A Sliver of the On-line Collaboration Ecosystem

With travel budgets slashed, fuel prices on the rise again, airport horror stories, summer storms,... who wants to travel for a meeting?

Along with Joe Sterling, we at Alphachimp have been developing Remote Graphic Capture to enable graphic recording via on-line collaborative tools. This article compares 17 best-in-class tools for virtual meetings.

Online conferencing tools are used for many reasons – sales presentations, webinars and training, to name a few. Plus, if you work from home, like many freelancers and small business owners do, you face the unique challenge of needing live meeting time with clients who may be located around the world.

There are many online meeting tools out there that offer a variety of features at varying costs. Here are a few tools you may want to consider, some of their notable features and the cost for using them.

Let us know what you have found useful in dodging the airport blues while experiencing quality collaboration with peers. Or (shameless plug) schedule a demo of RGC today!

Update on 2009-05-20 15:28 by Alphachimp

Face time is crucial to morale and productivity

by Susan Pinker from Globe and Mail on why physical distance still matters in the age of the internet.
(via Twitter @valdiskrebs @barrywellman)| May 20, 2009

Want to get up and running on very little capital? OpenSource and web apps are the way to go. This is advice to social entrepreneurs (and entrepreneurs in general) from Jeff Skoll's foundation. Open Source solutions like Ubuntu for free and OpenOffice give an instant operating system and Office suite of productivity tools. Online solutions for websites, shared documents, collaboration and customer relationship management include: PBwiki, WetPaint, Google, Zoho, 37Signals

clipped from www.socialedge.org

Almost all start-ups run into limitations in two critical areas - time & money. You can never have enough of either. Technology is supposed to help you save a bit of both, but it always seems to end up taking more time and more money than it ever saves you. Even when you find a solution that saves you money, it almost always takes more time than you have to give, and vice versa. What choices are available to help swing things back in the intended direction?

Open source tools are free, but expensive in terms of time lost to implement. There are free web services available that allow you to utilize their capabilities - sans your own branding. Gmail is great, but how long can you get away without having your own domain associated with your email? Same goes for free wikis and other collaboration tools.