Gmail compose

Shift C, R, F - to open in new window.

Google Docs Additional Storage

You can now upload any kind of file to Google Docs.

.. and buy additional storage at 25 cents per GB.

What better than a 80 GB backup drive for $20/year? And share it with others (shared folders!), to boot!

wildcard bookmark

I don't know how well-know it is, but basically you make a bookmark with a keyword for the address bar and a wildcard in the URL.

For example, if you make a bookmark with the keyword 'map' and the address 'http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?hl=en&q=%s' (note the '%s' wildcard) you can then type 'map cleveland street london' straight into the address bar just as the summary suggests. All that they seem to be suggesting is having it come up in a 'floating' context box like the AwesomeBar rather than actually open in the tab.

dabbleboard

Dabbleboard is an online collaboration application that’s centered around the whiteboard. With a new type of drawing interface that's actually easy and fun to use, Dabbleboard gets out of your way and just lets you draw. Finally the whiteboard enters the digital age!

skydeck.com

Make low-cost, high quality calls from your computer using your current cell phone number. Your friends and colleagues always know who is calling and you don't have to be at your desk when they call back.

Search, sort, read, reply, forward, tag, and archive all your text messages, voicemails, and your call notes, the same way you manage your email. Keep track of all your conversations with clients and friends.

Read all of your text messages online and use your computer keyboard to reply.

Been using youmail to handle voicemail, but this looks comprehensive.

Be more productive

Hard work isn't supposed to be pleasant, we're told. But in fact it's probably the most enjoyable thing I do. Not only does a tough problem completely absorb you while you're trying to solve it, but afterwards you feel wonderful having accomplished something so serious.

So the secret to getting yourself to do something is not to convince yourself you have to do it, but to convince yourself that it's fun. And if it isn't, then you need to make it fun.

HOWTO: Be more productive (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)

"With all the time you spend watching TV," he tells me, "you could have written a novel by now." It's hard to disagree with the sentiment -- writing a novel is undoubtedly a better use of time than watching TV -- but what about the hidden assumption? Such comments imply that time is "fungible" -- that time spent watching TV can just as easily be spent writing a novel. And sadly, that's just not the case.

Time has various levels of quality. If I'm walking to the subway station and I've forgotten my notebook, then it's pretty hard for me to write more than a couple paragraphs. And it's tough to focus when you keep getting interrupted. There's also a mental component: sometimes I feel happy and motivated and ready to work on something, but other times I feel so sad and tired I can only watch TV.

If you want to be more productive then, you have to recognize this fact and deal with it. First, you have to make the best of each kind of time. And second, you have to try to make your time higher-quality.

HOWTO: Be more productive (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)

Blogged with the Flock Browser

The Architecture of Mailinator

The most interesting part to me is that the complete set of hardware that mailinator uses is one little server. Just one. A very modest machine with an AMD 2Ghz Athlon processor, 1G of ram (although it really doesn't need that much), and a boring IDE, 80G hard drive (Check ServerBeach's Category 1 Powerline 2100 for the exact specs). And honestly, its really not very busy at all. I've read the blogs of some copycat services of Mailinator where their owners were upgrading their servers to some big iron. This was really the impetus for me writing down this document - to share a different point of view.

5 Cool Google Tools You Should Know About

Probably, Google itself doesn't know where it's headed, and its leadership believes that this "throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks" model is a far better way to pick winners and losers than to make bets internally. They're probably correct about this.

I guess I shouldn't complain. Google has so much stuff going, that there's always something to peer into. Plus, its model of releasing anything and everything provides us all with universal, and usually free, access to the fruits of its research.

Here are the latest five:

The Best States For Business

In Forbes.com's second annual Top States for Business, Virginia may be the top-ranked state for the second straight year, but Washington is the big story. The biggest mover (tied with Tennessee), rising from 12th to fifth place, Washington is also the only state to finish in the top five in three main categories (labor, regulatory environment and growth). And Washington's numbers are up across the board when you look both backward and at projections into the future.

A Struggle Between Efficiency And Creativity

Traditionally, 3M had been a place where researchers had been given wide latitude to pursue research down whatever alleys they wished. After the arrival of the new boss, the DMAIC process was laid over a phase-review process for innovations—a novelty at 3M. The goal was to speed up and systematize the progress of inventions into the new-product pipeline. The DMAIC questions "are all wonderful considerations, but are they appropriate for somebody who's just trying to...develop some ideas?" asks Boyd. The impact of the Six Sigma regime, according to Boyd and other former 3Mers, was that more predictable, incremental work took precedence over blue-sky research. "You're supposed to be having something that was going to be producing a profit, if not next quarter, it better be the quarter after that," Boyd says.

For a long time, 3M had allowed researchers to spend years testing products. Consider, for example, the Post-it note. Its inventor, Art Fry, a 3M scientist who's now retired, and others fiddled with the idea for several years before the product went into full production in 1980. Early during the Six Sigma effort, after a meeting at which technical employees were briefed on the new process, "we all came to the conclusion that there was no way in the world that anything like a Post-it note would ever emerge from this new system," says Michael Mucci, who worked at 3M for 27 years before his dismissal in 2004. (Mucci has alleged in a class action that 3M engaged in age discrimination; the company says the claims are without merit.)

