Someone told me recently that they had 22 different log-in IDs. My first thought was, you must get out more. My second thought was, how do you remember 22 different Web services, let alone log-in IDs and passwords?
The answer, of course, is a password manager. These days, I see PC security as a form of insurance. The more you have to risk, the more you should spend to protect it. Anyone who banks or otherwise transacts online will find the investment in a password and personal-data manager worthwhile. Fortunately, if your password-management needs are meager, the protection doesn't have to cost you anything.
Siber Systems recently announced the beta version of RoboForm Online that lets RoboForm users store their log-in data securely online. Just log into the service from any browser and get fast access to the IDs you've saved on your PC. With just one you're logged into your favorite Web sites.
Log into the RoboForm Online service to access your favorite Web services with a single click.
(Credit: Siber Systems)The first time you use the program, you're prompted to enter a master password. You can change the master password via the program's Options drop-down menu and selecting Security settings, but if you forget a master password, you have to delete all the password-protected files and start over.
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Organizing your life is much easier in theory than practice. And although there are several ways to go about it, including using Outlook, online task managers might be your best bet. Whether you want it built into your existing social networks or you prefer something you can surf to during your day, I've picked some nice services. They're not perfect for everyone, but you should find at least one service that satisfies your needs.
Task managers
Gmail Tasks If you don't want to waste time with different sites to track your tasks, try out the Gmail Tasks.
When you click on Tasks in Gmail, a small box is displayed allowing you to quickly jot down notes about what you need to do for the rest of the day. When you complete a task, simply check the box next to the item and it will cross it out. Tasks also lets you add sub-head items, set up due dates, and more. It's a great service for those who want a convenient, yet powerful task manager.
Gmail Tasks is a convenient tool for Gmail users.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Nozbe Nozbe is a powerful task manager that should help you find all the functionality you already enjoy in Outlook.
After you sign up for Nozbe (you'll need to choose between a free plan or several paid options, which cost up to $149 per month depending on the number of users you have), you'll immediately find a full-featured task manager that goes far beyond a simple to-do list. The app lets you create a project, add tasks, and determine their importance. For multi-user projects, you can decide which person in your group should tackle each task.
Nozbe lets you upload notes to supplement tasks. You can also attach files, images, or documents. Like many of the other services in this roundup, Nozbe will let you send tasks through Twitter. You can call in updates via Jott. You can even manage your Nozbe account from your iPhone. That kind of availability might pull some from Outlook.
Nozbe is a great service for those who want power.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)
Shoeboxed announced this week that it has improved the way it handles digital receipts sent to its online filing system. The company, which scans and hosts paper receipts, business cards and full-size documents, can now pick out specific information from forwarded e-mails containing purchase information, and put it into one of the system's 15 purchase classifications.
Like users would do with purchases on travel services like TripIt and Worldmate, simply sending the confirmation e-mail to your Shoeboxed address means that it gets filed along with the rest of your expenses. The goal is to make it easier for customers who are already using Shoeboxed's receipt scanning by mail service to blend in purchases they make online.
The company says the new technique is 95 percent accurate and removes the need for customers to enter in purchase information manually. This is a noticeable improvement over the previous system, which would simply paste the information into a blank message without giving it a title or a expense category. The new system also pulls in things like vendor names and the total amount spent, which can be compared and cross-referenced with other expenses it tracks from your paper receipts and scanned photos you've taken of receipts from your mobile phone.
E-mailed receipts are now automatically categorized, including how you paid for it and where you bought it from.
(Credit: CNET)I gave it a spin earlier today on 10 different receipt confirmations from different vendors and had a 100 percent success rate on it accurately figuring out where the item was from, how I paid for it, and its price. It also did a pretty good job on categorizing the purchases, getting seven of the 10, while leaving the remaining three blank.
One thing it doesn't pick up on, which is worth mentioning, is the actual purchase date. It only keeps track of the date it was sent into the system. This isn't a big deal, since you're probably going to be forwarding items the same day you're purchasing, and you can also see the source copy of the e-mail from Shoeboxed's interface. But it's something to keep in mind if you're planning to forward a bunch of old purchase confirmations.
The receipts by e-mail service is completely free, although other parts of Shoeboxed, like its paper scanning, and mobile photo transcription require signing up for a paid monthly plan.
Previously: Shoeboxed now tags scanned receipts for you
The new contact manager pops up when you hit the "to" field in Gmail
(Credit: Google)Gmail has long had a feature that automatically suggests and fills out the name of people you've corresponded with. On Tuesday night, the service got a tweak that makes that process easier--it's also likely to be second-nature to Microsoft Outlook users.
Now clicking on the link next to the "to" field pulls up Gmail's contact list manager, where you're able to very quickly sort through your contacts, or anyone you've e-mailed, and pick the ones you want to include in the message. The same goes for removing anyone; you just have to click on their name again and they get removed.
Not readily available when using this new menu is a way to select which of these users you want to add as CC's or BCC's. Outlook does this in the same menu, whereas in Gmail, you have to open up each of those fields in the message, then click to open up the contact manager yet again. Hopefully future versions streamline this process and combine those options into the same UI.
