Lately I’ve been sprucing up my collection of software applications, and spending time with some good online tutorials on my favorites. Many of these tutorials are free, and in this post, I’ll round up several that I’ve found worth paying attention to.

Are you a Photoshop user? Good-Tutorials has a great collection of tutorials on effects, filters and more. They’re all free, and easy to follow.

Also on the graphics front, Good-Tutorials has a useful collection of Adobe Illustrator tutorials. You can learn how to do convincing wood and metal effects, and more. If you happen to reach for the open source application GIMP when it comes to graphics, check the tutorials at HowToGimp.

If you dabble in Linux at all, there are a couple of sites on the web with outstanding tutorials specific to almost every Linux distribution, from Ubuntu to Fedora. HowtoForge is a good place to start. Look down the left rail of the site for the many topics covered. Also check out Unix-Tutorials.com.

Recently the OpenOffice suite of productivity applications was upgraded to a new beta version. As I’ve been trying it out, I’ve also been spending time at LearnOpenOffice.org, which offers free HTML- and Flash-based tutorials.

My very favorite site of all for free tutorials remains W3Schools. You can become proficient in almost any kind of web development at this site, tuning up your HTML, CSS and JavaScript skills, among other topics offered. Give this one a try.

Do you have any favorite sites for application tutorials?

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If you must travel for business, it’s nice to know what it costs (and your accountant will be asking you what you spent at the end of the year). This is where new service FuelFrog comes in: keep it posted on the amount of gas you put in your car, the mileage, and the price, and it will calculate and graph your mileage and spending trends over time.

Of course, anyone can do this with a notebook and a spreadsheet at home; the math is trivial. What makes FuelFrog actually useful is the fact that it has Twitter integration. So rather than keep track of written notes or gas receipts, just pull out your mobile phone and send over a tweet whenever you gas up the vehicle. Then visit the web site at your leisure to see how you’re doing.

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Web Worker Daily readers are likely familiar with GrandCentral, a service that gives you a single phone number that can ring multiple phones including your office, cellular phone, and home number simultaneously.

However, if you’ve ever thought it would be nice to read your voicemails either in as a text message or email, PhoneTag has a service in mind for you.  With this add-on PhoneTag service, you can have all your phones ring at the same time, and if you call goes to voicemail - ready your voicemail through PhoneTag.

These voicemail to text services have been around for quite some time, but before this integration between PhoneTag and GrandCentral, you had to choose between the two services. No more.

PhoneTag, formerly known as SimulScribe, was among the first to offer voice-to-text transcription.  PhoneTag also gives you a wav audio version of the email, along with your text summary of the message.  The company is well established and is compatible with many mobile carriers including AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Alltel and more.

After 10 voicemail tests, the PhoneTag service works very well.  All messages were transcribed with 98% accuracy.  If PhoneTag can’t decipher a word spoken to it, it puts a question mark at the end of the word to alert you.

The service is useful, but voice-to-text services as a whole are not without their flaws.  Voice recognition is still more of an art than a science, and errors can occur when a computer tries to interpret voicemails and relay them into text.

I have used a similar service from CallWave, with unfavorable results.  Voicemails were interpreted incorrectly and if you simply relied upon the text summary of the voicemail, you’d receive the wrong message.  For example, a person left me a message that actually said, “Hi Jason, this is Josh, please call me”.  The text transcription literally read, “Hi Jason, this is Josh, don’t call me”.  Luckily I had the raw voicemail to listen to and didn’t think my co-worker didn’t wish to hear from me.

PhoneTag service starts at $10/month for 40 messages or $30 for unlimited messages.

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We looked at online project management provider WhoDoes when they first launched about a year ago. Now they’re out with their 2.0 release, which adds new features - as well as a selection of paid plans to supplement their free starter package.

The core of WhoDoes remains simple task management, with tasks grouped into milestones grouped into projects. There are some new tweaks in this area - for example, you can assign and reorder tasks by drag and drop - but the real advances are in the area of team and collaborative work.For starters, WhoDoes now maintains a searchable directory of users. You can choose in your own settings whether to be visible or invisible in this directory - or to be visible only to other users from your own email domain. You can build your team up in two ways now: search for people in the directory or invite them to join WhoDoes. Of course you can assign tasks to anyone on your team.

