tracking

Employee Project Clock is a basic program that allows users to track time spent on particular projects and tasks. The program does a decent job of allowing employees to track their work activities, but it's far from perfect.

The program's interface is basic, consisting of a slender module full of drop-down menus. To start, users add employees, clients, projects, and tasks to the database. To clock in, users select their name, the project they'll be working on, and other relevant details, and clock in and out with a button. This aspect of the program is pretty simple. … Read more

Researchers at Ford Motor have some high-tech tools to help them understand driver distraction and to improve safety behind the wheel. One of those tools is the "Distraction Lab," a full-motion-based driving simulator.

The Virttex (Virtual Test Track Experiment) simulator has been in operation since 2001. It looks like an egg-shaped alien spacecraft on legs. The Virttex simulator has helped Ford develop new products, such as SYNC, and continues to help researchers understand driver distractions.

Timeless Time and Expense provides a simple tool for managing the complicated world of client billing. With helpful tools to help you organize and calculate expenses, this is a fantastic tool for those who make their living on billable hours.

The program's interface was impressively simple, considering the complex work it handled. We didn't need to visit the Help file's instructions because the onscreen direction was intuitive enough to keep us on track and quickly billing. We were able to divide our time between clients and projects by creating a simple file tree display. Beginning and ending … Read more

Gary Hayes little flash application shows how active the social web is. Hayes built the application based on data he pulled from a range of social media sources, which he compiled at the end of September 2009.  You can download his Social Media Count here.

Timeless Time and Expense Multiuser provides the tools employers need for tracking work time by an unlimited number of users. Its smart tools for calculating and tracking time are a great help to small businesses, contractors, and others who make a living through billable hours.

The program's interface was welcoming and professional. We were able to quickly set up tasks and billing just by following onscreen prompts. The Help file's instructions were an afterthought, frankly. This program mimicked the single-user Timeless Time and Expense in every way, except that we were able to set a password and user … Read more

This morning, Fred Wilson introduces us to one of Union Square Ventures' portfolio companies that is coming out of stealth and launching publicly. Tracked.com is a sort of re-imagining of a business information service that provides personalized information on businesses and the people associated with them.

The start-up is positioned to be a competitor to Google and Yahoo Finance, which are largely ticker-based, as well as user-driven information sites like CrunchBase, Wikipedia, and, to some extent, LinkedIn.

Conceived by Mike Yavonditte, formerly of Quigo, Tracked.com, of course, provides extensive information on ticker-based companies, including company financials, much like Google and Yahoo Finance do, but it's not just a stock service. Its strong point is that it also tracks privately held companies, gathering any available information on them. For all of these companies, Tracked shows a wealth of information and news as well as the people associated with the company, complete with fleshed out profiles on them as well.

Tracked helps you keep an eye on the companies and people that you find important in the business world. It has a completely customizable "My Tracker" section that allows you to pick what companies and people to watch. For public companies, it has more robust functionality than Google or Yahoo Finance. It even calls out a lot of interesting data like executive compensation. For example, you can view a list of the executives with the highest compensation in 2006. For private companies, Tracked might be the most extensive, publicly available database in existence (aside from Wikipedia) and it's sure to grow even more.

One thing that is notably different about Tracked as compared to Wikipedia or CrunchBase is that users cannot edit current entries or add new ones. This ensures that the data on Tracked is accurate since the team can check all of the data that comes in. The downside to this is that it cannot possibly include as much information as a user-driven site.

Overall, Tracked.com is a strong, customizable alternative that will pull some users away from Google and Yahoo Finance. It is a convenient and highly addictive way to browse through information on public and private businesses as well as people. The information is so extensive and interesting that you should plan to burn a couple of hours the first time that you check the site out.

You may notice that Tracked.com is operating a little slow right now with the surge of traffic from its launch. Hopefully, as they work out the kinks, performance will improve.

Here are some additional screenshots to give you a better idea of the site's functionality, but you should really just check it out yourself.… Read more

This week we got a sneak peek at a new social tracking site that's launching a little later this year. Called Strings, it's made up of tools that let you passively share your various on- and offline activities with others online, all in the hopes of both getting and giving recommendations from its online community.

In many ways Strings feels a lot like FriendFeed. For example, just like FriendFeed you're able to tie Strings into to various services you're using like Amazon, Netflix, and social-bookmarking tools so that it can implicitly share information about what you're doing on each of those services with others. And like FriendFeed, this information can be tracked and filtered depending on what type of content it is, and what group of friends it's coming from.

Where it differs though, is that this data feed begins with complete anonymity; nobody ever has to know it's you who is feeding the site. If and when you decide you want to start identifying data as your own, Strings has a very deep set of privacy controls to protect what other people can see. … Read more

Movienizer is an intuitive database that allows users to keep track of their movie collections. Although it's similar to other programs we've seen, the fact that it's free sets it apart.

Movienizer's interface is simple and attractive, with its major functions organized in buttons and menus across the top. Like many similar programs, Movienizer can download movie information from 24 online resources in nine languages, or gather information from a DVD or text file. The program also has a loan-tracking feature, allowing users to keep track of who they lend their DVDs to, although it's … Read more

Profit Loss Report Spreadsheet is an Excel spreadsheet that allows users to track small business expenses from month to month. It's nothing fancy, but it may be a good choice for users who, for whatever reason, don't want to use bookkeeping software.

The program's interface is simple, with a separate spreadsheet for each month, plus a report sheet and data sheet. Users add vendor names in the data spreadsheet, which are then available for selection in the other pages. Users then enter financial transactions much as they would in any other financial software, with the date, vendor, … Read more