Elance
August 8, 2008 in 4 out of 5 stars, A service, Collaboration, Hiring, ProductivityElance: A place to (primarily) find freelance help, and also to find work as a freelancer. Elance, Inc. Elance has been around for a while (at least since 2002) and serves a wide range of businesses. I won't speak to their breadth, just their value to me as a non-Fortune-500-level entrepreneur. Elance's real benefit is in finding inexpensive (many of their providers are in Asia and Latin America) help for more specialized tasks that I can't afford the time to do myself, or that I don't have the skills to do myself.
For example, I have about 1,000 product images that I need the backgrounds removed from in Photoshop. My friend needed a customized Flash video player designed for his site. A quick (relatively simple) post on Elance, and we found the help we needed within 24 hours.
I like how careful they are about vetting businesses and providers to ensure everyone is the real deal. They also have an escrow service (free for businesses), and a fairly robust messaging and agreement system to make sure everyone knows what's expected and how the project will pay out. My results have been very satisfactory. The site is pretty complex, and as such, it's a bit cumbersome to use (I did muddle my way through without reading much and just guess-clicking and did ok however). Some of the communication structure feels more like insulation designed to make sure Elance gets their commission than a way to make my life easier. Most of their project management constructs are far too elementary to be useful. Free for businesses, providers pay 4-6% plus a monthly fee depending on usage. Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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Google Sites
July 23, 2008 in 4 out of 5 stars, A service, Collaboration, Free, Hosted "Office", Hosted software, Issue trackers, Productivity, Project managementGoogle Sites: A poor man's (pretty darn good) intranet. An online, Google-hosted wiki-meets-project management software service. Google gobbled up Jot Spot (a hosted wiki service headed by Joe Kraus) before it even really got going, it was later re-born as Google Sites. Google I have a growing and widely dispersed team for my latest venture. I've set up a Google Sites website which is serving as an "intranet" for this team, and it's working quite well. It's like a wiki in that anyone (whom you allow) can edit or add pages or documents. It also has several built-in tools to help you create things like, a file download repository, a todo list, an issue tracker, or an announcements board. Most anyone can set one up and manage it, it's not difficult, there are no HTML skills required. You have some limited control over the look and feel; for example you can easily brand it with your own logo and colors. They've made management of the site very simple. You can invite others as owners, collaborators or just viewers. You can also optionally make the site visible to everyone on the internet. You get 100MB of storage space for free, and can bump that up to 25GB per account for their paid version which costs $50/user/yr. They even have an API. My primary beef is no discussion forum built in. That would make it twice as valuable for us. Even if they just took Google Groups and married it in, we'd have a winner. This is a huge omission. I would also like the option not to have previous versions of all my pages available to everyone. It's not a huge deal, but I don't need the last umpteen version of a page viewable forever, and there's no facility to disallow this. Free for most everything, $50 per user per year for the deluxe version with lots of storage space. Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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There are also many more options available through "Gadgets" like a Google Calendar, a Presentation (read: Microsoft Powerpoint-like document), or a Spreadsheet. Plus hundreds of third party gadgets like maps, weather, games, news feeds, and chat. Not to mention a million other useless things no one would ever want (Woody Allen quotes?). Fortunately it's easy to ignore that stuff.What could be improved?
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ReviewBasics
October 16, 2007 in 4 out of 5 stars, Collaboration, Design, Free, Hosted software, Productivity, Project managementReviewBasics: Hosted software that allows you to submit, for review by others, a website, an image, a document (Word, PDF, Powerpoint), or a flash video. Others can add comments, drawings, emoticons, text, etc. SharpStyle Labs, Inc. It's an impressive technical accomplishment. It's polished and easy to use. Plus, it offers nice controls for the author: You can have comments visible just to the author, or to all reviewers. You can you write up a set of instructions for your reviewers. It offers a comments history. When done, you can filter all your stuff by date, by reviewer, and by files which have reviewer comments on them. If you need to do asynchronous reviews, and/or if you have a geographically distributed team, this is a great resource. It feels a bit slow (which is probably because it's so rich, so that's forgivable). If you want to submit a website for review, you can't do it as you are creating the workspace (like you can with everything else), you have to create the workspace, then dig around for it (they tell me this is going to be addressed soon). Free Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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