In addition to task-sharing, WhoDoes 2.0 also enables file sharing among team members. You can upload a document to any task, and also view a full list of documents in a repository area.

Two other features are available only with paid subscriptions (and in a 30-day trial for free accounts): fast planning and project email. Fast planning gives you a single screen where you can rapidly add milestones and tasks, as well as assign them to users. Project email gives you a way to send email to a project and have it added to the repository.

Free accounts are limited to 1 project and 5MB of storage. Paid upgrades, starting at $5.99 per month, add more projects, more space, and (depending on the level) optional features. You get unlimited users at all levels. With the edition of the team features, WhoDoes is worth a closer look by any group seeking a streamlined online management tool.

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About a week ago, I posted about Needing a Gentle Intro to RSS Feeds. I mentioned that I would read my RSS feeds through Google Reader over breakfast while my husband reads the paper and would let you know how I fared.

I know it has only been a week, but here are my first impressions about the impact reading feeds is having on my life and work.

1. They make me look smarter. Over the past week, I used Tweetburner to immediately post what I was reading when I was reading it to my Twitter page. On those mornings that I was immersed in feeds, I think I looked smart and informed. Either that or crazy or not busy enough actually getting work done.

2. They give me interesting fodder for breakfast conversation with my husband. Unfortunately “new media” is not his area of interest so he paid me back reading me articles about bears and other wildlife topics.

3. I read more blog posts in one week by Seth Godin than I had in the last several years. I don’t mean to neglect Seth. He’s smart. I like him. I learn from him. But I stray from reading blogs in general because I can’t seem to find the time. Reading feeds over eggs and coffee carves out time to learn from the masters.

4. I learned about new paths to productivity. Tracking the feed of Brazen Careerist led me to an interesting blog post from Penelope Trunk and one that I need to read again. Productivity is my obsession. The information in her post is like giving a compulsive hand washer more soap.

5. I learned more about Twitter apps which can only increase my Twittering effective. From Twemes to Hashtags to Twidgets, I devoured this short and snappy post and still wanted more. Increasing my Tweet effectiveness is actually important to my work since I use Twitter to source story ideas, to get answers to my burning tech questions within minutes, to market projects (both mine and my clients’), and to connect with my peers on a regular basis.

6. What I read in feeds last week had either a direct connection or impact on what I do every day for work. I discovered some interesting blogs and sites such as: Brand Tags - an experiment in the 1-word associations people make with brand logos (branding is an important aspect of the work I do to market companies and nonprofits online); the post Social Media FAQ#5: How Do I Takl to my Executives About Social Media (always interested in seeing how people communicate social media to non-tech types - helpful in my pitches to potential clients); and Drop the Excuses and Start Participating (interested in the impact of social media on traditional PR as I’ve moved from the traditional to the “new PR” over the last 10 years and into social media in the last few years.)

It remains to be seen if I can keep up with my feed reading over time. In the meanwhile, I’ll absorb as much knowledge as I can to expand my understanding of this ever-changing industry and to improve what I do and how I do it.

What was the latest thing you read via your feed reader that has had an impact on the way you work?

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The last time we looked at multiplatform note-storage application Evernote, they supported Windows and Mac and had a web version. That’s still the case, but with the release of Evernote for Mac 1.1 this week, their Mac support is much improved. The new version adds support for PDF files (though it doesn’t yet recognize text in images in PDFs). Better yet, they’ve tied it much more deeply to OS X, resulting in “Save PDF to Evernote” in the standard Mac print dialog so you can send content from just about anything to Evernote. Other improvements include integration with Spotlight, a three-pane view, and encryption.

The new additions make Evernote for Mac feel much more like a native application, and less like ported software. If you’re on a Mac, this is a great time to register for their beta.

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Sometimes, business relationships tend to be too straightforward and formal. Those things have their place, but we need to include a more human touch when it comes to web working. After all, it’s much easier for clients to ignore and forget you if they don’t see you face to face on a regular basis - you’re just another online contractor to them.

