To the envy of developers everywhere, Google Software Engineers are granted what they call their “20% time.” As a result, Google coders get 20% of their working time to work on projects that the developers select away from management approval. Many well-known Google projects have resulted from 20% time, showing that the effort benefits the company as well.
Gmail, one of WWD’s favorite web based utilities, has been put into the spotlight as Google opened the door on Gmail Labs. This section of Gmail’s website will house new “beta” add-ins and features in an effort to gather feedback from users. To get to Gmail Labs, inside your Gmail settings pane, click on the Labs tab. Note: GMail is still rolling Labs out to users. If your Gmail doesn’t have it yet, check back a little later. It appears that this is only available to @gmail.com email addresses and not Google Apps addresses.
Anything web worker useful here? Let’s take a look.
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Scribd is a document hosting service that we’ve touched on before that allows users to bring their documents into their online service for viewing and later use. Scribd recently launched a service called iPaper@Scribd that is aiming to do away with annoying email attachments by granting users the ability to convert documents to the company’s iPaper format.
Using iPaper@Scribd is drop dead simple. To get started, cc: ipaper@scribd.com in your outgoing email attachment and fire off the email. As a result all your other recipients will receive a link to the Sribd hosted document a few moments later. Alternatively, you can just email Scribd your document and forward on the link when you receive it back from your web service.
If you use the first option mentioned above, it may really annoy your email recipients. This is because they’ll receive two emails - one with the original attachment and a second Scribd email with a link to their version of the document.
On another note, considering you’re uploading business documents to the Internet, we would not recommend putting up business sensitive documents that may contain proprietary business information.
Scribd has been used to display business documents on blogs for a while and I think it will be a great tool for people who wish to share documents in a very easy manner.
Small business owners are always looking for smart ways to keep costs down while achieving useful practicality. Whether it’s running a business from your home office to avoid renting an office or completing administrative tasks sometimes best outsourced to a hired hands, business owners seek balance in profitability and efficiently running their businesses.
Additionally, US cellular service providers over the last few months have been rolling out “unlimited plans” that offer an unlimited bucket of minutes for one flat monthly rate. In most cases, $99 a month will give you unlimited chatters a way to talk all you want. Sprint’s plan is very attractive because it includes unlimited voice, data, and SMS.
However, T-Mobile put a new spin on the unlimited plan by offering an unlimited family plan. For example, if you have a $99 T-Mobile unlimited plan, you can add additional lines for just $49/month that will include unmetered national voice minutes, SMS, MMS, and instant messaging.
Small business owners may not know this, but this “Family” plan is not only usable by those who share genetic bonds. This is applicable to small business because for about $250 (not including taxes), you can have unlimited wireless minutes to run your business with. This type of value makes the offering very competitive and could be comparable to Internet telephony (VoIP) offerings. However, the beauty of this T-Mobile unlimited family plan is that you have access to your minutes no matter where your cell phone happens to be.
For more information about the new plans, see T-Mobile’s website.
Would you consider running your small business on cell phones? What tradoffs can you think of?
As forecast in a previous post, Starbucks has begun their complimentary Wi-Fi service. To get your two free hours of Wi-Fi, you must:
- Create an AT&T Wi-Fi account
- Have a Starbucks card (that can have as little as $5) on it and you must have used your Starbucks card once in the last 30 days.
- And agree to be emailed (spammed) by AT&T up to 4 times a year.
Not a bad deal: get a Starbucks card and an Americano and you can have 2 hours to use their professionally managed and speedy Wi-Fi.
As another option for free Wi-Fi with your morning coffee, check out your local coffee shop and of course Boingo is also an option.
For more information on AT&T’s Wi-Fi Service, see their FAQ.
(Photo credit: Flickr User visualpanic)
When traveling abroad, making calls back home or otherwise can get very expensive, as alluded to in a previous post. With an unlocked GSM mobile phone, you can use the Orange service as discussed in the aforementioned link, or any other pre-paid GSM provider. However, what if you could combine the convenience of a mobile phone with the low-cost calling of a VoIP company.
A mobile VoIP company called Truphone is attempting to make international calling very inexpensive for travelers and other users of their service. Truphone is a program that runs on your Wi-Fi enabled mobile handset used the Internet to cheaply send and receive phone calls, much like to Skype on your PC. Truphone allows for cheap calling from your mobile phone when signed onto Truphone via Wi-Fi.
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If your company or co-workers are involved in numerous web 2.0 sites, you may have images on Flickr, videos on YouTube, a blog with an RSS feed and so on. This results in giving your website users many places to look when they consume your organization’s online media - not very user friendly.
This content separation leaves a space that aggregation services are trying to fill. Sites such as FriendFeed (covered before), Tumblr, and the new Strands.com (covered by parent site GigaOm.com) are all vying for your attention. These aggregation websites create what are called activity streams or life streams, and combine all your online media into one place (and one RSS Feed) for your intended audience. You have complete control as to which sites are combined and aggregated in the services.
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Back when broadband Internet access was made available to homes in the late 1990’s, teleworking took off. In businesses, employees were allowed to work from home part time (in some cases, full time) and many home based businesses took off, allowing small time entrepreneurs to have a low-cost launching point for their great idea.
Then, reality set in. Working from your home can be isolating and can result in feeling cut off from the working world. Co-working is a new trend, as recently reported by CNN and others, which involves teleworkers gathering within the same physical space in order to have some social time while working on their tasks. There are businesses such as CubeSpace and Citizen Space that make co-working easy by offering space for co-workers to gather, however what is a web worker to do if they don’t have this type of option close by?
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Being able to bookmark and save web pages for future reference is a functionality that has been tried by many players, including 
