Today we will take a look at four small but groundbreaking tools that help save significant time each day:
This little Outlook plug-in resolves a number of common issues and inconveniences that cost time and cause daily frustration when dealing with your email. Initially, you might think “Why pay $30 for an Outlook plugin? Is there no freeware?” Sure there is, but only Xobni offers the following features that really do make your daily “email life” a lot easier. We have been using Xobni for over a year now and we can wholeheartedly recommend it. Here’s what it does:
a. Auto-complete: As you know, Outlook auto-completes email addresses but only if you enter the first letters first. Xobni auto-completes email addresses even if you start typing the last name of a person or even the company name. Xobni will also autocomplete email addresses of people you haven’t ever written to. This feature alone is worth a lot more than 30 bucks to us.
b. Consolidated Attachments: This great feature shows you a list of all attachments ever sent to you by a contact. Just select any email this contact has sent you and you automatically receive this handy pane in your Xobni panel.
c. Super Fast Search: Xobni claims its search is 50 times faster than the Outlook mail search. While we never bothered verifying this statement, we can say that Xobni search is always pretty much instantaneous. Take a look at figure 1 to see what else the Xobni search does.
d. Threaded Conversations: Similar to Gmail, Xobni will display your email conversations with a selected contact in a threaded view. This is a very useful feature that Office 2010 will offer by default.
e. BlackBerry Integration: By consolidating and combining information from your calendar, email messages, phone calls, SMS logs, LinkedIn and Facebook, Xobni provides a fully automated and constantly updated address book for your BlackBerry.
Additional useful and interesting features:
a. Portrait: Xobni will pull an email sender’s portrait photo from social networking sites and display it within an Outlook window. It’s great to be able to see who you are dealing with.
b. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Hoovers: Xobni shows information for all your Outlook contacts that is pulled from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Hoovers. This is not an essential feature, but it’s interesting to see what your business partners twitter about.
Bottom Line: Some of the best $30 you’ve ever spent.
Try Xobni
After seven years, Skype is now finally available for BlackBerry (Verizon only). It’s actually pretty good. Voice quality is fine, as it does not go through 3G, but uses a dedicated voice-line by Verizon. Skype-to-Skype voice calls are free. Instant messaging is pretty snappy and uncomplicated. Advanced features like file transfer, screen sharing, conference calls and video calls are not supported.
Bottom Line: Finally, I can be reached via Skype wherever I go. Not having all the advanced Skype features available on the road really doesn’t bother me. As it’s free, Skype for BlackBerry is a no-brainer.
Try Skype for BlackBerry
Netvibes is a great news aggregator that allows you to create dashboards around topics you want to stay up-to-date on. For example, I have set up a dashboard on “storage virtualization”: http://www.netvibes.com/prinomic . These dashboards can be private or open to the public, as in the case of the Prinomic storage one. You can also add numerous widgets, e.g., Twitter stream, your Gmail, Facebook wall, calendar or Flickr stream.
Bottom Line: Netvibes can save you a lot of time when trying to stay up to date within your fields of expertise. The graphical representation is great and it is very easy to add additional news items or widgets. Check it out!
Try Netvibes
The idea is great: Install a small agent on your workstation to monitor your reading behavior and then receive a personalized homepage with content that Genieo deems relevant to you. We’ve tried it for almost two weeks and came to the conclusion that it’s not quite there yet. Too many articles would turn up that really were not of any interest. At the same time, a lot of interesting stuff went on in our favorite blogs and news sites that did not get picked up by Genieo.
Bottom Line: There is a lot of potential in the Genieo idea. We will leave it installed for a while and watch the quality of our custom homepage evolve. One day, I would hope that the quality of the Genieo homepage comes close to the Netvibes news pages that we create manually.
Try Genieo