The internet started as a place to view, and only view. With the advent of "web2.0" we have many useful online tools that help us streamline our professional and personal lives. This post outlines some of our favorite online apps to hopefully give you a jump-start toward improving your productivity and simplifying your life. Let's get started.
Jott.com
Jott converts your voice into emails, text messages, reminders, lists and appointments. Jott is a voice to text transcription service which allows its users to call a toll-free telephone number and speak for up to 30 seconds. The speech is then transcribed to text using a combination of software and of human transcribers, who work in a "sterile environment which also includes medical dictation." The message can be sent back to oneself, turned into a reminder, sent to a contact or group, or sent to a third party "Jott link" such as LiveJournal. Sending to contacts and groups can be through email, text message, or both.
Twitter.com
Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing? Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send "updates" (or "tweets"; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service (e.g. on a cell phone), instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific or Facebook. Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and instantly delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can restrict delivery to those in his or her circle of friends (delivery to everyone is the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, instant messaging, SMS, RSS, email or through an application. For SMS, four gateway numbers are currently available: short codes for the United States, Canada, and India, as well as a United Kingdom number for international use. Several third parties offer posting and receiving updates via email.
Jaiku.com
Jaiku is a social networking, micro-blogging and lifestreaming service comparable to Twitter, but keeps going where Twitter stops. Jaiku allows you to aggregate RSS feeds, photo streams and many other online activities right into your account and therefore broadcast them on to your followers. It pulls all your online communications together.
RememberTheMilk.com
Manage tasks quickly and easily. An intuitive interface makes managing tasks fun. Set due dates easily with next Friday or in 2 weeks. Extensive keyboard shortcuts make task management quicker than ever.
Get reminded, anywhere. Receive reminders via email, SMS, and instant messenger.
Organize the way you want to. Are you a list lover? Create as many lists as you need. Into tagging? Use the task cloud to easily see what you have to do. Want to store notes along with your tasks? You can do that too.
Locate your tasks. Use the map to see where your tasks are located in the real world. See what's nearby or on your way, and plan the best way to get things done.
Work together to get things done. Share, send and publish tasks and lists with your contacts or the world. Remind your significant other to do their household chores.
Add tasks wherever you are. Adding tasks is as simple as firing off an email (even from your phone). See an important date on the web? Add it to your list with Quick Add.
Del.icio.us
Del.icio.us (pronounced "delicious") is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. Del.icio.us uses a non-hierarchical keyword categorization system in which users can tag each of their bookmarks with a number of freely chosen keywords (cf. folksonomy). A combined view of everyone's bookmarks with a given tag is available; for instance, the URL "http://del.icio.us/tag/wiki" displays all of the most recent links tagged "wiki". Its collective nature makes it possible to view bookmarks added by similar-minded users. All bookmarks posted to Del.icio.us are publicly viewable by default, although users can mark specific bookmarks as private, and imported bookmarks are private by default.
CallWave.com
Vtxt, a speech recognition technology that transcribes voicemail into a text message that users can read on their mobile phone, in email or online. Jamie Lendino from PCMag.com explained on October 29, 2007, that instead of transcribing the entire message into text, the Vtxt technology is unique because it, "squeezes each message under the 160-character SMS limit using its GIST (General Information on the Subject and Timing) technology to give you the gist rather than the entire text." Callwave also offers Visual Voicemail and text messaging widgets, Virtual Fax and the Internet Answering Machine.
1. Switch your voicemail service to CallWave with no interruption and no hassle.
2. When someone calls your mobile number and you don't answer, they get your CallWave voicemail.
3. You get a summarized text transcription of their message on your mobile phone, in your email and in your message center.
4. You can also listen to their message on your mobile phone, in your email and in your message center.
5. You can reply via text and call back features and then archive (or delete) the message in your message center.
AwesomeHighlighter.com
Webapp the Awesome Highlighter aims to give context to shared links by allowing users to highlight text in a webpage before they send it out. Awesome Highlighter creates a special URL that saves your highlighting schemes and displays them when you click through to the link. You can finally give quick context to a link without typing a long-winded email.
Why you would use it?
To show someone what you think is important.
To save time for the reader.
How to use it.
Insert a web page address above and click "highlight page."
Select text with your mouse on the following page.
Click "Done" when you're finished.
Copy the short url into an email, forum or blog.