How do you stand out from the others? By applying your own personal touch to client interaction. Here’s how you can start…

Remember special occasions. I usually greet clients on their birthdays or during our ‘anniversaries’ - the date when we signed our first contract together. This may come off as a bit touchy-feely, but it’ll differentiate you from others. Especially if your greetings are handwritten notes rather than short emails.

I once listened to an interview of an internet entrepreneur who chose a contractor among other bidders just because this contractor was the only one who greeted him on his birthday. To the entrepreneur, this meant that the contractor pays attention to details. Also, greeting clients on special occasions means that you take some time to remember them apart from the time you send out invoices.

Be available, but not too available. Clients appreciate timely responses to their concerns, especially from web workers. After all, they’re paying you without looking over your shoulder as you work. If you’re not available soon enough for them, even just to say that you’ll discuss their problem at a later date, red flags start to go up. If they’re working with you for the first time, they might get ahead of themselves and think you’ve run away with their deposit. To avoid this from happening make sure that you have a response - any response - within 24 hours.

However, there’s such a thing as making yourself too available. I once had a client who needed over an hour of chatting each day until his project was completed. On hindsight, I realized that I should’ve set some limits. Spending too much time on one client might force you to spend less time on the other clients that require attention. Plus, it might distract you from the actual work you should be doing.

Offer them discounts. Regular clients appreciate discounts, although they don’t demand for one. Giving a regular client a discount is like giving them a ‘loyalty prize’ for working with you over the years.

Overdeliver. When you make promises to a client, you need to overdeliver. Clients will be expecting that you keep your promises, but they won’t be expecting something extra. Delivering more than you promised makes them feel that they got the best deal for their money.

There are several ways for you to overdeliver. You can submit a project earlier than expected, you can submit more frequent progress reports, or you can create a small additional feature to the project.

Say “Thank you”. Thank your client for meeting with you, signing the contract with you, paying you on time - everything. The more important occasions, such as selecting you for the project and making the final payments, should come in the form of a handwritten card or a small gift. The cost of the “thank you” will likely vary depending on the cost of the project, but even the simplest card makes a difference. One of my clients actually wrote me an email about how touched he was because of the year-end “thank you” card I sent. Then, he said he wanted to start a new project with me - even if he hadn’t contacted me for months.

Doing these five things may not be a necessary part of your work, but it makes the interaction between web workers and their clients more personal. Perhaps, by doing these things, your clients will realize that you’re not just some robotic contractor from the other side of the country.

What special things do you do for your clients? Do they have any advantages for you or your business?

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A common misnomer about Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is that it requires you to be using a headset, tethered to your computer.  This is simply untrue as modern VoIP services and solutions use either a) normal corded and cordless phones or b) a specialized phone that resembles a cordless phone or cell phone - just modified to utilized VoIP technology.

VoIP has some major advantages over traditional landline phones. First, typically you can call phones in the US and Canada for one monthly flat rate.  Also, international calls can be made very cheaply.  Included services with your flat rate service include: call waiting, call forwarding, online enabled voice mail, CallerID, and many more.  Whereas conventional phone companies charge you individually for each of these services, VoIP providers give them to you for one flat rate.

Where do you begin if you’d like to use your broadband connection to lower your phone bill dramatically?  Lets walk through some of the options.

More “Traditional” VoIP Services

Vonage is the most well-known Internet telephony service, thanks to their aggressive marketing campaigns. Vonage is a service that gives you a telephony adapter that converts your standard voice signals into packets that can be sent over the internet.  Therefore, you can plug your normal phones into this adapter and start dialing the same way you do with a landline.  Vonage service runs $25/month for unlimited calling to the US and Canada and many additional services including voicemail, call forwarding, etc.  Vonage requires a U.S. shipping address so you must live in the U.S. to use Vonage service.

Vonage service includes e911, which is a service that enables emergency responders to locate you when you dial 911.  Just a few years ago, before e911, there were incidents where responders couldn’t located VoIP users who called for emergency assistance.  Now with e911, you give your physical location to the VoIP service provider when you sign up for service.  Accordingly, it is important to update your address with our VoIP service provider should you move.

