In school this year I’ve been assigned a very large group research project with four other students.  Traditionally, these kinds of projects start off pretty straightforward, with each person working individually to find data to solve a business problem.  But as the team gathers its research, it becomes increasingly difficult to sort though, organize, and actually use the myriad of stuff found by everyone.  This presents a significant problem when the project begins to take shape and the research everyone has collected needs to be applied to solutions dreamed up by the team after a lot of research has been done.

Luckily there are an increasing number of online collaborative tools that can be utilized to make collecting, finding, sorting, and editing online data found by a group of people easier.  My team has found Evernote and Dropbox to be extremely useful in helping us get through this process more efficiently.

I set up a new Evernote account and gave my team the username and password so that the five of us can use this one account.  Now we can clip data from web pages, tag these data with the subject matter and the name of the person tagging, and deposit it all into this one account.  It takes about 10 seconds to select specific text from a web page or the entire page and save it in Evernote’s servers (using the Evernote web clipper).  The result is a huge repository of research that can be searched and referenced extremely quickly by everyone, anytime.  Additionally, you can make blank notes to allow team members to share random ideas with each other.  For example, we have a note called “solution ideas” where all group members can quickly add and edit a running list of ideas within this note for solving our business problem.  This note is then used to provoke discussion when we have meetings.

While Evernote is great for storing text from websites and personal notes, it isn’t all that great for storing group documents or other files.  Now, it does have the ability to add any file to a note if you have a premium account (at $5 per month), but I don’t love this functionality.  (I discussed this in a previous post, here.  See the “file by file online backups” section.)  Dropbox is the solution my team is using for storing research found in pdf form or original documents that we create for our project.  Using my own Dropbox account, I created a folder called “research” and shared folder this with my teammates.  With everyone using the Dropbox desktop software, the folder and a copy of its contents is placed on all of our computers.  All teammates now have the ability to search for, add, and edit anything in this folder.  And while the folder to find these group docs is stored on our of computers locally, any changes made in the documents within these specific folders are synced with copies of these files stored on Dropbox’s servers, and in turn synced on all of the other teammate’s local folders.  (For more info about Dropbox, I have previously written about it here – again in the “file by file online backups” section.)

I am extremely impressed with these two products, and they have made this massive group project a heck of a lot easier for basically free.  Group collaboration is always tough, but these days I’m glad the Internet has tools like these to vastly improves this process.

Stay tuned for an inevitable future update after I FINALLY get my Google Wave invite – that thing’s all about making online group collaboration easier.

Related posts:

1. Evernote Rocks.

I like finding free little third party programs that add useful functions to the already great Mac OS.  I download lots of these, but there are only a few that I use on a very regular basis.  (Sorry PC users, these are predominantly Mac-only programs.  But I’m sure there are plenty of PC alternatives for all of these applications.)

iStat Menus: This application allows you to view information for 8 different processes in your computer right in your menu bar.  You can check out the status of your CPU, RAM memory, hard drive space, network connection, internal temperatures, fans and power and bluetooth connection.  It also gives you a great replacement for the default date/time display on the menu bar – when you click on the time, a small calendar pops out.

[update - 8.28.09] – It seems that the latest version of iStat Menus will not work with Mac OS 10.6.  Waiting for update…]

Skitch: I talked about this one in an earlier post.  It allows you to take a picture of anything that is on your computer screen.  It comes with some basic editing tools, or you can open any screen shots taken in any other image editor you wish.  It’s more useful than you might think.

Caffeine: Have you ever been watching a video on Hulu or YouTube and your Mac’s screen keeps dimming to save power because it thinks its idle?  Each time it does this, you are forced to jiggle the mouse or touch the track pad to brighten the screen again.  Annoying, right?  Well Caffeine puts a little icon on your menu bar that, when turned on, overrides your computer’s desire to dim the screen.

You Control: iTunes: This is a free utility that gives you complete control over iTunes from the menu bar.  This highly customizable app gives you access to iTunes controls; it displays the current track, artist and album when the track changes; and you can navigate your entire music library from the menu bar button so don’t have to open iTunes nearly as often.

