With no Stevenote at this year’s Macworld, the world not only awaited Apple’s 2009 lineup with bated breath, but also the company’s inaugural Schillergram. Sadly, Apple’s announcements were widely accepted as being underwhelming, lacking the razzle-dazzle of previous Macworld keynotes; no iPods, Mac minis or iPhones, but a slew of application updates and the death of DRM for music (yay!)
Om provided a great overview and perhaps the most pertinent release for web workers was the beta launch of iWork.com, Apple’s foray into web-based office productivity applications.
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The North of England seems to be a hotbed of coworking with not only major cities such as Manchester and Leeds hosting multiple, vibrant coworking communities, but smaller towns such as Huddersfield and Bradford now beginning to enter the field. Options are available for web workers and freelancers wishing to enjoy the flexibility and community spirit of coworking.
Huddersfield is a curious place - an old market town of just under 150′000 people, about halfway between regional hubs, Leeds and Manchester, yet a nascent hub of creative and digital talent. Recent years have seen an infusion of public money in creating a ‘digital quarter‘ for the city, as well as the local university’s school of computing taking a lead in promoting crossover between creative and computing subject areas. Now the city is set to launch not one, but two coworking communities.
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Earlier December saw the launch of Cogi (pronounced co-jee), an audio recording and transcription service in the mould of QTech’s reQall and SkyDeck, bringing a potentially a valuable note taking tool for web workers.
The US-based service enables users to capture the audio content of any phone call or conference calls in their entirety for later transcription to text by the service. Users can also markup parts of the call for particular emphasis during the transcription process. Apparently marking up such segments of a call is as simple as hitting a touchtone keypad to issue stop and start commands, though I’m sure a visual aid to this would be a welcome future addition.
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We last briefly looked at Invotrak in the Summer of 2007. The service is similar to Freshbooks, in that users can create and track invoices and timesheets for client projects and employees as well as some funky analysis of payment history.
Feature-for-feature, Invotrak and Freshbooks seem almost identical, though the latter offers a wider range of price plans, the former does seem to enjoy a cleaner and clearer design.
However, perhaps the ace-in-the-hole for Invotrak is its support for the iPhone, via a native App Store application, and its availability as a Dashboard widget for Macs.
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Coffee shops with free wifi are the web workers’ digital oases, allowing us to flit from coffee to cake, sucking down bits and bites. For those without a home office, or access to a coworking community, such locations can quickly become our nomadic offices.
So with this in mind, it’s great to hear the that last week, the UK’s Pret a Manger launched free wifi access in around 90% of its stores. ‘Pret‘ is well known for its ethical business practices and healthy, freshly made food, so it makes for a nice alternative to the usual Starbucks hourly charge (as much as £5/hour!) or the unappealing McDonalds environment.
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Last month’s SIAA OnDemand Conference saw the launch of RocketLawyer’s ‘web-based law office’ - a service that may prove to be a useful DIY legal utility for freelancers, web workers and startups.
RocketLawyer is essentially a library of legal forms - covering the spectrum of business and corporate law, ranging from wills, pre-nups and leases to NDAs, employment contracts and incorporation agreements - that enables legal advice and execution to be delivered just as web applications enabled software to be delivered as a service. At its heart, the forms are simply a vehicle for connecting lawyers to clients, but the self-service element allows for a large part of the costs incurred to be mimised as lawyers are only required for the final review stage.
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The creation of Address Book 2.0 - the evolution of contacts applications into something more distributed, social and elegant - is a prize being hotly contested by many startups. Just recently, Web Worker Daily has examined Soocial, ContactHero and some of the privacy pitfalls of web-based contact books.
The latest to join the fray is Cellity’s Address Book 2.0, launched earlier this month, at the LeWeb’08 conference in Paris. The service promises to centralize and synchronize a user’s communication points from sources as diverse as Outlook, Twitter, cellphones and social networks.
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