There has been little formal research on whether the tension between Six Sigma and innovation is inevitable. But the most notable attempt yet, by Wharton School professor Mary Benner and Harvard Business School professor Michael L. Tushman, suggests that Six Sigma will lead to more incremental innovation at the expense of more blue-sky work. The two professors analyzed the types of patents granted to paint and photography companies over a 20-year period, before and after a quality improvement drive. Their work shows that, after the quality push, patents issued based primarily on prior work made up a dramatically larger share of the total, while those not based on prior work dwindled.

Defenders of Six Sigma at 3M claim that a more systematic new-product introduction process allows innovations to get to market faster. But Fry, the Post-it note inventor, disagrees. In fact, he places the blame for 3M's recent lack of innovative sizzle squarely on Six Sigma's application in 3M's research labs. Innovation, he says, is "a numbers game. You have to go through 5,000 to 6,000 raw ideas to find one successful business." Six Sigma would ask, why not eliminate all that waste and just come up with the right idea the first time? That way of thinking, says Fry, can have serious side effects. "What's remarkable is how fast a culture can be torn apart," says Fry, who lives in Maplewood, Minn., just a few minutes south of the corporate campus and pops into the office regularly to help with colleagues' projects. "[McNerney] didn't kill it, because he wasn't here long enough. But if he had been here much longer, I think he could have."

Six Sigma: So Yesterday?

Revenue generation: US techies on top

A highly skilled and cost-effective workforce may be a major driver behind India's emergence as the global back-office of IT industry, but it still has miles to go before it catches up with global giants in terms of productivity.

A comparison of revenue contribution by employees of top five players in India and the US in this space shows that an American IT professional contributes nearly ten times higher to the company's turnover than his Indian counterpart.

Among the top five Indian IT firms -- TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Satyam Computer and HCL Tech -- TCS is the biggest in terms of annual revenue, but Azim Premji-led Wipro steals the show in terms of revenue per employee.

But even Wipro's per employee revenue of just over 51,000 dollars gets dwarfed when compared to the Fortune 500-listed IT companies in the US, where an employee contributes at least 1,00,000 dollars to the company's annual turnover.

The figure for TCS stood at close to 48,000 dollars, with annual turnover of 4.3 billion dollars and head count of over 89,400 employees at the end of last fiscal.

Wipro had annual revenues of 3.5 billion dollars and total head count of over 67,800 people last year.

Infosys' per employee contribution was close to 43,000 dollars with total revenue of 3.1 billion dollars and over 72,200 employees.

The average revenue per employee (ARPE) of the five largest IT earners in India stood at 42,000 dollars last fiscal year, against 4,10,000 dollars in the top five in the US -- HP, IBM, Dell, Sun Microsystems and EDS.

India's labour output will still lag Asean's by '15: ILO

The Indian economy may match the economies of the Association of South East Asian Nations in size by 2015, but in terms of labour productivity it will trail this grouping of 10 nations by a little under 20 per cent, according to a recent report by the International Labour Organisation.

The country is unlikely to match Asean productivity even after it overtakes the group in terms of size.

"If India overtook Asean around 2029, its level of labour productivity would be around a quarter of Singapore, half that of Malaysia, around 40 per cent less than Thailand and about the same level as Indonesia," said Steve Kapsos, a member of ILO's Economic and Social Affairs Unit, which drafted the report, in an e-mail response.

To be sure, the productivity gap has been steadily declining, from 70 per cent in 1990 to 33 per cent in 2006, a trend that gathered pace after the East Asian financial crisis in 1997.

"The challenge to Asean is not just that both China and India are growing faster. More importantly, their labour productivity levels are increasing more rapidly," the report said. China recently overtook Asean in terms of output per worker.

In recent times, only Myanmar and Vietnam have registered higher growth among Asean countries.

Asean countries worry that exports from China and India will flood their domestic markets, squeeze them out of global markets, and that the two giants will attract all the investment flows to Asia.

Higher-income countries, on the other hand, fear that if these large emerging economies can acquire and master new technologies, their exports may soon dominate the global high-tech export industry.

Top 25 Apps to Grow your Business

If you are running a small business, you know that to be successful you need to be a jack-of-all-trades. The smart way to manage everything from company finances, to client relations, to marketing, is to use the right tools – tools that are simple enough that they won’t require you to spend a lot of time and money you don’t have setting them up.

In this guide we cover the 25 best web2.0 applications for entrepreneurs who are looking for simple, cheap, and effective solutions to solving some of the tasks facing their small business or startup. The 25 applications selected were chosen both on the basis of their usefulness for the individual small business manager as well as their effectiveness in providing community support and networking opportunities for users.

Productivity Ninja: 101 Ways to Rock the Keyboard

Keyboard Shortcuts

Gmail

* Compose. C.
* Reply. R.
* Reply all. A.
* Forward. F.
* Archive, and next. Y+O archives the current message and opens the next.
* Delete, and next. #+O (i.e. Shift-3 + O) to delete and then open the next message.
* Send. Tab-Enter to send a message after composing it.
* Search. /.
* Navigate. J and K to move up and down your list of messages.
* Conversation view. N and P to move to the next or previous messages in Conversation view.
* Mute. M will archive a conversation and make all future messages in that conversation skip your inbox.
* Select conversation. X will select and check a conversation so you can tag, archive or apply an action.
* Save draft. Control-S.
* Go to inbox. G+I.
* Go to Starred. G+S.
* Go to Contacts. G+C.