Notify: This little program works just like the Google Notifier, but better.  It keeps track of what’s in your Gmail inbox, displays Growl (see next program) notifications when new mail arrives, has a great interface, and supports multiple accounts.  The big reason why I switched to this program from Google Notifier was that it can check for new messages every minute – GN will only check every 15 minutes.  I also never used GN’s Google calendar notifier feature, but if you do, you can just turn on the calendar notifier and run Notify along with Google Notifier.

Growl: This has been around for a long time, and is a must-have app for Mac owners.  It allows many Mac applications to give you small messages that pop up on your screen when new actions occur in them or new information about them is available.  Once installed, applications that use the program will automatically detect Growl and will begin giving you messages when needed.  All notification settings for each application are highly customizable from the Growl Systems Preferences control panel.

Cooliris: This is a plugin for Sarari 3 & 4 and Firefox that displays pictures and/or videos from websites on a really cool 3d wall within your browser.  It simply gives you a much faster and more interesting viewing experience when you are searching the web for pictures or videos.  Definitely check it out and give it a whirl.

Handbrake: Like ripping DVDs onto your hard drive?  You need this free program.  Its a robust application for converting DVD video into many different computer-friendly video file types.

Hulu Desktop: This application was created by the Hulu folks for making Hulu video even more watchable.  This very slick application can be controlled with the Apple remote, and will make you never want to go back to watching Hulu at Hulu.com again.

Tweetie: This is a slick little Twitter application that is the sidekick to the popular iPhone app with the same name.  There are lots of applications out there to control your Twitter account(s), but I am really comfortable with this one.

MacJanitor: There are a number of “cleaning” functions that your Mac does throughout its day that boosts its performance and clears out unneeded data that can bog down its system.  However, because some of these functions are scheduled to begin late at night, if you shut down your Mac every night they run very rarely.  MacJanitor allows you to start any of these process anytime you want.

Evernote: I devoted an entire post to this one a few weeks ago.  Check it out.

And if this list isn’t good enough for you, check out IUseThis.com – a site where people can submit and vote on Mac applications.  I check there regularly to see what applications people are using.

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1. It’s really* easy to replace your TV with your computer!

For a short while, I was the “Junior Service Writer” at Springboard Media in Philadelphia PA.  In this job, I dealt with everyone who wanted to bring their Apple computers in for repair.  I learned a few important things during my short tenure:

1. Customer service jobs are the worst.  The. Worst.  When I took this job, I forgot the lesson I had previously learned both as a waiter and GAP employee: Daily exposure to the unchecked Id of the general public is a powerful corrosive to any optimism, idealism, or compassion one feels towards her/his fellow human beings.
2. As a new low-level employee, it is extremely hard to change the culture or the ways in which more senior employees do their jobs.  It doesn’t matter how correct, brilliant, or “fresh” your ideas are – if people don’t trust your opinions, they will not listen to a word you say.  (And as it turns out, talking about your fancy MBA schoolin’ to make yourself sound smarter just makes you sound like an ass).
3. Most people think hard drives are magic and will work forever.  Then when tragedy strikes and they learn that this is not the case, these people scream and/or sob at junior service writers who tell them they need to fork over a bunch of money for the possibility that their data might be saved.  (No, AppleCare does not cover the cost of data recovery if your hard drive fails while still under warranty.)

Of course, before this job I too was dragging my feet about backing up my computer.  But after watching a second unlucky graduate student completely fall apart at the thought of his dissertation being lost forever, I decided to purchase my first external hard drive for backing up my data.