LooseStitch.com
LooseStitch lets you create and share outliner documents. Brainstorm ideas. Jot them down. Call friends over. Get feedback. Make changes. Share. Create outlines for whatever you want. Using LooseStitch is extremely easy. You start out your outlline by adding rows to it. Jot down anything relevant that crosses your mind. You can rearrange and structure your thoughts later. Or delete them if you must. Once you have your basic points in front of you, start reordering them. Move a point up if it is more important or needs to get addressed earlier. Move it down if it can wait. So far, your notes won't look any different from a good old Todo list. But not to worry. You will tap into the real power of an outliner when you start grouping points to form a heirarchy of ideas. To group points together, insert a row before the first point of a group. Simply add a row anywhere in the outline and move it in place. This new row will act as a heading for the points below it, so give it a meaningful title. Once the heading row is created, click on every row that is logically part of this heading and indent it. The dot beside a heading row will become a disclosure triangle that you can use to expand or collapse the group. LooseStitch even lets you colour your rows and mark off items as completed. In fact there is a whole lot more you can do with LooseStitch like embed within webpages and export for use with other applications as text, HTML, OPML and for use with OmniOutliner.
IWantSandy.com
Sandy is a virtual assistant centered on your email. You email Sandy with (almost) natural language statements, like “Remind me to call John Smith at 8am tomorrow”, and Sandy emails you a reminder at 8am tomorrow to call John Smith. Coupled with Jott, Sandy is a really exciting service!
MozyPro.com
100% of all hard drives fail. Back up your data. Automate it and never worry about it again by doing it online. Multiple plans for business and home. It’s secure, hi-performance and easy to use and administer.
YouSendIt.com
YouSendIt is the No.1 digital delivery company serving business and individuals on the Web today. Their innovative service enables users to send, receive and track files, on-demand. YouSendIt provides a trusted, convenient and smart solution for transferring large files over the Internet, replacing the need for FTP transfers, overnight couriers and unreliable email attachments. YouSendIt's technology platform provides developers and partners the resources for integrating YouSendIt services into the applications people use for creating and communicating. When it has to be there now- just YouSendIt!
Google.com/a
Google Apps brings together essential services to help your business, school, group or family communicate and collaborate more effectively. These services are powerful, easy to set up, require no maintenance, and you can get them for free. Everything is unified by the Start Page, a central place for your users to preview their inboxes and calendars, access your essential content, and search the web. Administrators can choose to deploy a mix of the communication and collaboration products listed below.
Communicate and connect
Gmail - Offer custom email addresses to your organization with up to 25 gigabytes of storage for each account, search tools to help people find information fast, plus instant messaging and calendar tools built right into the email interface.
Google Talk - Your users can call or send instant messages to their contacts for free -- anytime, anywhere in the world. File sharing and voicemail is included, too.
Google Calendar - Your users can organize their schedules and share events, meetings and entire calendars with others. Your organization can also publish calendars and events on the web.
Collaborate and publish
Google Docs and Spreadsheets - Your users can create documents, spreadsheets and presentations and collaborate with each other in real-time right inside a web browser window.
The Start Page - A central place for your users to preview their inboxes and calendars, access your essential content, and search the web.
Google Sites - Work together to keep related documents, web content and other information in one place, on one site.
HighriseHQ.com
Track contacts, leads, customers, vendors, and others with Highrise. Ring. It’s for you.
Ping. You’ve got mail. It’s a new contact, a lead, a customer, a journalist. It’s someone saying something important you need to remember. What do you do now? Where do you log notes from the conversation? Where do you put the contact information? Where do you set up your next action? In Highrise.
So many people. So many phone calls, emails, notes, follow-ups, and tasks. Who’s this person again? When did we last speak? What did we talk about? Has anyone else in my company talked to this person? What’s supposed to happen next? Highrise is here to keep track of it all.
When you use Highrise, contacts and communication history can be shared across your entire company. No more “Jim has the client’s number and he’s out of the office today.” No more “I don’t know what Jane told the printer last week.” No more “Oops, I didn’t know you already called her back — I just did too.” With Highrise, everyone’s on the same page.
Highrise is your homebase for everyone that’s important to your business. It puts together all those little points of contact so you can see the bigger picture. It makes one history out of many interactions. Highrise helps you make sense of it all.
Your address book doesn’t do enough. Traditional CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software tries to do too much. That’s why we built Highrise. It’s the just-right, more thoughtful way to keep track of the people, conversations, and tasks that are the lifelines of your business.
BasecampHQ.com
Basecamp takes a fresh, novel approach to project collaboration. Projects don't fail from a lack of charts, graphs, stats, or reports, they fail from a lack of clear communication. Basecamp solves this problem by providing tools tailored to improve the communication between people working together on a project.
Basecamp features a simple permissions system that allows you to specify who can see which projects. For example, if you want Susan to see only 5 of your 13 projects, just uncheck a single checkbox on the projects you don't want her to see.
The ultimate in online, collaborative project management software, Basecamp takes the cake.