Packet8 is a veteran VoIP provider and prides itself on stability and reliability.  Packet8 sets itself apart from the VoIP pack by offering solid service and optional video conferencing features.  Their most popular plan, Freedom Unlimited, includes calling to United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, Guam, France, Italy, Ireland, Spain, and the UK for the flat rate of $24.95/month not including taxes and regulatory fees.  Packet8 charges a $30 activation charge.  Like Vonage, Packet8 will provide you with a telephone adapter.  Packet8 also includes e911.

There is a difference between Packet8 and many other VoIP providers that needs to be noted.  The voice technology Packet8 uses to transfer your voice over the Internet, called a codec, is different than Vonage.  Packet8 uses g.729 whereas Vonage utilizes g.711.  The result, in my experience, is that voice quality suffers.  This difference is especially noticeable when two parties on a phone call attempt to speak at the same time and drown each other out because of the way g.729 functions.

Rounding out the group of notable VoIP providers is ViaTalk.  One of the lesser known VoIP providers, ViaTalk prides itself on outstanding customer support.  You can either pay for an entire year (currently priced at $200/year) or monthly at $23/month, not including fees and taxes.  Their feature set includes voice mail, caller ID, call waiting, call forwarding, call return (*69) and an impressive customer control panel.  e911 service is included with ViaTalk service.  ViaTalk, along with Vonage, is only available in the United States.

I have had to work with ViaTalk customer support on a few occasions and have found them a pleasure to work with.  Their support is U.S. based and available 24 hours a day.

Skype

Unlike the afore mentioned options, Skype does not use a telephone adapter to make your voice calls route over the Internet.  Skype is the grand daddy of the VoIP world and is wildly popular as a computer-based VoIP service.  They offer very cheap voice calls to landlines and cell phones that are billed at around 2 cents a minute.  They’ve partnered with a few hardware manufacturers and have built Skype phones that look exactly like a cell phone or conventional cordless phones.  My favorite device is the NetGear VoIP841, however I look forward to trying more in the near future.

Skype recently announced a monthly plan that includes unlimited calling to the United States and Canada for $2.95/month.  Skype calls to landlines and cell phones used to vary in call quality, but I have found SkypeOut calls to be as good if not better than a normal landline phone conversation.  To see if Skype might work for you, download Skype and make a few calls to see if your quality is up to acceptable for you.  To get a phone number for people to dial you from conventional phones, you must purchase a SkypeIn number which runs $12 for a 3 month subscription or $36 for one year.

Important notes:

• You cannot use Skype to dial 911 in an emergency.  So if you need to dial 911, do it from a cell phone if Skype is your only calling option.  Skype does not use e911.
• With any VoIP service, service can go out from time to time, and relies on electric service.  It’s important to have a backup plan such as a cell phone in order to conduct business and make phone calls should your VoIP go out for any reason.
• These VoIP services are intented for those living in the U.S.  For international VoIP, Skype would be my first suggestion.  If you have experience with an alternative international VoIP provider, please share in the comments.
• VoIP call quality is dependent on the quality of your broadband connection to the Internet.

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Boingo, already one of the world’s largest providers of wifi hotspot services is hitting AT&T where it lives…or at least where it gets its coffee.

Boingo announced in an e-newsletter to customers that it will be expanding its service into Starbucks restaurants across the United States:

We’ll be adding Starbucks® locations market by market, but I’m excited to announce that you can already use your Boingo account at Starbucks® locations throughout the greater San Antonio, TX area. In the coming months, we’ll announce new markets via email and in this newsletter, with the expectation that all US-based Starbucks® will be online by the end of 2008.

In addition, Boingo announced that iPhone owners will get 15 minutes of free access in selected major airports after agreeing to watch a 15 second ad. iPhones get the red carpet treatment first, followed by Nokia smartphones and Internet tablets, Windows Mobile devices and Sony Ericsson dual-mode phones in the coming weeks.

Boingo’s unlimited plans in the U.S. start at $21.95/mo with no contract obligation.

