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Communications
I remember the first time I saw IRC in action: I was about 10 years old and an older cousin, a computer engineer who lived with us, would log on to chat rooms to play Acrophobia, Trivia and MadLib. We were on a US Robotics Sportster 9600 baud modem and didn’t know too many other people in India who had an internet connection. Back then, it blew our minds.
IRC or Internet Relay Chat is a form of instant messaging with millions of users worldwide that dates back to 1988. One would log on to a server, pick a chat room called a channel, and then get talking. IRC hasn’t changed very much in all these years – it was meant to be basic and stays true to its roots (which aren’t exactly as described on Numb3rs). However, it was built by geeks for geeks, and so has undergone some development, which you can see in IRCCloud. This still-in-beta app brings IRC to your web browser and lives in the cloud. It offers a contemporary interface and some new features for advanced users. Let’s take it for a spin, shall we?
When you’re doing business without completing much customer research beforehand, a lot of assumptions are made. These can sometimes be way off because you’re not really asking your customers what they think, instead relying on preconceptions that are sometimes wrong. This is where Customer Thermometer comes in.
This handy little app allows you to send out emails that allow your customers to provide feedback in a quick and easy way and rate your service based on a traffic light system that represents how satisfied they are with the service or just about anything else you’d like feedback on. Read on to find out more.
When I was in college (4 years ago, for those of us keeping count), I had the pleasure of being the Student Government’s first ever Director of Technology, cementing myself as the school’s top geek (at least top social geek). We’d have bi-weekly meetings to discuss pending bills, campus updates, and more. After each meeting, the secretary would type up her hand written minutes, email them to everyone on Student Government, and have me upload a copy to the website. While it was a cumbersome process, I didn’t really explore a better way to do things. After using minutes.io, I now know there is a now considerably better way to take meeting notes.
minutes.io is a very simple (and beautifully designed) way to to keep meeting notes. It doesn’t require a login and its got a lot of great features packed into such a focused app. Let’s take a closer look.
Group messaging via email is a mess. If you send an email to multiple people, it’s inevitable they’ll forget to “Reply to All” and then others miss out on the conversation. You end up having forks of the original message, including and un-including recipients at will. Wouldn’t it be great if there was an alternative form of communication, optimised for more than two parties?
Well, there was one: Google Wave. I loved Google Wave, and spent a lot of time experimenting with it as part of the closed developer preview before it launched. It was really fun to play with group collaboration and conversation, and the nature of the format made it extremely intuitive to use. However, Google ended the Wave project last year and, although they’re working on a solution for a self-hosted version, it’s not really used by the public any more.
But don’t think that this means you have no other option for this type of communication. Peers.me is a great alternative that’s not currently waiting for its switch to be flicked off. The group communication tool shares many of the features of Google’s product (even its name!), but is currently maintained and in service, making it a considerable option for the next time you need to send out that group memo.
You’ve released a great new app or started the store you’ve always dreamed of, you’ve gotten covered in all the top sites, and you’ve got customers actually paying you money for your hard work. Congratulations! Now comes the hard part: supporting your customers.
No matter how nice your service or product is, your customers will need help with it. You’ll need to help them with everything from pre-sales questions to billing problems, from issues with your product to things you could have never thought of before.
The problem is, most customer support web apps are rather expensive, and can quickly eat into the meager amount your startup’s making. Plus, they’re often complicated and confusing to use, and don’t work exactly like you want.
WooThemes, the popular WordPress theme design firm, recently launched a brand new app theme, SupportPress. This advanced theme transforms a simple WordPress site into a full-fledged support system for your team. Does it have what your company needs? Let’s dive in and see.
Remember the days of actually having meetings face-to-face? Sitting around a table in suits discussing finance and such? Well, time’s have changed and now we do our collaboration online. I can collaborate with a colleague in Australia from my home in the UK thanks to a wealth of online collaboration tools.
MeetingBurner is another online meeting tool, currently in beta, with some pretty nice enhancements over what the competition currently offers. MeetingBurner advertises itself as being one of the easiest meeting platforms to just get involved with, and it’s certainly pretty simple therein. Not only will MeetingBurner reignite your love for screen-sharing, but it will also stream the host’s webcam to get a visual conferencing experience.
A decade ago, most of us had never even heard of the idea of a social network. Today, after the very phrase Social Network was used as the title of a movie, most of us rely on social networks to stay in touch with our family, friends, and colleagues. You can’t escape social networking. Switch on the TV, and odds are the news anchor will be reminding you to follow them on Twitter.
You can’t connect a billion people without having them form some long-term habits for sharing and online interaction. We’ve all learned how to use Twitter and Facebook, so starting over with a new network can be daunting. Google+ has taken the world by storm over the past couple of days, and a number of people were able to get early access to it. After using it, it’s easy to see that Google has put an incredible amount of time and thought into designing their answer to Facebook. It brings many of the social features you’d expect from a network together in a way that just might make it the ideal network.
Whether you’re already on Google+ and would like to discover some of its hidden features, or are curious what it will bring once you finally get an invite, here’s a detailed look at all of Google+’s features and the changes it may bring to your online social life. (more…)
Google has made more missteps with social networking than perhaps any other company online. MySpace’s slow death marks the death of one product. In the same time frame, Google has bought out, launched, and killed or neglected a score of social products. Wikipedia lists nearly a dozen social networking related acquisitions, depending on which you count, and Google’s own Orkut, Buzz, and Wave have either withered on the vine or been outright killed.
With this many failures, you’d think Google would cede the social networking market to Facebook and Twitter. Not so. Google unveiled yesterday their latest network, Google+. For once, it looks like Google might have a winner on its hands, if it can convince us to share on yet another network. It’s stylish, and includes features that take it beyond both Facebook and Twitter. Let’s take a look at what Google+ promises, and see whether it’s even worth trying to join.
Prior to getting my iPad, I didn’t have much use for notebook apps. After my computing life went mobile, however, I found myself needing to write things down without having a notepad within reach. And so I got Evernote, the same notebook app used by so many of the bloggers I followed. After a few days, however, I wasn’t happy. Evernote could do all the things I wanted it to, but it didn’t…feel right.
My editor suggested I take a look at Memonic, a notebook app developed by a Swiss startup named Nektoon AG. I said to him the same thing I say to everybody else: if something doesn’t feel right, then it can’t hurt to try the Swiss.
Social networking. It’s human nature to fear the unknown, and in the realm of current technology, the unknown is now social networking. And granted, there’s plenty to fear. Like every innovation before it, horror stories have been told about the dangerous effects of these new social networks. There’s obvious issues when you’re sharing personal information with people who’s identities can’t be confirmed. But then there are the brighter sides to these digital networks with social connections. We get to add a social layer to our digital lives, sharing those artifacts of pixels and code that are important to us now.
So what if you could have the best of both worlds? What if you could get all the benefits a social network provides, but wrapped in a protective bubble of encryption, something where you choose who’s allowed in. That’s what Minigroup aims to provide. Let’s take a look at what they have to offer, and just how painless and feature-rich this private social network is.
