25 April 2006

Word Processing on the Web

OK, this isn't exactly news but I just realized I had never mentioned it and I thought it was pretty cool when I first heard about it. It's finally here! A way to collaborate on documents with a web based word processor! We're going back to a mainframe world folks, but a mainframe that is completely open - for a price of course. Check it out: Writely - The Web Word Processor. It's recenlty been purchased by Google so expect some amazing things.

22 April 2006

Google Calendar

OK, before now, I just suspected it, but now I know. Google's been keeping it's eye on the DataZoomer project and has probably been checking out www.coparentcalendar.com in particular. Their new calendar system is just too similar to the one we created just over a year ago.

OK, it's not all that similar. They probably had a bigger budget than I did, but it's the same basic idea. And it's cool! I don't want to lose users of course but I just had to point this new app out. And I can see that Google is definately going to try to compete with DataZoomer now. ;-)

But seriously, it's pretty cool to finally be ahead of one of the big guys, even a little. We've had many great ideas that were just a little too late. By the time we got to actually doing them we realized someone had already done it.

But not this time. We actually released coparentcalendar a full year before Google Calendar! So what? Well, we happen to have a bunch of other ideas in the works that we haven't released yet so we'll see if we can beat Google to the punch on those ones too! ;-)

Anyway, check it out. It's really cool and it's all Ajaxy and stuff, if you like that, and of course, it's free.

14 April 2006

SpaceMonger

Here's an unbelievably cool and simple tool for figuring out where all your hard disk space has gone. It's called SpaceMonger
and it is free of course. Sorry my Mac using friends. This one's only for the PC right now. You may already have something cooler that does the same thing anyway. ;-)

13 April 2006

Love is the Killer App

I read this book back in January, and wanted to write a review but didn't. Some of the thoughts keep coming up for me so I wanted to just write a few words about it.

First, I thought the book was good. Not great but good. I would recommend it but there are a lot of other books that I would recommend first. Why? I felt that it didn't have as much meat as I usually like to have in this sort of book.

Now, what do I mean by "This sort of Book"? Good question. By the title it's a bit difficult to figure out what the book could be about. It could be about Love and relationships, it could be about computing, it could be about business. It turns out, its about all of those things.

It's about Karma. It describes and promotes a way of life, a philosophy, that the author has used to propel his career and his life in general to new heights. What he proposes is essentially to read a lot, read books thoroughly, marking them up (a practice that I have yet to try) with your own notes, and then if you like them, spreading the word on what the book said.

He says, to get into the practice of sharing, being authentic and learning as much as you can about your subject of choice, through reading and conversing with other people and then sharing everything you know, unreservedly with whoever you think might benefit from it. It's a very generous way of living and to me, quite appealing.

He says that if you make this a practice, people will notice and will come to see you as the one who spreads the love and the knowledge around. You become the glue, the one that people want to work with because of your knowledge, generosity and authenticity.

Like I said, it's a good book, I would recommend it. The title's a bit strange IMHO, but hey, it got my attention and that's what great titles do.

06 April 2006

Google Finance

Google has added some cool new investment tools to their ever growing list of applications. I think it's a great start, and I am using it, but the porfolio could use some more features. I do love the simple interface though and the stock chart visualization gadget is incredibly cool. Check it out.