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In an earlier post, I made the point that web workers who rely on home Wi-Fi networks, and who haven’t yet upgraded to 802.11n Wi-Fi wireless technology should definitely do so. Even though the 802.11n Wi-Fi proposed standard is not quite ratified yet, and some potential upgraders fear that the ratified products won’t be compatible with what they use now, there are numerous reasons to upgrade anyway to Draft-n. Now, some good solutions are emerging for upgrading easily, and there are signs that more businesses are moving up.

Lots of readers of this blog are Mac users, and many readers are already using 802.11n Wi-Fi because it’s built in to Apple’s Airport Extreme routers and many Apple systems. However, if you have older Macs, Other World Computing is offering good ways to upgrade those inexpensively.

Wi-Fi is radio technology, so to be using 802.11n Wi-Fi you need it in your router as well as in the devices you connect to your Wi-Fi network. Other World Computing has a new line of Wi-Fi adapters that will inexpensively bring 802.11n to any G3, G4, G5, or Intel processor-based Mac or PC with an available PCI, USB 2.0, or PCMCIA Card slot running Apple OS X 10.3.x or later or Windows 2000/XP and later.

You can check the prices for routers and adapters here. They’re quite reasonable, and adapters start at $67.99.

What if the final 802.11n standard turns out not to be compatible with your Draft-n products? Most people think that firmware upgrades will make this a non-issue, but if it does occur, a typical user would need only a few hundred dollars of upgrades. Meanwhile, due to the MIMO (multiple-input, multiple-output) antennas in Draft-n products, and more, you get vastly better performance than you can get with 802.11g Wi-Fi.

On a related note, Aruba Networks, which works closely with the Wi-Fi Alliance on Wi-Fi certification, has announced that it has shipped its 10,000th 802.11n access point. Universities and other organizations are upgrading prior to the official ratification of 802.11n. It makes much sense for web workers to do so as well.

Are you using Draft-n Wi-Fi?

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There’s no shortage of online task managers - but that doesn’t stop more from popping up all the time. Two relatively new (and free) entrants might be worth your while if you’re looking for a new app in this category.

Goal Organiser tries to move you from task management to goal management. In addition to entering steps (tasks), you also tag each one as to the goal it will contribute to. Coupled with other information about tasks, the application tries to automatically suggest your next action at any given point.

Listaculous, meanwhile, is all about simple lists of tasks. You can have as many lists as you want, with tasks that can be reordered and highlighted with color. Their twist is that you can access your lists through their site, through a Google gadget, or on any other site that embeds their control.

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The usual sites are buzzing with the news that Google has announced its new Friend Connect service (link won’t be turned on until tonight). Google is positioning this as “a service that helps website owners grow traffic by enabling any site on the web to easily provide social features for its visitors.”

Let’s start with what this is not: Google is not getting into the white label social networking space. Startups in that arena - like KickApps, who we’ve looked at before - allow you to build up your own site with social networking features like members, blogs, photo sharing, discussion, and so on. That approach lets the individual site be the center of gravity for the network, but results in needing to join multiple networks to keep up with all of your communities.Google is taking a diametrically opposite approach, keeping the center of gravity in the network. What Friend Connect does is allow members of a small set of existing social networks (Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, Orkut, and Plaxo) to interact on multiple sites across the internet. After webmasters sign up with Friend Connect (this may be difficult for a while; they’re going to meter access via a wait list), visitors to their sites can sign in to their existing network IDs and interact with their existing friends. So, for example, if WWD went with Friend Connect (which we’re not currently planning), you could log on with your Facebook ID and see and chat with your Facebook friends here.

The interaction is all going to happen through included code snippets that display in IFRAMEs - in other words, the Friend Connect functionality will be isolated islands within your site, like raisins in a cookie. Though Google is planning to use APIs like OpenID, OpenAuth, and OpenSocial in the backend plumbing of Friend Connect, there’s no front end API to allow webmasters to get information out. If you’re running a Friend Connect-enabled site, you won’t know what visitors are even doing on that part of your pages.

This idea - that users will bring existing IDs with them and insert them into other sites on the net - has been tried before. Yahoo’s MyBlogLog is in this neighborhood, as are many startups that try to enable leaving comments on any web site. Sure, Google’s approach is a tad more standards-centered, and it has the advantage of leveraging numerous already-large member communities. But what I don’t see here is any really compelling use case.

