Web Worker Daily

I recently wrote “How to Carry Your Office on a Stick,” which showcased the best ways to install portable applications on a USB flash drive. But what if you’re the type of person that doesn’t like to carry a flash drive around or happens to lose or forget it? The solution then might be a desktop in the clouds. This idea of an online or virtual desktop that you can access from any computer has actually been around for years, but continues to evolve with time. Here are some of the best ways to host your desktop online today. Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s note: With this post we welcome Thursday Bram to the WebWorkerDaily team. Thursday is a full-time writer who has written on topics ranging from small business to kitchen appliances — and yes, that includes the kitchen sink. She’s based in Laurel, Maryland and focuses most of her writing online.

Adobe is adding to options for working in the cloud with Acrobat.com. About a year ago, Acrobat.com went online, competing with Google Docs and Zoho with word processing, collaboration options and tools to work with PDFs. Since then, Adobe had also added Presentations to the mix.

The news at Acrobat.com is twofold. First of all, Adobe has added a new spreadsheet tool, bringing its suite of online tools in line with those offered by Google and making it far more useful to a web worker who wants to handle all of the basic office file types in the cloud. Second, Adobe has announced that Acrobat.com is leaving beta, which, in turn, has led to the announcement that business subscriptions for these tools are going live. Read the rest of this entry »

Many of the web apps that we cover here on WebWorkerDaily wouldn’t have made it off the ground without the scalability and flexibility offered by cloud computing. It’s one of the main reasons that we’ve seen an explosion in the number and variety of web apps over the last couple of years, and it’s radically changing the way that we work on the web.

The cloud offers many benefits, but as the technology is still very much in its infancy, it’s hard to sort the signal from the noise and identify the real opportunities. If you’re looking to get ahead of the pack and exploit cloud computing in your next project, or simply want to check out the opportunities that it brings to the table, you should check out Structure 09, our annual cloud computing conference, returning to the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco on June 25, 2009. The day will be keynoted by two pioneers in the world of “infrastructure on demand,” Marc Benioff and Paul Sagan. Sagan, CEO of Akamai, will share his vision about how Akamai continues to innovate in an industry it helped birth a decade ago. Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, will share his insights that drove Salesforce.com to become the first SaaS (Software as a Service) company to pass the billion-dollar revenue mark. Read the rest of this entry »

Collaboration is always a challenge for any team, but when that team is virtual, cloud collaboration presents its own set of organizational and tracking problems. GroupSwim is looking to step into the slot between e-mail correspondence and full-featured robust project management systems ala Basecamp. According to the company, GroupSwim is not for the management of a project but for the collaborative exchanges during the creation of deliverables.

While one of the company’s tag lines is “social collaboration for the enterprise,” I always look at software and apps from the standpoint of the lone Web worker who puts together various virtual teams for projects. Can GroupSwim be useful to distributed Web workers?

Read the rest of this entry »