Web Worker Daily

I just received an email message about the demise of Projecho, little more than three months after first hearing about the easy conferencing application during its big PR push.

What do you do when an application you’ve adopted and incorporated into your work process suddenly goes under? Nancy recently wrote about why she doesn’t trust the cloud for her work, but when you run a virtual company or are part of a virtual team, it isn’t realistic to keep all of your work on a local computer. Even if you aren’t a virtual worker, there are still apps that die quick deaths every day — their demise can leave you out in the cold. Read the rest of this entry »

You are an independent contractor, sole proprietor, or owner of a company of one. What happens to your business, your income and your clients if something happens to you? If you haven’t thought about setting up a formal contingency plan to outline the steps you need to take now in case something happens to you, you could be jeopardizing your livelihood. Whether it is an accident or an illness, something unexpected could occur at any time that can put a strain on your work and life.

Here are some things you should think about when developing — and implementing — a contingency plan. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve raved about real-time free file-sharing service drop.io before. The company just unveiled a new free, no-download web presentation system called present.io.

The key to present.io is simplicity. First you make a “drop,” which is drop.io’s term for storage space, and add any required media in two clicks.  You get a unique URL for your drop to share it with your participants. Then you activate a presentation, and everyone viewing your drop will be able to access your presentation.

Everything the admin of the presentation does is seen in real time by the participants. Open a picture, video or a document, everyone sees it. Participants can also see your cursor as you click through options. Like any web conferencing presentation software, participants cannot click on and affect your presentation, since it is not a collaborative space.

Present.io works well with document presentation, and you can open the document into full-screen mode for more detailed viewing. Audio and video presentations work in the same way. You can also open up a chat window at any time for real-time text chat. Or use present.io in conjunction with a free voice conferencing system to have a free, fast and easy web conferencing system at your fingertips.

While present.io can’t compete with the more robust paid web presentation systems out there like WebEx and Adobe Connect Pro, if you are looking for instant, free presentations that require zero software download and no complicated setup, this could be the solution for you.

What are you using — and spending– on your web conferencing systems?

Free file-sharing service drop.io (previously raved about here on WebWorkerDaily) added a really useful new service this week: real-time collaboration (or “streaming” as drop.io call it). This should be very handy for web workers: you could use it to share files during teleconferences or to collaborate on project assets with your distributed team, for example.

For the uninitiated, drop.io is a simple and flexible file-sharing service. You don’t need to sign up — just head to the site, select some files to upload and you’ll be taken to your “drop” (a space you can use for sharing files), which sits at a URL generated by the service, like this: http://drop.io/megy3fx. You can then send that URL to anyone you need to share your files with. You can choose to leave your files open to all, make them private, or control access as you wish. You can upload files to the drop in a number of ways: through the web interface, via email or fax, you can even send it voicemails (which are stored as audio files on the drop).

drop.io: a "drop" is a space to share files

The really great thing about drop.io is it’s a foolproof and easy-to-use service that makes things really simple, which means sharing files with less technically-minded folk is less of a hassle than using something like FTP. The new features make it possible to collaborate on files in real-time on your drop.

Live asset updates

Any changes to your drop (like changes to existing assets, or the addition of new assets) are immediately displayed to everyone viewing it. Updates are displayed automatically using Ajax and don’t require you to reload the page. In my tests, changes were displayed virtually instantaneously. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve covered drop.io in the past, but some recent updates definitely warrant a fresh look at the service.  The basic idea behind drop.io is to give users an extremely easy way to share files of many types in a straightforward manner.

When you go to drop.io, you’re given the option to create a “drop” which is like a file locker for your files to be uploaded to.  You can then set a password for the drop and an expiration date, if needed.  Additionally, you can say what types of rights users of the drop have: whether it be just to view the files, view and add to the files, or to view/add/delete new files to the drop.

Read the rest of this entry »