Ping is an app that makes your email more like text messages

Do you send rapid fire emails from your smartphone and want a way to send emails even faster? Do you wish email was more like your messaging app, with “typing” notifications? Do you want to see every email from your girlfriend or boss all huddled together in a single thread? Do you wish your email was automatically sorted into those from “people” and “everything else”? Do you want to set a custom email notification sound for each person you regularly talk to?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you just might love a hot new cloud-based email app called Ping, which is launching soon. I’ve been testing out the beta for a few weeks, and I can confirm that a lot of it’s features are a big change from the way we’re used to doing email. For one, instead of sorting emails but subjects and conversations a la Gmail, Ping shows you ALL of the email you get from a single person or group of people in one giant thread, just like your text messaging app on your smartphone. Read More

How to Use Apple AirPrint

AirPrint reverses the normal mobile trend. A lot of the hype about mobile technologies has centered on “augmented reality”—letting you see the world with additional data provided from your phone or a special device like Google Glass. But we don’t just need to bring reality into the digital realm; sometimes we need to bring the digital realm into reality. Apple’s AirPrint technology is supposed to do just that—let you print from your phone or other iDevice—to an AirPrint enabled printer on the same wireless network.

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Free Photoshop Alternative: Try Canva

Everyone loves things that look nice. That’s why a lot of us wind up paying professional graphic designers to make our webpages, brochures, fliers, and the like. While designers are indispensable for their skills, they’re also indispensable because they have access to tools like Adobe Photoshop—which is pretty pricey for the amateur to acquire—and has a very steep learning curve.

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Can Bunkr Kill PowerPoint?

We’ve written before about the ubiquity of Microsoft Office products and their transition to mobile environments. Admittedly, they’ve been a little slow on the uptake, which created an opportunity for a number of companies to develop software meant to replace these seemingly irreplaceable office tools.

Bunkr is one such of those tools—a new product from a French startup that explicitly wants to be a PowerPoint killer. Whether it can dethrone the reigning champion of the slideshow is a separate question, but it does offer a lot of nifty features if you’re looking for an alternative to Office. For starters, Bunkr looks and feels a lot like PowerPoint. If you’re familiar with using that, making a switch to something new shouldn’t feel that weird. But Bunkr offers a few features that make it stand out. Read More

Bring Sanity to your Inbox with Sanebox

About a year ago, the consulting firm McKinsey and Company conducted a study that concluded about 28% of the average workers’ time is spent on email. Thinking about my own email experience, I know a lot of those emails are basically useless. Or, at least, things that don’t have to be dealt with immediately.

SaneBox is an inbox management program that wants to help you deal with your chronic email bloat. Compatible with Gmail, Apple Mail, Outlook, Yahoo Mail, and most other web-based email programs and email clients you might use, SaneBox gives you a toolbox to let you manage your email rather than having your email manage you.

There are a lot of products that help you manage your email, but SaneBox has given some deep thought to the problem, and their efforts show. Based in part on the principles of the popular productivity principles of Getting Things Done, SaneBox is more than a simple email filtering tool like Gmail’s priority inbox.

Though it does filtering quite well, too, which is the foundation of most email management tools. SaneBox defaults to two levels of importance, but is able to manage up to five. And while their importance algorithms work well on their own, SaneBox allows you to connect to you various social media accounts to better learn what’s important to you and what isn’t. Best of all, it summarizes your unimportant emails for you so you can decide quickly what needs your attention and what you can ignore.

But what makes SaneBox really interesting is what it can bring to your inbox besides basic filtering. One of my favorite features is the summary of email activity, which includes the summary of your latest unimportant emails, but more powerfully, provides a lot of statistics on your email behavior, which lets you think critically about how much time you’re spending and the load of messages you’re dealing with. A richer understanding of how much time I can expect to spend on email helps to plan my workload—and lets me consider whether I really need to read everything I think I need to read.

There are a whole host of other great features: one-click unsubscribing from email lists you don’t want to be on anymore, automated nagging features that will email you to let you know if an important email hasn’t been replied to, cloud-based attachment storage, and others. It also works with the email on your mobile devices, so you don’t have to worry about scrolling through a ton of useless messages on your phone.

SaneBox will cost you $5 per month (and you can try it for free for 14 days), but given that the company estimates that it saves the average user two hours per week, it just might be worth it to you.

Is VPN The Next Big Thing For Tablets?

Sander Biehn is an account manager with AT&T. You can find more blog content from Sander and other experts on mobility on the AT&T Networking Exchange Blog, where this post originally appeared. AT&T has sponsored the following blog post.

using tablet for business
How to get it all done – safely – on your tablet

It is only my second full week of working exclusively on my tablet, and I have been steadily and consistently surprised by what applications have been the greatest assistance to me. One of the biggest surprises has been the VPN client. By using the VPN and the resources attached to it, I have skirted many thorny issues that I experienced working on the tablet. These include printing, Microsoft document retrieval and manipulation, and access to such systems as our CRM platform, which does not have a mobile interface or login routine.

Klaus Brandstaetter blogged recently on SecurityInfoWatch.com about the increasingly important role of the VPN for BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) users from the point of view of the IT team. He rightly explains the overwhelming desire not only for employees to access corporate data on a mobile device, but also for that device to be personally owned. Brandstaetter outlines the pitfalls for IT, which include security breaches and the effects of malware on the worker productivity. But many of these threats can be avoided by using VPN. This is Brandstaetter’s main point. While he addresses IT’s concerns, I thought the benefits to the end user were still vague.  I would like to add to his work by outlining the ways in which the VPN can assist a highly mobile end user. After all, for any strategy to work in the world of BYOD, it needs to be beneficial to both IT and the end user.

