What Could Be (dot com)

21 March 2007

Who Needs to Stay in One Place When We Have The Internet?

CouldBe Studios (that’s us, in case you’re confused) is many things to many people, but sedentary it ain’t. We shuttle between a home office, an office-office, and several points in between. How do we do it? Here’s a list, in no particular order, of the apps, programs and sites that make it possible to run a business from anyplace we happen to be.

Basecamp: Having a place where we can communicate with our clients and keep track of notes, tasks and milestones is definitely a good thing. For them and for us.
Highrise: It’s new, but already we’re digging the ability to collaboratively add notes to contacts. Need to know who talked to the ISP last and what they said? It’s all there. Our inner OCD rejoices.
Backpack: We still use this to keep more “lightweight” lists, and we’ve even been known to use the Writeboard feature to write drafts of blog posts. Yes, we know we can use Writeboards in Basecamp. We’re just used to them in Backpack. (Did we mention our inner OCD?)

(Note to 37signals: you know what would be really cool? If all these accounts could hold hands and be friends. You know, one login to rule them all? Plz and thx.)

iChat: While we remain highly suspicious of the A in AIM, we grudgingly admit that we feel a certain amount of affection for iChat, especially for video conferencing. Originally we thought we’d use Skype for video chats, but since our love affair with Skype went sour we thought we’d give iChat AV a try. We haven’t been sorry.
Ma.gnolia: We bookmark obsessively, but the thing that sold us on Ma.gnolia was the ease with which we can send bookmarks back and forth without having them come up in our bookmark stream. If one of us runs across a site we want to share, we can just click the little “Send Bookmark Recommendation” icon, choose a recipient (or several) from our list, and viola. Especially handy for links we don’t need to act on right away but hope to peruse at our leisure. As a company we’re always working on a million things, so it’s nice to be able to prioritize without missing out on anything.
Box.net: Essential for file sharing, which is a thing we do a lot of. We miss the friendly little drag and drop-able interface of the previous incarnation, but still think it’s pretty spiff. The new color scheme is definitely easier on the eyes, and since one of us is desperately myopic we appreciate things like that.
Honorable Mention: Google Reader. We were using NetNewsWire Lite for our extensive and well-documented RSS habit, but once we moved to Google Reader we never looked back. We love the fact that we can view our feeds from anywhere - including our phone. Google, we kind of love you.

And last, but certainly not least…

BlackBerry Pearl smartphone: Our mobile line is our business line, and we figured that since we’re going to be connected all the time we might as well be really
connected. Being able to read and respond to e-mail on the bus? So freaking cool. Also, look how much more productive we can be during our commute!

Anything you’ve found especially useful that we didn’t mention? Let us know in the comments!

Technorati Tags:
couldbe studios, productivity, mobile office, basecamp, backpack, highrise, ichat, ma.gnolia, box.net, blackberry pearl

4 Comments currently posted.

stan says:

yes,we don’t stay in one place, also we don’t surf on one sites, RSS makes more micro-content flow in the pipeline of IM and mobile, such as Skype/Gtalk/AIM/Yahoo/msn/mail/mobile…

RSS+Skype
RSS+Gtalk

couldbe studios says:

RSS is definitely a huge asset to those of us who are on the go. I honestly haven’t done much with GTalk (which seems unlikely given my love affair with Google, but there you go). Maybe I should check it out.