External Hard Drives

These have always been a great way to back up stuff, and they are getting even better with more advanced software.  As a Mac guy, I of course use Time Machine, which is the easiest backup solution I’ve ever encountered.  Time Machine comes with the OS 10.5, but not any earlier versions of the Mac operating system.  You just plug in an external hard drive, follow the few steps needed to make it your Time Machine backup destination, and turn on the program.  It backs up everything on your computer every hour, as long as your external drive is plugged into your computer.  If you have a Time Capsule, your hard drive doesn’t even have to be plugged into the computer – the hard drive is on your wireless transmitter, facilitating wireless backups.  And finding an old file in your archived data is really easy with the trippy user interface Time Machine has to search the external drive.  I’m not sure if it’s the best backup solution – its simplicity might be a real drawback to people who require more robust solutions like off-site backups.  For those options, check out this blog post.

PC users – check this article out about various free PC backup solutions.

Online Backup Systems

Online backup solutions are poping up all over the place as data storage gets cheaper and cheaper.  Here’s a good review of the biggest players in this industry.  From what I have seen of online backup solutions, there are two basic kinds – ones that are meant to backup your entire system, and the ones that are meant to backup specific files for quick online retrieval.

Entire system online backups
When I first heard of Mozy online backup, I was really excited and tried it out immediately.  This service gives you 2GB of space for free, and an unlimited amount for $5 a month.  When downloaded and set up, it can back up your entire hard drive onto remote servers in Alaska or something.  If the hard drive in your computer does crash, you can get your data back by redownloading all of it various ways or by getting Mozy to send you DVDs with your data on them.

It is the nature of Mozy and other solutions like it to be running all the time.  It took my initial backup of the 70 or so gigabites 2 weeks of constant communication with off site servers to finish uploading.  After this initial backup, your computer syncs any updated files every hour or so.  After a while, I found this to be aggravating and hard to ignore.  There were the occasional error messages, and it slowed down my machine very slightly.  (Others have found this to be a bigger issue.)  Also, Mozy will not backup things that are not on your computer.  Therefore, if you delete a file, it will delete that file off your backup data on their servers after 30 days or so.  It was because of this (I think), every time I opened Windows using Parallels, Mozy would spend the next day or so re-backing up the 6GB of space that Windows takes up on my computer.  It was like it would forget Windows was installed on my machine when Parallels wasn’t running, and then back it up in its entirety every time I used Parallels.  As a result, I never really had any confidence that Mozy was keeping the most up-to-date copies of my files.  I got rid of it after 2 months.

File-by-file online backups
My experience with Mozy has soured my view of entire system online backup solutions.  My external hard drive plus Time Machine is much less complicated, faster, and safer.  There are other online services out there, however, that will allow you to store individual files or entire folders onto off site servers and that provide great web interfaces to retrieve these files.  The problem I have had with most of these is that there is usually no way to edit the file directly from the place it is being downloaded.  There is also usually no way for the file being backed up to be immediately updated on the off site servers after it is edited from my computer.  (Evernote does this to some degree, but the problem with this is that when you store a file in Evernote, it is actually copied from its original location in your computer to a file within the Evernote file system in your computer.  Therefore if you save a file in Evernote, open it later, edit it, and close it, and then you want to email just that file to someone, it’s a pain to find that exact document within the confusing file structure Evernote creates in your computer to store its data.  Once you find it you then have to rename it, and….ugh).

I had planned to end this post with the message that while my external hard drive and Time Machine works really well for my entire system backup, I had not found a file-by-file solution that didn’t end up being more work than just saving files to my computer and ending it there.  But in my research for this post I found a great product that I am now using to back up all of my most important documents.  Dropbox is an online storage product that places a folder directly in my Finder (Windows Explorer for PC folks) which is automatically synced to Dropbox servers.  After moving my most important document folders into this “dropbox” folder, I can open, save, and edit all my documents directly from my computer, and any changes made to them will by synced to copies of these files on Dropbox’s servers.  The service gives me 2 gigs of server space for free, and after that there are pretty reasonable monthly fees for a lot more space – you could back up your entire system.  I’m happy with only saving my most accessed documents, however, so 2 gigs is fine.

