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| reQall Helps You Remember Stuff, Anywhere Posted: 03 Apr 2009 04:00 PM PDT Written by Meryl Evans.
Capturing and Tracking Your Thoughts To use reQall over the phone you just dial a toll-free number and talk to it. reQall accepts voice commands to add items, share a reminder with another reQall user (a useful feature for teams of web workers), listen to your current lists and ask reQall to send a list to your phone. reQall’s call-in system works for me even though I’m deaf. The detailed step-by-step quickstart guide shows how to call reQall to add an item. It transcribes your audio message into text and keeps the audio file. The system did a decent job of transcribing my notes, although it missed a couple of things with my imperfect speech. Still, the accuracy is impressive and you can edit anything it gets wrong. The system publishes the audio recording to your account on the web site in an instant and the text version of the audio shows up within a few minutes. Of course, you can also enter capture items from within the web app, in the large “Add” box on the left of the screen, as you can see. Communication Options There are many ways to view your lists from the reQall application. In fact, at first it can seem a bit overwhelming. You can receive transcripts of new audio items by email, text message (SMS) or instant message (IM). You can also receive reminders and shared items in the same way. reQall sends a daily memory jog by email at a scheduled time. You can also interact with it over IM. Once you add reQall to your buddy list, it will message you to confirm receipt of items or to let you know that it doesn’t understand a command. reQall comes with a free application for BlackBerrys and iPhones that syncs with your reQall account. The reQall app also works with iPod Touch, except for the voice recording feature, unless you have a microphone. A plug-in for Microsft Outlook integrates reQall with Outlook’s contacts, calendar and tasks. reQall also works with Google Calendar and calendars that support the iCal standard, including Apple iCal.  reQall Jogger on BlackBerry  reQall iPhone app
Unique Features Memory Jogger reviews your notes, current location and upcoming calendar items to predict when you need a reminder to jog your memory. Those on an iPhone can shake their phones for a EureQa, which opens a reminder or Memory Jog each time it shakes. reQall is location-aware. The “My Places” tab stores your notes that are specific to certain locations such as home, school, work, grocery store, etc. However, I found this feature is buggy, as it rarely adds items when they refer to a place that appears on the list. Furthermore, reQall for the BlackBerry won’t recognize any of my locations, even though Google Maps knows exactly where I am. If it worked, it would prove valuable in giving you relevant reminders when you’re near one of your listed places. So, Is it Useful? Honestly, reQall has many features to meet every communications preference. While it looks overwhelming, it won’t be once you decide how you want to interact with it. It’ll take time to get the hang of reQall’s limited vocabulary, which makes it tricky to figure out how to give it the correct command. But being able to access, and interact with, your to-dos wherever you are, no matter what you are doing is extremely useful for any web worker. reQall comes in two flavors: Standard and Pro. Standard is free while Pro costs $2.99 per month or $24.99 per year. You can try Pro for 30-days free without entering a credit card.The key difference between the two is that Standard doesn’t include Pro Memory Jogger, location-based reminders and the ability to manage items with email. Those in the U.S., the UK and Canada can register by phone; otherwise you can sign up on the web site. How do you remember things?        |
| 5 Most Popular Posts on WebWorkerDaily This Week Posted: 03 Apr 2009 03:00 PM PDT Written by Simon Mackie. Just in case you missed any of them, here are the five most popular posts on WebWorkerDaily this week: New to coworking? Check out Imran’s roundup of coworking coverage Interesting conversations are happening all over the web: about you, your company and your industry, and revealing many tips and tricks that you should know. Dawn shares her tips on how to monitor them all. Step-by-step instructions on how to use Gmail Tasks as a Getting Things Done (GTD) system. Mark Hinton shows how he built his spine-friendly standing desk. Sam explains why your home wi-fi network needs a regular cycled reboot.
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| Thanks to Our WebWorkerDaily Sponsors! Posted: 03 Apr 2009 02:00 PM PDT Written by Edit Staff. We’d like to say thanks to this month’s WebWorkerDaily sponsors:
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| Find Freedom From Distractions Posted: 03 Apr 2009 11:00 AM PDT Written by Eric Berlin.