Why should I, as a webmaster, set aside part of my page for you to have a conversation in? Why should you, as a user, come to my site to talk with your Facebook friends, rather than using Facebook? Why should I have to choose which identity to share with a site, rather than just logging in with OpenID and interacting with other users of that site? What are we getting in return for pushing another stream of data through Google?

Until we see some compelling answers to those questions, Friend Connect looks to me like an attempt to make sure that Facebook and MySpace don’t grab all the mindshare with their recent data portability announcements. Right now I don’t see enough value for either users or webmasters to recommend Friend Connect over existing solutions for adding interactivity to sites.

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After a long private beta period, the much anticipated Xobni plug-in for Microsoft Office finally went mainstream last week as they opened up the offering to the general public. Press has seemingly always been good to Xobni, they are a favorite of our parent site GigaOm, and their announcement elicited a lot of buzz, including here on WWD.

With all the attention the product was getting, and the promise of “a whole new look at your email” I couldn’t resist giving it a thorough look to see how well it lived up to the hype.

Installation and set up of Xobni was quick and easy. The download was painless with not even an email address required. The installer did alert me that because I connect to my mail via IMAP indexing of my recent items might take a while, and indeed it did take about an hour. The fact that it broke down the set up and indexing into stages was nice though. It let me get started with the product as quickly as possible while it worked on creating a full index at a later time.

The indexing is critical as that is what powers the search, and the Xobni search really shines. The filtering is nearly instantaneous as you type, and the display provides contextual cues as to where your search term appears. I give them really high marks how well they did on this front.

The search box is front and center on the sidebar but it is also filled with a lot of useful information that changes based upon the email that you have selected. It creates a dashboard of sorts for that person, displaying a phone number from their contact card or pulled from the email. It also displays other email conversations (threaded ala Gmail) while another box collects and displays any files you have exchanged.

Particularly handy is the ability to further define your search criteria once you are within a user profile. For example to find specific words within a conversation between you and another party. Again, the filtering is lightning fast.

The social networking aspect of Xobni is getting a lot of attention and indeed Xobni shows you who else a person has emailed and any commonalities that it can determine between you. It’s an interesting take on connecting folks, although I didn’t discover anything earth shattering. I think an eventual hook into other social services like Twitter could enhance this further.

Xobni also offers a time scheduling function where it will automatically extract free time from you calendar and submit some proposed meeting times to your chosen contact. It’s a nice feature if you fully populate your calendar but it would seem that most schedules would require a bit of tweaking before sending.

One of the things that I really like about Xobni is that is useful without being obtrusive. It provides additional, useful functionality without taking over or requiring a change in the way that you work. It’s just there when you need it. The sidebar can take up a bit of screen real estate, especially in Outlook 2007 if you have the To-Do Bar visible, but it can be minimized and tucked out of the way.

I’m not a heavy Outlook user as my mail and calendaring is all done through Google Apps, but I do sync mail via IMAP and find the sorting and grouping features in Outlook to be really useful. The addition of Xobni isn’t going to make me give up my Gmail, but it does make Outlook infinitely more usable, and after just a week I can’t imagine trying to search for anything without it.

At one point, a message at the bottom of the sidebar asked me if I was happy and gave me the opportunity to give them feedback. I didn’t take advantage of it then but hopefully they’ll read this and see what a good job I think they have done so far.

Xobni is currently in beta and runs on both XP and Vista in conjunction with Office versions 2003 and 2007. Their site indicates that support for XP Service Pack 3 is forthcoming but they currently recommend sticking with SP2 if you are running Xobni.

Are you stuck with Outlook? Do you think Xobni could help you use it more productively?

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If you’re in software development, “agile” has a specific meaning - a set of processes designed to support rapid delivery of value to customers. Now VersionOne, a provider of an online project management tool for agile organizations, is out with a new release - V1: Agile Team. This edition of the product is aimed at groups just getting started with agile practices, and strips things down to tracking releases, stories, and tasks, together with integrated reporting. Based on a scrum-style process, it lets you keep track of everything that’s going on with a project and update in a variety of ways, including grid editing or drag and drop.

