Webware100

Yahoo Calendar is Yahoo's free day, week, month, and yearly planning tool. Users with Yahoo accounts can create their own calendar for free and share it with others. Creating new events is a simple affair. Anyone can link up an event or task to several e-mail addresses and get reminders on a variety of devices and services including Yahoo Messenger or on their mobile phones.

In addition to its planning roots, Yahoo's Calendar doubles as a task scheduler where users can set priorities and make their own to-do list complete with time zone control and highly customizable due dates. There's also a huge directory of events you can add-on to your calendar such as U.S. holidays, horoscopes, and daily weather reports.

Winner: Yahoo Calendar (Calendar.Yahoo.com)
Category: Productivity

Remember the Milk beta makes your to-do items and reminders available in Gmail, via SMS, the iPhone, Windows Mobile devices, Skype, and popular IM clients. Integration with Google Calendar and contacts would let you connect to, say, a co-worker for an instant chat at an appointed time. Remember the Milk also can pinpoint tasks on a map and export your lists as Atom and iCal-ready feeds.

Remember the Milk is one of the most portable goal-setting services in its space; you can take it with you instead of repeatedly returning to its Web site. There are two levels of service, one free and one Pro that runs $25 a year. Pro members get early access to new features, technical support, as well as access to the service on Apple's iPhone.

Winner: Remember The Milk (RememberTheMilk.com)
Category: Productivity

Mint is a free online financial management service, designed to compete with local money management software and competing online finance services. It will interface directly with your bank and credit card companies (there are more than 3,500 institutions on the system) to keep your accounts up to date. That makes Mint not only a budgeting tool, but also a way to keep track of accounts without going to a bunch of different sites.

You can also configure the product to send you e-mail or mobile alerts when certain conditions are met, such as accounts dropping to certain levels, bills coming due, or when large purchases are made on credit cards you're tracking.

Mint makes money for itself, and for you, by looking at your spending habits and your accounts and recommending offers that will save you money. Got a high-interest credit card? Spending too much on DSL? Mint's advertising network will match offers from its partners to your particular situation. Mint's consumer pitch is that it will save you thousands of dollars a year if you listen to its paid advice.

Winner: Mint (Mint.com)
Category: Productivity

Microsoft Office Live Workspace is Microsoft's tool for sharing Office documents and mission critical files between multiple users. Workspace users can select privacy controls for each document and get the heads up when another user is editing it. If they want to work on a shared document at the same time, Live Workspace also taps into Microsoft's SharedView to enable screen sharing and overwriting protection.

In addition the Web view, users can take advantage of a plug-in for Microsoft Office that links up to Live Workspace, letting them save documents in real time to their selected Workspace without even having to navigate to the site.

Office Live Workspace is completely free to use while still in beta. Microsoft has talked about adding advertising to pay for it.

Winner: Office Live Workspace (Workspace.Officelive.com)
Category: Productivity

I Want Sandy is an automated e-mail assistant. You simply add "her" as an e-mail contact to get started. Sending Sandy an e-mail with a small message will have the system scan what you wrote and convert into an e-mail reminder or calendar appointment that will be sent back to you at whatever time you note. It also has been designed to work with the popular microblogging service Twitter, letting users remotely set reminders while away from their regular e-mail.

I Want Sandy works for one person or with groups. There's no special sign-up, you just CC them and the service will alert everyone at once. You can also set up how you want to be notified, either on your regular work e-mail or on your phone. The service is free and works with a variety of calendaring tools, including Google Calendar.

Winner: I Want Sandy (IWantSandy.com)
Category: Productivity

Google Docs & Spreadsheets is a free, Web-based collaborative office suite. Users can make and share documents and spreadsheets with anyone who has a Google account. What makes the service really interesting is that multiple users can be concurrently working on the same document. All files are stored for free on Google's servers, and they can be accessed from any computer with an Internet connection.

While you need to be connected to the Internet to use these applications, you're also able to export Google Docs & Spreadsheets files to work with Microsoft Office and several other formats. Google also recently rolled out a compatibility with its Gears extension that will let users edit their office files while offline, which can be useful if you're jumping in and out of range of Wi-Fi or cellular data while out and about.

Winner: Google Docs and Spreadsheets (Docs.Google.com)
Category: Productivity

Google Calendar is a free, Web-based calendar. Users can add events in multiple calendars and access them on their mobile phone or using Google's Gmail. Like many other Google applications, Google Calendar has a collaborative nature. Users can share and subscribe to one another's calendars or import them from third-party services that offer things such as national holidays, movie releases, or moon cycles.

In addition to a calendar view that can be toggled by day, week, or month, you can also create your own custom view that lists anywhere from two days to four weeks. To keep track of any upcoming events, there's also an agenda view that lists everything that's on your calendar in a chronological and color-coded view.

Winner: Google Calendar (Google.com/Calendar)
Category: Productivity

Basecamp is a Web-based project management tool from 37signals. Groups can come together and work on large or small projects, sharing the same collaborative space.

It's essentially a mash-up of various productivity tools, including a to-do list maker, shared storage space, message boards, and calendaring. What has made it so successful is how it's been tied together. It's well known as a service that fits both personal and group organization into one handy tool.

Basecamp has several tiers of service, with varying degrees of shared file storage and active projects.

Winner: Basecamp (BasecampHQ.com)
Category: Productivity

30 Boxes is an online calendaring tool. Instead of clicking on dates and times to enter appointments, you can type in its single entry box something like, "Lunch, noon Friday with Frank," and it will create the appointment based on that.

Despite its simplicity, it's more than an events calendar with a rudimentary understanding of scheduling grammar. It's also an aggregation service for time-based updates from your social sites and for those of your friends. For example, 30 Boxes will put your blog updates, Twitter messages, Upcoming.org calendar items, and Flickr photos on your calendar, as well as those from your friends.

The service has a to-do list miniapplication as well, and it has its own e-mail application, called Supermail, that you can use to send Web links. It tracks responses to your e-mails--when users open the message or click on the links you send, you're alerted in 30 Boxes.

Winner: 30 Boxes (30Boxes.com)
Category: Productivity