Free online meeting applications, such as Yugma, which I wrote about yesterday, have gotten very powerful in recent years, but they still don’t do all the cool things they could do. Few of them offer any sophisticated way to deal with video, especially high-definition video, and the devices you can use them on tend to be limited. These last two shortcomings are why a review of CallWave’s Fuze that I saw on PC World’s site caught my eye.
After trying Fuze, even though it’s not free and I’ve been slightly more impressed with the features in paid services such as WebEx’s, I think many web workers will want to try it.
Read the rest of this entry »
This morning, we published an article by a guest contributor. Approximately 30 minutes after the post was published, we were made aware that the freelance contributor had already submitted and published the exact same article on another site. As soon as the duplication was brought to our attention, we pulled the article.
We apologize to our readers for the error.
Last month I wrote up the new version 4.0 of one of my favorite free online meeting applications: Yugma. This application is a favorite among many WebWorkerDaily readers and writers. Version 4.0 brings a lot of conveniences, but I still had a few things remaining on my wish list.
Now, Yugma has just announced several improvements to its free and paid plans that can make a big difference for those who regularly use this application. At the top of the list of improvements is a fix for a bone I had picked before.
Read the rest of this entry »
If you do any blogging, reporting or electronic publishing focused on timely topics, take a look at Whostalkin, a social media and metasearch engine for blogs that has just come out of private beta testing. I’ve been experimenting with it today, and, for the most part, it does a good job of ferreting out conversational and anecdotal information on newsworthy topics for which there may not be lots of coverage immediately available.
Here are the kinds of tasks I tried with it, and what I found.
Read the rest of this entry »
Last summer, I did a post on the best ways to get the most battery life you can with portable computers. Since then, I’ve had a lot of good alternate suggestions come my way from readers, and I’ve had a chance to try some of the suggestions.
With many web workers probably traveling to CES, Macworld and other shows this month, here is an updated list of nine suggestions that can make a big difference.
Read the rest of this entry »
It’s one of my favorite pursuits to try out bushels of open source and freeware applications, looking for gems. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose on the hunt, but there are definitely a lot of applications out there that cost nothing but pack powerful punches.
Here are three Windows freeware applications that rose to the top of my favorites list in 2008–ones that I use every week.
Read the rest of this entry »
A while back, a friend of mine and I had an idea for a new e-commerce web site we were thinking of launching. We eventually shelved the idea after digging up a couple of sites that were too close in spirit to the same idea, but one of the things I remember we worked hard on was mocking up a good looking design for the site, complete with a slick logo. This can be more dificult than it seems at first, but is an important first step in moving from your vision of a web site to execution.
Here are some free resources that can make the process easier, and provide good prototyping results.
Read the rest of this entry »
Earlier today, a reader reminded me about OpenGoo, a free, open source suite of web-hosted productivity applications. I’ve used OpenGoo in the past, but hadn’t checked back in on it for a while. It has a nicer interface than it did before, and delivers word processing, document management, contact management, e-mail, project management, and time management applications.
If you like to use Google’s online applications, or Zoho’s, definitely take a look at each of the applications in OpenGoo, especially the information management features.
Read the rest of this entry »