There are some other features of this service that are really cool, too:

• I can easily invite anyone I want to have access to any of the files I place in my account.  As long as they download the DropBox software onto their computer, any edits they make to the documents will be synced to the off site servers and all other computers sharing those documents.  If the invitee does not want to download the software, they can download all shared documents, but any edits will not be synced.   
• Each file has a public url, so I can link directly to files using this url and access them via any web browser.
• There is web access to all my files stored online, so I can access them anywhere with an internet connection.
• I can view my stored files on my iPod Touch/iPhone using its mobile website.

With Time Machine, Drop Box, and my AppleCare warranty with two years remaining on it, I feel as confident as I can* that my data is safe and I won’t end up in financial ruin if something happens to my computer.

*AppleCare DOES NOT cover accidental damage to your computer!  So if I spill something on my keyboard or crack my screen, I’m SOL.  I learned that lesson from Springboard as well….so sad.

Related posts:

1. Group projects are now slightly less awful

It’s August, which of course means an explosion of news articles about how expensive textbooks are and what poor college students are doing these days to keep these costs down.  Where people buy their textbooks and how they actually read them is becoming more and more varied and confusing, making bookselling the latest perfectly good business model to be demolished by the Internet.

Here are the interesting textbook-buying trends that I’ve been paying attention to lately:

• Buying Used Textbooks – This is certainly not new and is now a standard way for students to get their textbooks each semester.  And as Internet search becomes more sophisticated it is becoming even easier.  There are tons of sites to buy used textbooks, but I found you can’t go wrong with amazon.com, bigwords.com, half.com, textbookx.com, textbooks.com, or good ‘ol craigslist.org.
• Textbooks from other countries! – I recently received a tip about nbcindia.com from a classmate of mine.  The books are priced in rupees and the book you receive is reportedly a black and white soft cover copy of your textbook.  But they are really cheap.  This site recommends (among other things) checking out the foreign versions of American websites, like www.amazon.co.uk, to find cheaper versions of the textbook you want.  This blog post mentions two great sites for finding the international versions of textbooks: abebooks.com and textbooksrus.com.
• Textbook Rentals – This recent NY Times article discusses the rise of textbook renting as a profitable business model for textbook publishers and authors.  Chegg.com and bookrenter.com are mentioned in the article and seem to be the most popular sites for this.

• eTextbooks – This is a market that is slowly evolving and maturing.  The newest Kindle DX and the rumored Apple iTablet are certainly making some big waves in the textbook world.  There are lots of good and bad things about these, as I discuss below.  As far as where to buy eTextbooks, I’ve found amazon.com,  cafescribe.com, coursesmart.com, digitaltextbooks.com, etextshop.com, vitalsource.com, ichapters.com, and zinio.com.

fyi: Most of the sites I mentioned above (and a whole lot more) can be found in this great list.  The post says the sites are all geared toward business school textbooks, but really it’s just a huge list of textbook sellers.

More on eTextbooks

Why I’m not a fan of normal textbooks:

• They are out-of-sight expensive if you buy them new;
• They are heavy and bulky;
• When you buy them used from random folks on the Internet you can’t completely trust the shipper;
• The best search function these things have is their indexes.  I mean, come on.

Why I really like the idea of eTextbooks:

• All text in them is instantly searchable;
• All that I buy will fit inside my computer;
• When I buy one, I get it instantly;
• They are much cheaper than new textbooks.

So I actually bought an accounting eTextbook from iChapters.com last year.  While all the above held true, there were times when I regretted my purchase:

