Google pulled the plug on Wave a few weeks ago. This is an unfortunate development for us as we found Wave to be quite useful. We have used it to successfully collaborate on a couple of projects as our designer lives a few hundred kilometres away from where we are. The ability to login at any time and view documents, graphics and other work; catch up on the dialogue and add to it was very useful. The real time aspect of it was also beneficial. Having all the tools in one place worked very well for us.
This is proving to be a very popular project. They originally set out to raise $10,000 by the 1st of June. So far they have raised over $115,000 and they still have 19 days to go. I expect some very good stuff to come from this project.
Here are the links to a couple of articles on the Diaspora project I contributed financially to:
Diaspora is an Open Source project which aims to develop a "privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed social network". Given my rantings in various places about the lack of privacy associated with Facebook and the way they hide their disregard for you privacy, I thought it was time I put my money where my mouth is. I have made a financial contribution to Disapora as I believe it could be the solution to my issues with social networking - namely the lack of control users have over their own data.
You may have heard about Google Wave. It's a new technology being developed by Google. Google describes it as:
I mentioned in the post about our phone system that we can access our phone system when working remotely. In fact, we can access our entire computer system when working remotely. We have full access to our file server, phone system, mail system, printers, and other IT services when away from the office. We use a very good piece of security software called OpenVPN to accomplish this.
There has been a lot of talk about Voice Over IP (VOIP) phone systems in the past few years. A VOIP system basically allows you to make calls across a computer network (like the Internet) instead of using landlines provided by Telecom or other telecommunications companies. The cost of calls on a VOIP system can be far lower than those made through a landline provider. Obviously this is very attractive to business.
As I said two posts back we use the Community Edition of SugarCRM as our Customer Relationship Management system. SugarCRM is very good and it has a good community behind it. There have been a lot of modules written that extend SugarCRM in various ways, many of which interact with other online systems.
Lisa and I recently hosted a small online meeting using DimDim. DimDim is an Open Source web conferencing tool. As with all open source software it is freely available for use. In fact, the DimDim people go a step further and will allow you to host conferences using their software on their website for free.
One of the more useful Open Source tools we use is SugarCRM. SugarCRM is a Customer Relationship Management system (CRM). A CRM is used to track and organise contacts with current and potential customers or clients. We find SugarCRM invaluable for this and use it to store information about every contact we have with our clients.