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Under the Radar: Managing your business online

Security, reliability, and stickiness were key talking points at an Under the Radar session showcasing online business collaboration tools. Presenters included Act-On Software, Magento, Mumboe, and NetBooks. While all presenters emphasized their company's ability to offer software as a service, Magento and NetBooks especially focused on tools for small business.

The Cisco-funded Act-On Software combines Salesforce.com's leads database with WebEx's large-scale conferencing to add invitation and follow-up services and pull data between the two. For example, Act-On runs as a tab within Salesfoce, WebEx, and Microsoft applications, and can show Salesforce data after a WebEx conference. … Read more

Kiss Microsoft Project goodbye

If you use Microsoft Project, you might want to seriously consider three alternatives that run completely on the Web. In addition to supporting more contemporary features right now, and getting updated with even newer gadgets more frequently than Microsoft can muster, these products, being completely Web-based, offer much more robust collaboration tools.

First up: Liquid Planner. We saw this product at Demo 2008 but it will be on stage again at the Under the Radar conference that I'm moderating on Thursday. This tool's special sauce is its embrace of uncertainty. Users can put in best-case and worst-case estimates … Read more

More crashing waves to make us drowsy

Forget the mousetrap--some inventors are apparently obsessed with building a better sleep machine instead. Or, in this case, a "travel sleep sound generator" called "Sound Oasis."

The latest example of white-noise machines, as we used to call them, tries to raise the bar yet again with all manner of sleep-inducing sounds (18 altogether). This one's product literature includes such marketing gibberish as "a patent-pending sound designed to combat jet lag using non-linear music and slowed nature sounds that encourage relaxation and can reset the body's internal clock." Our translation: They've added … Read more