Of course, you can use any project management application to track software development. But the features built into more V1: Agile Team make it worth a look - graphs that show you how you’re doing, and data entry aimed specifically at software projects, are among the highlights here. Though they’ve put a $995 price tag on it (compared to $30 per user per month for their Enterprise edition), right now it’s available for free, in either hosted or downloadable versions.

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Coworking continues to evolve and mold to the increasingly blurred boundaries between domestic and professional life. An area often overlooked is that of childcare for remote workers and home workers.

I have colleagues and collaborators who, despite the fact they’re self-employed and work largely from a home office, still need to employ childcare. Some may see this as an unnecessary overhead, but it’s actually desperately needed in order to provide focus whilst working from home.

Enter Cubes & Crayons in Menlo Park, CA, self-described as ‘full-time childcare and office space’; think of it as coworking + creche! Cube & Crayons was profiled recently (along with New York’s TwoRooms) in a Springwise article exploring emerging trends in ‘More Work Spaces for Parents‘.

At Cubes & Crayons, the usual connectivity, office equipment, conference rooms and work spaces exist alongside facilities for kids ranging from just a few months old to pre-schoolers. Like most coworking plans, there’s a lot of flexibility in choosing drop-in, pay-as-you-go and pay-monthly options, with discounts to regular members.

Interestingly, Cubes & Crayons not only encourages members to contribute, but writes it into their agreements; for every 20 hours or use, parents/members are expected to contribute 4 hours of voluntary time, perhaps to help care for the children in the facilities. Rather than being an onerous requirement, I believe this kind of quid-pro-quo can help to bring cohesion to a community and actually deepen ties between people sharing the space. If I have to trust you with my child, I’ll make damn sure I get to know you well!

The addition of childcare facilities to coworking spaces is as inevitable a development of coworking as coworking was to freelancers and web workers. Coworking is a lifestyle choice - we choose to exercise control and freedom over our working patterns and our children are as fundamental a part of these lifestyle choices as any other working environment.

In a previous post on the future of coworking, we speculated on how human resources and enterprise structures would accomodate coworkers into their cultures. However, issues such as childcare speak to wider issues on how we approach cultural, corporate and urban design.

If coworking breaks into the mainstream can we imagine…

• cities becoming more diffuse, as office campuses and downtown areas give way to hundreds of coworking hubs - perhaps jointly funded by large corporates.
• homes becoming larger as families accomodate more than one home-worker, perhaps even hosting friends and colleagues in coworking areas of their homes?
• a decline in commuter traffic as people work closer to their homes, or indeed from them.

Of course, such notions have long been explored as telecommuting found its way from labs to reality, but perhaps coworking represents an opening to reimagine how we live and work more broadly; regardless, I believe childcare will be as integral a part of coworking as connectivity.

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The rumor mill has been churning for months, with both RIM and Apple gearing up for Round 2 in the smartphone wars. Apple fans hope the next iPhone stomps the BlackBerry into the ground for business users, while the CrackBerry addicts hope the next BlackBerry will make their favorite device just as much fun as the competition.

While we speculate on why Apple discontinued online sales of the iPhone, RIM wasted no time in making a formal announcement of the BlackBerry Bold (aka BlackBerry 9000) this morning.

There are few surprises in this announcement, since fan site CrackBerry.com has been playing with and talking about the new device for the past few weeks.

In short, the new BlackBerry has a much sharper screen, more RAM (1 GB), wifi, 3G, GPS and a camera. Even better, most reports say the keyboard is easier to work with than the one on the 8800 series. The new BlackBerry OS features better email (HTML!), better browser, better media handling and DocumentsToGo for editing Office files. It even syncs with iTunes (on a PC-only, I assume).

RIM says it will be released “this summer” so that can mean anywhere from June to September. Most sites are predicting an August release date. So if you believe the rumor sites, RIM has the first press release but Apple may actually be the first to ship.

Which is the “killer” and which is the “target” depends on who you talk to, and whether your phone/mobile email use is dictated by your employer.

What do you think of the new BlackBerry? Is it enticing or are you still holding out for that 3G iPhone?

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