No man (or woman) is an island – and this statement can’t be any truer if you’re a designer or developer. Though paid/subscription services like Basecamp and Zimbra are great, individuals strapped for cash have a ton of alternatives that provide similar (if not better) features. In this article, you’ll find 15 free tools to help you facilitate remote/web-based collaboration. Whether you need basic whiteboarding/brainstorming tools or fully-featured project management applications – you should

This is a community service announcement. Since I took the time to crack the download syntax for the PowerPoint decks presented this week at PDC, I thought I’d make my work publicly available. Here it is (i.e. sessions listed in alphabetically order with the session titles copied from the original master session list posted here, where some of the titles changed following Microsoft announcements like Windows Azure): BB01 - A Lap around Cloud Services Part 2 (e.g. the presented session was t

Following up Monday's post about the Freemium Rate, Hudson Barton wrote "in a normal 'freemium' relationship, it is the higher valued services that have a fee attached to them." Most freemium services offer free but limp, shallow versions of their paid products. I show that on the chart below by the boxed "0" (free, few features) and the upgrade path to the boxed "$" (high cost, more features). In Skype's case, that's not how it works. SkypeOut users call a voice line and pay for it by th

The three main features required for web conferencing are text chat, audio chat and video chat. If you are conducting group discussions then you will require audio-video conferencing facility. Yahoo messenger, ICQ, MSN messenger and Google talk offers free web conferencing facilities. Gotowebinar supports application sharing, slide shows, video recording and VoIP facility. You can also conduct surveys with the help of this program. Yugma offers different pricing schemes for their customer. They

How the faltering economy has affected business travel Times Online, UK - 2 hours ago The two are linked when it comes to video-conferencing, but perhaps the CFO doesn't see video-conferencing as in any way connected to the travel process yet ...

By Tizita Kebede The Daily Monitor The Ethiopian Telecommunication Corporation (ETC) announced on Wednesday its plans to start off operation of installed high-tech multi-inclusive equipments, and thus entertain about 6.5 million more customers during the current fiscal year. While conferring with local media regarding the corporation’s performance assessment report at ETC’s head office, Amare Amsalu, CEO of the Corporation, Zelalem Bekele, Chief Technical Director, and Abdurahim Ahmed, Comm

Democratization of HD Video Conferencing 08:39 | Michael Johnson | Oct 31st, 2008 9:00am | As high definition video conferencing takes hold in the enterprise, it improves communication in clear ways, as well as in some subtle ones. The impact on the boardroom is one thing: groups and executives now come together for effective virtual meetings that save money and valuable energy resources. But new technologies are bringing that value and efficiency one step further: by bringing the collaborat

With Microsoft OCS R2's pending release, I thought you'd be interested in seeing a video interview of Microsoft's Ananad Lakshminarayanan about some of the new features in Office Communications Server R2, which is Microsoft's popular unified communications platform. In the video you'll see some of the IT Admin specific features in OCS R2, which includes an OCS architecture planner to make OCS much easier to deploy. Essentially, it includes a wizard that you provide with your locations, users, an

Image Credit: EMPA We like to see life cycle assessment being used in everyday situations, especially when it comes to helping businesses reduce their environmental impacts (and even if it means looking at rather archaic looking graphs like the one above). The scientists at EMPA (Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science & Technology) – the creators of Ecoinvent, one of the most important life cycle ...

Banks are failing, stocks are falling and Governments around the world are finally admitting we are heading for a recession! So with all the doom and gloom in the media - is there really anything you can do about it? The first piece of practical advice is keep to calm - this isn’t the first global recession, and it certainly won’t be the last. On the other hand, if you struggling, the most important thing is to not ignore it and get help (and there’s plenty out there). Interestingly, in the l