Team Collaboration

• Video in Parlano MindAlign … Parlano showed off video calling capabilities within MindAlign, its persistent chat application. “This is the first demonstration of fully integrated group chat and video calls utilizing the soon-to-be released Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 and the SIP/SIMPLE unified communications standard.” It’s being demoed at TechEd this week. Available … sometime (but kewl!). Parlano (hat tip, Jeff)



• Colligo Award Finalist … Colligo is one of the finalists for “Best of TechEd 2007” in the SharePoint category. Its offline add-on for SharePoint addresses many of the weaknesses in SharePoint’s inbuilt offline capabilities. The winner will be announced tomorrow. Colligo
• BlueTie at 35,000 … BlueTie announced that 35,000 small businesses have subscribed to its free email and calendar service. “BlueTie Free is a Web-based application that features shared contacts and files, spam and virus protection for email, domain support, 5GB of storage per user, and up to 20 users per business customer.” The free service was released last year. Intranet Journal
• Workplays … Humap Ltd. released a pilot edition of Workplays, its new collaboration solution for virtual teams. Key capabilities: real-time chat, online document authoring, presence, and more. Some accounts are available. PRWeb
• Cospaces … The University of Salford and other coalition partners have unveiled a major project to enable engineers to collaborate using virtual reality technology for the design of planes, cars and buildings, among others. “It is hoped that in just a few years these collaborative workspaces will be available for industries across the world – saving them the time and cost of international travel and helping to reduce carbon emissions.” NAFEMS
• ikordo is Live … Ikordo from A Volutio, an intelligent way of scheduling meetings, has gone live. It uses email to coordinate with invitees, linked to an intelligent sense-making algorithm to automagically figure out the best meeting time based on people’s email responses. ikordo

Productivity

• Sleep More! … The Better Sleep Council reported on the negative impacts of insufficient sleep on performance at work, including negativity, poor memory retention, lowered alertness and less productivity, among others. Recommendation: Sleep longer (and get a better bed / mattress). Better Sleep Council
• The 20 Hour Week? … Gartner is forecasting that by 2015, due to time-saving productivity-enhancing technology, we’ll all be working a 20 hour week, rather than a 40-60 hour one. Laura concludes, “In my work teaching corporate seminars and speaking at conferences, I’m finding the work week continues to *climb* for the average worker. As people have more flexibility and can work from home, they tend to just add more to their plates. They leave work, go home, plug in, and keep working!” Laura Stack
• OmniFocus Cometh … The Omni Group’s new GTD application, OmniFocus, is almost ready to go. If you’re brave enough to run pre-release software, and you’re one of the privileged few to own a Mac OS X, then download away … OmniGroup (“privileged few” … ha, that should give Eric a paradigm shift vs “6% market share”)

Other Stuff

• Toshiba a Laptop Lightweight? … Or at least, it will have the lightest laptops soon. InfoWorld