• Bad software and DRM ruined the user experience:  When I downloaded my book last year, iChapters made use of this program called Unsealer, which was the key to unlocking the big-time DRM their products come imprisoned in.  It took me hours of searching online forums to figure out how to make this crappy program actually open my book file.  Finally, I discovered that it only works with an old version of Adobe Acrobat Reader for Mac, which resulted in more time wasted scouring to web to find this out-of-date version of the reader software.  Once I got the Adobe Reader to open my file I could use the book as advertised, but Adobe would crash on me fairly regularly.  (Most likely because it was an old version).
• My eTextbook was harder to navigate quickly in class than its physical counterparts:  My accounting class made heavy use of the textbook during class lectures.  Therefore, there was a lot of rapid flipping back-and-forth between two or three pages in the book while answering in-class questions.  This is harder to do on a vertical scrolling text file on your computer screen.  Also, the page numbers in the textbook itself did not correspond to the page numbers that Adobe Reader assigns to each page in the eBook.  It was therefore difficult to quickly flip to a page in the text when directed by the professor.
• My eTextbook had a lack of editing tools: When using a traditional textbook, most people find it useful to highlight important sections and write little notes in the margins while studying.  Surprise surprise, I couldn’t do anything like this using an outdated version of Adobe Acrobat Reader, nor could I cut text out of the document and paste it into a Word document because of DRM garbage.  My workaround for this was to take notes on the book using Evernote, and cut and paste screenshots of important parts of the book using the FANTASTIC program called Skitch.  This worked for me, but obviously wasn’t an ideal arrangement.
• I can’t resell my eTextbook: Even though I don’t want to anyway, my eTextbook does not allow me to sell it to someone else.

But I still have faith in eTextbooks, and I think I’m going to try one again this semester.  I plan to use coursesmart.com to rent one for 180 days.  The company has been getting a lot of good press, mostly from its recent unveiling of its iPhone application.  I’m mostly excited about the great software that their products use, as they address many of the problems I’ve had in the past with eTextbooks.

No related posts.

I’m sure you know the kind of people this post is directed to – the annoying, snobby, elitist people who refuse to join Facebook. And if you are in this group, most of your friends think you are annoying, snobby, and elitist. All you anti-Facebookers need to get off your high horses and discover why Facebook is a great tool.

The dumb stuff I hear from these web 2.0 poo-pooing people includes:

1. I don’t have the time or patience for setting up ANOTHER online profile;
2. I’m afraid I won’t have many friends to connect with;
3. Facebook is a stupid waste of time;
4. Anything of importance that I can do on Facebook I can do though email or the phone;
5. Facebook is just a fad, like Friendster (and MySpace. Snap.);
6. I don’t wanna bother putting up little status updates, nor would I care about all the mundane crap that my various Facebook “friends” do all day.

But I know where these folks are coming from. The only reason why I joined Facebook in the first place is that my last job made me…which of course is ironic, considering how much time I subsquentely wasted on it during work hours. The only real prior experience I had with social networking sites ended with a really ugly MySpace page containing a bunch of media plug-ins that never worked. Like this one. Or this one. Or this one. Or this one. (I think that last one is purposefully annoying, but still, creating a page that awful should not be possible.)

Once I started, Facebook was easy to like. Setting up a new account is made as easy as possible, the user interface is extremely intuitive and attractive, and…it has games on it! With which I quickly got bored. Oh, and my fear that I wouldn’t have any Facebook friends was thankfully proved false. Facebook has some amazing tools that helped me find people I knew that were dying to welcome me to their fun cult.

I think the real reason for Facebook’s popularity is that it facilitates more productive relationships with others in your social circles. First, as more and more information becomes digitized and searchable, Facebook is a terrific way to efficiently share information you find interesting with others that have your same interests. If you like to surf, it’s easy to post a link on your Facebook page about the bitchin’ surf board shop you found in Jeffrey’s Bay, South Africa; this link will then pop up on all your friends pages, and more than likely some of them will find it useful. And in turn you benefit from your friend’s postings as more and more of them join and connect with you.

But the most important thing I discovered about the site came from reading my friend’s “mundane” status updates. This is actually an extremely effective way to keep in touch with a large number of people on a personal, and even professional, level. I have nurtured many languishing friendships by simply posting a comment or two on a friend’s status update about their new cat or bad customer service experience. The argument that social networking sites are making us value “real” friendships less is absurd. And usually voiced by grumpy old fossils.

So drink deep. Everybody else is doing it.