But the more I thought about it, the more Freedom made sense to me. The concept is simple: There are so many online distractions from doing real work these days — email, instant messaging, social networking, information and news, casual gaming, and on and on — that it’s a pretty snappy idea to have an app that locks out the alluring siren song for a set period of time so that you can get some work done. As the web site for Freedom explains, “Freedom will free you from the distractions of the Internet, allowing you time to code, write, or create. At the end of your selected offline period, Freedom re-enables your network, restoring everything as normal.” Ah, Freedom. At present Freedom is only available for Mac (through OS X version 10.5.6) but I wouldn’t be surprised to see it released for PC soon. As Rebecca Traister on Salon.com notes, “I have downloaded the program so that I may be liberated from all the other programs I have downloaded.” Freedom is free, but the developer is asking for a donation of $10 to “fund future development efforts.” Of course, we don’t actually “need” Freedom; we already have it. We’re all perfectly able to simply shut down our web browsers, desktop apps and other communications systems on our computers so that we can get work done. The problem is that we don’t want to. We believe that we can keep the proverbial floodgates open, while getting work done and being maximally productive at the same time. So perhaps Freedom will give us that extra little push so that we can help ourselves. Do you think that Freedom would help you to concentrate?      |
| Telecommuting and the Untethered Employee Posted: 03 Apr 2009 09:00 AM PDT Written by Imran Ali. As part of a special report on Work/Life Balance, BusinessWeek ran a “Telecommuting: Once a Perk, Now a Necessity,” an interesting story on how remote workers and telecommuting are now being seen as necessary developments for many organizations, rather than perks afforded to a privileged few amongst their workforce. Driven by the need to reduce capital expenditure, many employers are encouraging workers to move to home offices. Here are a few interesting takeaways.
There’s a bunch of phraseology strung throughout this article that I think is really pertinent to the web worker. Really what we’re talking about is the “post-geographic, untethered worker” — the web is simply an enabler for many disciplines and industries. I’m going to stop using “telecommuter” and go with “untethered” worker from now on! There are some interesting inferences to be made from Gelb’s story and that of her employer - could coworking be seen as a potential “halfway house” for employees? Could smart employers provide coworking credits to their newly untethered workers, or perhaps stimulate the development of sponsored coworking spaces that benefit workers who might live in proximity?      |
| Ambiently: Find Related Web Content Posted: 03 Apr 2009 07:00 AM PDT Written by Samuel Dean. Like many web workers, searching the web is an integral part of how I get things done each day. For that reason, I regularly try out various types of search engines that can take me beyond standard Google results. My favorite recent find in this area remains Viewzi, which lets you get lots of different types of visual and text-based views of anything you search for. This week, I’ve been trying a tool that bills itself as a web “discovery engine,” rather than a pure search tool: Ambiently. So far, I’m finding Ambiently very good for some of the tasks that I would otherwise use a search engine for, in particular finding good alternative content on esoteric topics and seeing how my content is being used by others. It’s very easy to get started with Ambiently. It’s a bookmarklet, so it works in most popular browsers. From the application’s home page, you just drag the “Ambiently” button up to your browser’s bookmarks toolbar. Once it’s in the toolbar, all you need to do is click on it to get a list of suggestions for other web pages related to any page you’re looking at. The idea behind Ambiently is to give you suggestions for content that’s similar to the content on the page that you’re currently looking at. It does indeed do this for any web page, but I find it most useful for quickly showing me alternatives to pages on fairly esoteric topics, and particularly useful for quickly looking at how anything I’ve written on the web is being picked up by others. For example, I went to this WWD page where I wrote a story about the useful Firefox extension, Pencil. When I clicked on the Ambiently button on my Firefox toolbar, I was taken to a list of several sites that picked the post up. There were some sites that had other reviews of Pencil as well. By contrast, if I search on “Pencil” or the title of my post at Google, I get a long list of Mozilla and Mozilla-related links. Ambiently appears to look at a whole lot of keywords on any web page you’re on and then seeks to find matches for groups of them. I’ll give Ambiently a nod for indeed being different from a search engine — definitely more of a “discovery engine” — but it’s primarily best at finding non-obvious relationships related to offbeat topics. Have you used Ambiently? What did you think of the results?      |
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