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PCs are great productivity tools, and great time-wasters. It's not really fair to blame the machine; it didn't force you to spend all day Net surfing and forwarding gag e-mails. SVT Systems' GoalEnforcer Hyperfocus Edition is designed not only to help you focus on your tasks at hand to increase your daily productivity, but also to help you focus on your long-term goals and make concrete steps toward achieving them. It's based on "recursive visual thinking," a graphical method of saving, organizing, and prioritizing projects, goals, and thoughts.

GoalEnforcer Hyperfocus Edition's executable can be … Read more

Advanced Time Reports is a project management tool combined with time-tracking and reporting features in a single, multiuser solution optimized for managing small teams across departmental lines. It has the expected scheduling, reporting, client and contacts, and time sheet functions critical to project and team management. Xpress offers two desktop and two Web-based editions of ATR; the Premier Edition for Windows PCs offers all the functionality of the Professional Edition, with the addition of expense tracking and more team and project management options, but it lacks a few of the Web Premier version's features, such as mileage tracking and … Read more

Americans are changing their Internet usage habits and, increasingly, they're spending a bulk of their time on social networks such as Facebook.

It's not a new trend--but the numbers are getting bigger, according to a report released by Nielsen Online on Monday. Social networks led the pack last year with 15.8 percent of our online time spent there. But that figure has grown 43 percent in a year, now up to 22.7 percent of our time. Meanwhile, two other categories--video/movies and online games--both saw double-digit gains in usage time, 12 percent and 10 percent, respectively. … Read more

Despite public approval, U.S. wind energy investment is slowing down instead of growing, according to the American Wind Energy Association.

An overwhelming majority of Americans support a renewable electricity standard, and wind energy investment in particular, according to a poll of 600 likely voters conducted in March by Newhouse of Public Opinion Strategies and Bennett, Petts & Normington.

Specifically, 89 percent of Americans said increasing the amount of energy the U.S. gets from wind is a good idea. Broken down by ideology, 84 percent of Republicans, 93 percent of Democrats, and 88 percent of independents support increasing the … Read more

As rumored last month, YouTube this week unveiled its latest partnership: a collaboration with ABC's local Bay Area news station that makes it easier for users to upload relevant local content they've snapped on their cell phone or other mobile video device.

On YouTube's blog, YouTube's news manager Olivia Ma says that ABC will then choose uploaded videos to run as part of local TV news coverage as well as on ABC7's Web site.

Alongside video content it's already received, or curated from known local YouTube users, ABC is encouraging users to go out … Read more

To-do lists has become so essential to so many people's lives that they've actually evolved into their own category of software. Power To-Do List from Five O'clock Software is a fine example of the species. It lets you group your tasks in eight different views, including Next Actions and Tasks by Project, Importance, and Due Date; All Tasks by "Context," and more. What sets it apart from other time-management tools is its underlying concept. It's based on David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) method, which essentially takes the commonsense notion that writing things … Read more

If all the commercial buildings in the U.S. that exist as of 2010 were retrofitted to be more energy efficient, the country as a whole would save over $41.1 billion a year in energy bills.

That's according to the report "Energy Efficiency Retrofits for Commercial and Public Buildings" released Thursday by Pike Research.

Of course, in order to get to that $41.1 billion per year in savings, the owners of commercial properties would have to invest in the initial retrofit adaptations and construction upgrades. So how much is that going cost? Well, as it … Read more

Amid the swirling controversy surrounding iPhone 4's now infamous antenna engineering, Consumer Reports, which recently found the reception problems from Apple's latest smartphone to be a flaw disallowing it to recommend purchase, has stated that the Bumper case offered by Apple would solve those issues.

"With the Bumper fitted, we repeated the test procedure, placing a finger on the Bumper at the point at which it covers the gap below. The result was a negligible drop in signal strength--so slight that it would not have any effect, in our judgment."

Earlier tests, sans Bumper, caused Consumer … Read more