Related posts:

1. Parents make good Facebook friends!
2. Streamy.com: A clown car for social networking feeds

I discovered the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen when my marketing class team chose to use it for our group project last semester.  After initially dismissing the device because it seemed like an expensive gadget (two versions for $150 and $200) that couldn’t do anything my laptop couldn’t do, I quickly changed my mind and bought one.  It made taking class notes and recording interviews for my summer internship significantly easier.  And I know this blog is for the broke, but this thing is totally worth the money if you’ve got it.

Briefly, the thing contains a small camera that records what you write via microdots printed on special notebook paper.  While writing on this paper and recording your text, it can also record any sound it hears and syncs this audio to what it is recording with the camera.  Consequently when tap your pen on the paper you have been taking notes on, the audio that was recorded at the time of writing will magically come out of the pen’s speakers!  All of this information can then be archived on your computer (Mac or PC) via software that nicely organizes your notes and makes all your crappy handwriting searchable!  To get a better idea of all this, take a look at this video from Livescribe.  If you’re still not getting it, you should try a little harder and search “Livescribe” on YouTube – you’ll find tons of video demonstrations of the pen.  Oh, and here’s an example of a “pencast” – Livescribe’s online tool for sharing your downloaded notes.  While I think these things are pretty useless in general, I really like this one.

The device has won tons of awards, and its new availability at Best Buy and college bookstores as well as continued presence at Target, Amazon.com, and its own website, shows it has a bright future.

Related posts:

1. Evernote Rocks.

So I have spent a long time trying out various ways to take notes and jot down ideas.  I’ve got lots of school paper outlines, class notes, brainstorming sessions, etc scattered throughout my hard drive and online.  Most of these are in somewhat organized word documents, a lot are on Google Docs, some in Google Notebook, and others are on small note taking programs like Mac’s Stickies program or my slightly used xPad program.

I’ve never been entirely happy with any of these.  They all work well for some things, and not well for others.  The online programs aren’t available when I’m not connected to the internet and are sometimes buggy; Word documents are a pain to organize and search even with Mac’s Spotlight search function; and programs like xPad are a good start, but are still pretty limited.

Then Evernote entered my life.  Ahhhhhhh Evernote!  I’ve been an almost daily user of it for about a year now, and I’m not going to stop anytime soon.  It now holds 516 of my notes, and they are all insanely easy to find and view.  The desktop software offers a great way to jot down small notes and organize them quickly, easily, and with a lot of flexibility.  All notes are synced to an online account so you can access them anywhere with an Internet connection.  Evernote’s servers analyze any scanned documents you add to a note so that the text on them is searchable.  Oh, and there are various free mobile versions of the program available for most smart phones (and the iPod Touch).  And most of what anyone would use it for is free!  There is a paid version ($5 per month), but there is really no need for most users to buy it.

There has been tons written about this program, so I will stop now.  Check out these reviews:

• Review from Ars Technica
• Blog post about why paying the monthly fee is worth it
• Another random but good blog post about Evernote

Related posts:

1. Group projects are now slightly less awful

I’ve been thinking about starting a blog for a while, but I could never decide what to write about.  Nor have I ever had any really compelling reasons to put in the effort if I did think of a good blog theme.

But then I thought:

1 – I’m an MBA student who will graduate in a year, and a blog would give me a great way to express myself to potential employers who don’t know me at all.

2 – I spend HOURS in front of my computer reading about the latest and greatest internet tools being created every day.  I try to talk about these things with non-dork friends, and they look at me funny.  Now I can just invite them to read my blog if they want to know more about things like….blogs.  Or caffeinated Google search results.

3 – A blog will give me a great way to organize all my interesting Internet finds into one place, so I can look them up later.

Ultimately, I want this blog to be a testimony to my hatred of paper.  More specifically, to my manic sprint to a life where EVERYTHING I do, write, read, and (perhaps) say will be translated into 1′s and 0′s, stored on an unfathomable number of computers around the world, and instantly accessible from my MacBook.

Oh, and James Cameron and George Orwell are full of crap.

Related posts:

1. Evernote Rocks.