collaboration

Coalition enlists consumers in smart grid

Electric power companies and industry groups on Tuesday launched the SmartGrid Consumer Coalition, a nonprofit with the goal of getting consumers involved in managing their energy consumption.

As previously reported, the newly formed coalition is made up of utilities, smart-grid companies, research groups, and one consumer advocacy group. During a press briefing at the DistribuTech utility conference, representatives said members intend to do research on consumer preferences and collaborate on ways to inform consumers about smart-grid technologies.

"We don't think the smart grid is smart until the consumer is actually involved," said Katherine Hamilton, a president of … Read more

Tearing down Twitter's walls

Remember those crazy days of e-mail when you couldn't send messages between systems? Microsoft Mail customers could only send mail within their enterprise or to other customers of Microsoft Mail (ditto for the other systems). It wasn't until SMTP standardized things that e-mail could move between systems.

E-mail was interesting then, but it didn't really become dominant until it standardized around the SMTP messaging protocol.

Are we experiencing the same thing with Twitter?

Twitter has become hugely popular, but it remains a closed communication medium. Yes, it has opened its data stream and maintains an open API approach … Read more

Start-up Asana promises workplace nirvana

After contributing to the destruction of productivity at work by helping Facebook through its early days, Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein are launching a new service aimed to make people and businesses productive once again. The company, Asana, announced details today on its funding. However, details on the service itself are still vague.

Here's what we know: The company just raised a $9 million venture round lead by Benchmark Capital with additional funding from Andreessen Horowitz. Marc Andreessen is an advisor and will not be on the board. Benchmark's Matt Cohler, formerly at Facebook himself, will be.

The … Read more

Annotation and collaboration come to AbiWord

In an update earlier this week, AbiWord introduced several new features, one of which competitors have long had. In AbiWord 2.8.1, you can finally annotate a document. There's also integration with the new Web-based sharing tool called AbiCollab.net. This extends Google Docs-style sharing to AbiWord fans.

Other features have been fixed or introduced, too. Smart Quotes, the curved quotation mark, had been implemented before, but they now work as they do in other word processors. A multipage view has been introduced for examining more than one page of your document simultaneously. For users who need robust … Read more

Word up, price down

This free, open-source word processor strikes us as a worthy alternative to pricey, big-name products. AbiWord has a quick learning curve, since the interface is very similar to those in Word and WordPerfect.

You'll find just about all the features you need, including the ability to cut and paste, highlight, and a bevy of common formatting tools. Although we did miss a grammar-checking utility, AbiWord can check your spelling in many languages--you'll need to choose the appropriate foreign language dictionaries during installation. A huge plus is the ability to open and save Microsoft Word documents, though the program … Read more

Google Docs adds live sharing to folders

Google Docs has long let users share documents between one another, but folders--a feature Google begrudgingly added to Docs back in mid-2007, have largely been left out of the picture.

That changed on Monday, as users are now able to share entire folders of documents, spreadsheets, and presentations with other people.

The benefit here is that the permissions settings for a shared folder controls the individual file permissions of all the documents inside of it, meaning that you don't have to go through and change each document's viewing permissions one at a time. It's also an easy … Read more

Huddle adds collaboration features, iPhone app

Online collaboration service Huddle announced the addition of Web conferencing, an iPhone app, and a Microsoft Office plug-in to its service on Wednesday.

The company's new Web conferencing feature is fully integrated into Huddle. Users will now be able to schedule recurring meetings. They can also share content with outside participants by providing viewing privileges to a member's desktop. A limited number of minutes will be made available, depending on the user's plan. Unlimited conferencing can be purchased separately.

For now, Huddle's Web-conferencing feature is only available to its high-paying Enterprise plan-holders. It plans to roll … Read more

HP unveils Skyroom video collaboration tool

SAN FRANCISCO--Looking to take advantage of tightened corporate travel budgets, Hewlett-Packard on Tuesday showed the latest tech to come out of its labs, called Skyroom.

Unveiled together with Intel at the start of the Intel Developer Forum here, Skyroom is a real-time collaborative video conferencing and whiteboarding tool. HP CEO Mark Hurd hinted at the product when he spoke at Fortune's Brainstorm conference in July.

Skyroom allows colleagues in separate locations to make video calls and share videos, 3D applications, documents, and more in real time. Using an advanced video codec, rich applications and video are compressed and shared … Read more

A text editor made for developers

SubEthaEdit is a full-featured text editor and live collaboration platform with many specialized tools for software developers. Its streamlined interface focuses on speedy workflow--whether you're working solo or in tandem--and several users can edit a single document simultaneously using a simple, Bonjour-based system that lets you effectively drag and drop fellow collaborators into (and out of) docs, without any cumbersome setup.

SubEthaEdit also puts a premium on customization, with detailed choices in its preferences, good interoperability with most third-party apps you're likely to be using (like FTP clients and IDEs), and support for AppleScript and multiple coding languages (… Read more

For power Web users

We've been impressed with Diigo, a content sharing and bookmarking tool. It pulls double duty as a way to clip things from the Web, as well as share them with others. What makes the service really interesting is that you can use it to grab entire Web pages, and make annotations right on top of the content. Then you can share it with others, or view it even when the source site is no longer there, like a personal archive.

The service has a plug-in that lets you clip and save text from Web pages, or just page URLs … Read more