1. Getting it all done on the tablet

My first week and a half was full of frustration as I tried app after app to bridge the gap around documents. An inherent problem for tablet users is the lack of an easy way to store and manipulate documents. The solution came from a post on our Salesforce Chatter help desk about RDP Remote Desktop Lite. I downloaded it, and could securely see all the files on my laptop and was even able to manipulate, save, and send them. Here is the biggest news: I can send documents to the printer from this app too. The VPN solved more #tabletchallenge problems than any other single application. Who would have dreamed that was possible?

2. The big scare…not so scary

I spent the weekend in Miami at a friend’s wedding. It was extremely handy to have my laptop at the pool Friday night to catch up on the several hours I missed on Friday in transit. Upon arriving home, I couldn’t find my tablet! The normal panic started to subside when I remembered that there really wasn’t anything stored on the device. Unlike a laptop, I wouldn’t lose documents and files (of which there are quite a few) that were stored on the actual device. Luckily it turned out that my son had removed it from my bag and was looking at some of the photos I had taken at Miami beach. The sense of freedom I felt not being dependent on a personal hard drive was amazing. I knew I could access the things I needed from any device that I have VPN access on.

3. The VPN leading the cloud revolution

As witnessed above, we all have some letting go to do with respect to keeping files and work applications with us locally. I think we are still recovering from a time when the network was not always as reliable. With Cellular and WiFi networks at every street corner, we can now relax. Working each day with a mobile device — with no practical way of holding any document files at all — has made my reliance on the cloud complete and non-negotiable. I have to tell you that it is especially comforting, because I am often carrying my tablet outside the office (see the #tabletchallenge FreestyleFriday gallery) and I really don’t need to worry about my device being stolen, broken, or attacked by malware. I am therefore more likely to bring my device along which means I have the ability to be more productive.

Working exclusively on my tablet has really turned my world upside down. By using to the network and the cloud many of my initial problems have been solved. The one thing I am still getting used to is remembering to keep my tablet charged. I was just forced to leave a very comfortable chair to move to another spot closer to an outlet in order to finish typing this blog post!

Keep up to date with my progress under the Twitter handle @sanderbiehn and #tabletchallenge.

In what other ways might VPN help the mobile user? How do you think mobile VPN will affect BYOD adoption in the Enterprise?

 

CUBED: Work smarter on your smartphone with “Documents to Go” app

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: entrepreneur Jodie Yule is constantly traveling and working from her smartphone, but needs a way to get even more done while on the go. Right now, she’s juggling an endless stream of office documents coming in, but she has to wait until she’s back at the office to work on anything. Since she has a smartphone on her all the time, wouldn’t it make more sense if she was able to squeeze some work in during all those little moments in-between deliveries of her product, a weekly newsletter delivered to restaurants and coffee shops called “Coffee News”?

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Use StayFocused to Block Time Wasting Websites To Make You More Productive

StayFocused browser extension blocks websites to increase productivityWe’ve all logged into Facebook and mysteriously lost 45 minutes down the rabbit hole of status updates and liking photos. In theory it’s not a big deal, but all those tiny procrastination moves add up to lost time and productivity when you could be getting work done. It takes a lot of willpower to restrain yourself from checking Twitter (or whatever your distraction of choice may be), so there are a few options to take all the choice out of the equation. StayFocused is a browser extension for Chrome that simply blocks sites you specify, so you can’t be tempted.

Browser extensions work kind of like plugins, and they quite literally take advantage of the browser’s engineering to extend its technological capabilities. They’re all as simple as a quick download from the Google Chrome Web Store. Keep in mind this only work for Chrome, but you can use the Chrome browser on either a Mac or PC.

After you’ve downloaded the extension, there are a couple of productivity-boosting options. The first is called the “Nuclear Option,” which in this case means blocking certain sites all the time, or even only allowing certain sites all the time. If you’re willing to allow yourself a little time to goof off, you can also set the browser to allow for certain amounts of time that can be spent on various sites. For example, you can set a maximum amount of 20 minutes for Facebook. After your twenty minutes are up, you’re locked out. No more Facebook until the next day.

There are ways around it, of course. You could switch browsers or disable the StayFocused plugin altogether. So yes, you will still need some willpower to stay on task. But it’s a lot less than you might need otherwise, and it can’t hurt to limit (or at least just track) how much time you’re spending on sites that aren’t job-critical.

 

Synergyse: Google Apps Training for Small Business Users

Synergyse Google Apps training for businessGoogle Apps for Business is quickly becoming a viable alternative to standard email and IT solutions, especially for small businesses looking to move more of their workflow to the cloud. But for many people it can be tough to transition to a new way of working, especially if they’re deeply familiar with older programs like Microsoft Word and Outlook. New startup Synergese aims to take the pain out of transitioning (and lighten the IT burden) by providing real-time Google Apps training right inside the browser window. Synergese’s CTO Majid Manzarpour worked at Google training users in Apps, and two other founders are also ex-Googlers, so they’re approaching the businesses with expertise and experience in training.

As of now, Synergyse is offering training in Gmail, Google Calendar and Drive, the three building blocks of scheduling and document sharing within the Google ecosystem. Unlike a more traditional video tutorial, lessons take place inside the browser, allowing you to learn by interacting with program you’re looking to learn. It’s a more intuitive and interactive approach that allows quicker learning, but lessons are scheduled at your own pace, so there’s no rush.

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