefully this new release will have much more reasonable usage of my computer’s resources.
Do you avoid AIR apps because they are so resource-hungry?
Two small pieces of recent Google news were just announced that merit a mention, since both have ramifications for web workers. First, Google has put a date on a Mac beta build of Chrome, meaning there’s finally an end in sight to one of the company’s most egregious oversights. Also, a new change to Google Wave should reduce inbox clutter, and maybe make it more usable for those finding it hard to adjust it (like me).
Let’s get to that great news first. While the “new” web browser has now been available for download to Windows users for over a year (the beta was first released last September), Mac users only recently got access to a stable developer’s build of Chromium, and that’s far from a release version of the software. Luckily, the new Mac beta is said to be on track for an early December release. Read the rest of this entry »
The folks at Ribbit Mobile are offering 100 invitations to WebWorkerDaily readers for the beta of their new communication service. Just sign up on the reservations page, and enter the invite code “wwd09″ in the appropriate box.
Ribbit Mobile has more features than Google Voice, and reminds me a bit of VoxOx, which I wrote about a few days ago. This service looks very promising, but, like VoxOx, it isn’t finished yet. I’ve been unable to test it fully, because it doesn’t yet support Sprint cellphones. I also can’t get my contact list to import, either from a CSV file or through Plaxo (the only options Ribbit Mobile supports). I hope to post a fuller review soon.
Try it out, and let us know how Ribbit Mobile works for you.
If you’re concerned that Google is starting to know a bit too much about you, you might be interested to find out that Google has released Google Dashboard, a window onto the data that Google stores about your accounts. All you need to do is go to www.google.com/dashboard and log into your account. You’ll be presented with a list of all of the Google services that you use, and the data that is stored in them.
It’s interesting just browsing through the dashboard to see the Google products that you use. More than 20 products are covered by the Dashboard, although my account lists several products that I use that aren’t yet supported (including Feedburner and Google Analytics).
Do you think the Dashboard provides greater transparency?
Adobe has launched a new version of its web conferencing app, Connect Pro, that adds the ability to integrate existing telephony/VoIP solutions. (Adobe calls this “Universal Voice.“) This feature should make Connect Pro more attractive to organizations with existing telephony packages in place, as it won’t add to phone costs. As well as being able to use any existing telephony service inside the app, you can record audio from telephone-based participants along with your web conference, and stream audio from them to those using VoIP. Other enhancements in this release include improved security controls and an increased maximum number of conference participants (now at a mammoth 80,000 users).
Adobe also has announced that it is working on various native mobile apps for Connect Pro, with an app for iPhone and iPod due to be released first.
Does Universal Voice make Connect Pro more attractive for your company?
Over on our sister blog jkOnTheRun, James has published a great list of tips on how to be a productive home worker. They include:
- Set up a comfortable home office
- Make a separate work zone
- Music can play a big role
- Software tools are key
- Keep a real work schedule
- Get out with people
- Dress the part
I agree with all of his tips, but especially “Get out with people” (working in isolation over long periods can get me down and damage my productivity) and “Dress the part” (getting properly dressed every morning sets me up for the day as it means that it’s time to work). For more detail on why each of these points is important, read James’ post.
Share your home working productivity tips below.
A new study suggests that almost half (45 percent) of the workers at small- and medium-sized businesses spend most (75 percent) of their time out of their offices. In fact, only 15 percent of the businesses surveyed reported that all of their employees work in a single location.
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