This may seem like a very small feature, but for heavy Gmail users it removes the need to create special lists of contacts they e-mail on a regular basis. Instead, it makes use of regular e-mailing habits and more deeply integrates the short list of people you're communicating with--the same one that's found in Google's contacts manager.
Mint.com is the premiere web-based money management solution available Tuesday. The site pulls transaction information from your various financial accounts and presents the data in a beautiful, easily digestible format. CEO Aaron Patzer boasts that 50 percent of Mint's users have used the service to stick to a budget for the first time in their lives. Hoping to raise that number even more, its latest update, available now, focuses on making it easier for users to control their spending with advanced budgeting tools.
While Mint already had some budgeting features before the new update, it was mostly simplistic and offered little in the way of customization options. Features found in this update include the ability to set up and manage specific budgets for categories of purchases, monitor the overall effects of budget changes, budget for specific expenses (such as taxes), and track all of these budgets in real time. Users are now also able to distinguish between personal and business accounts to help separate their associated expenses. Finally, in typical Mint fashion, it has added a great looking graph visualization of your net income, broken down by month.
With this update, Mint is also pushing its users to transfer their dormant 401k accounts in to rollover IRAs through its "Ways to Save" feature, claiming that the action will result in an additional $65,000 in savings (on average) when retirement rolls around. While Mint's intent with Ways to Save appears to be genuine, be sure to properly evaluate and investigate these offers before signing up. Mint's main revenue stream comes from affiliate fees garnered from its users signing up for these offers.
These new features are certainly a welcome addition to Mint's already strong offering. Bringing responsible money management to users is an admirable goal, especially in this economy. Mint's new budgeting features should help to show even more people the way.
Nokia has signed an agreement to acquire Cellity, a small German company that creates social-network contact management and address book aggregation services for mobile devices.
Cellity's 14 workers will become Nokia employees. But the service will be shut down and existing user accounts will not be transferred to Nokia.
Cellity, which was founded less than three years ago, is based in Hamburg.
Terms of the deal have not been made public. The acquisition is expected to close in the current quarter.
Acquiring small start-ups is nothing new for Nokia. It acquired Plazes last year while the locator start-up was still in private beta, for example. The mobile conglomerate also has a history of willingness to rebrand. After acquiring a media-sharing site called Twango several years ago, Nokia ditched the start-up's moniker and folded it into a new software division called Ovi.
Clarizen this week announced that it launched version 3.0 of its online project management tool.
Clarizen 3.0 adds a variety of new features, including the option to manage business issues, track expenses, and view Gantt charts. The company also tweaked Clarizen's design and added more tutorials to its site to make it easier for users to learn how to use Clarizen.
I've put version 3.0 through the paces and evaluated the project management tool to see how it stands up to alternatives, like OfficeZilla, which I took for a spin earlier this year.
Clarizen is certainly more powerful than OfficeZilla and it works quite well. But should it replace your project management software?
... Read moreThis was originally published at ZDNet's Between the Lines.
Facebook's photo storage system holds 850 million photos and costs a lot of dough. Niall Kennedy has a nice overview of what Facebook is doing to minimize its storage costs.
Facebook's system, dubbed Haystack, is custom-built but relies on content delivery networks and NetApp. Facebook is trying to minimize the custom stuff and use commodity hardware.
Kennedy does a nice job of synthesizing Facebook's storage system. In a nutshell:
• Facebook's previous system relied heavily on Akamai and Limelight to improve latency.
• That Akamai and Limelight use costs money.
• Facebook has invested in its own "blob" storage system designed to cut the total cost per photo on the social network's systems.
• The company hired a former NetApp engineer to redesign the storage system.
A lot of this storage architecture is complicated--and frankly over my head--but for the engineers in the house here's a presentation on Haystack from last year.
Identity management service Telnic, which runs the .tel domain, announced on Tuesday that registering for a .tel domain has gone from its initial "land rush" phase into general availability.
Tens of thousands of domains have been sold so far, communications director Justin Hayward told CNET News, and the company will be having a launch event on Tuesday evening in New York to start spreading the word.
Telnic is sort of hoping that a .tel URL will become the online equivalent of a business card or, as Hayward put it, "one permanent point of contact, a bit like a telephone number." A .tel domain aggregates a list of chosen contact points--Web site, e-mail, telephone, social-network profiles, location data, etc.--and aims to be both flexible (if your telephone number changes when you go from one country to another, for example) and ironclad when it comes to privacy controls.
In conjunction, the London-based Telnic has announced that News Corp.-owned social network MySpace is now a .tel vendor and that MySpace users can purchase .tel domains directly for $19.99 per year, starting on Wednesday. This is part of .tel's strategy to make its domain-purchasing process more consumer-friendly than the norm.
"We're delighted that MySpace will be offering .tel domains to its community, enabling them to more quickly and easily manage all aspects of their online life," Telnic CEO Khashayar Mahdavi said in a release. "MySpace is exactly the type of partner that has the foresight to see the .tel (domain) as a complementary product, providing choices as social networkers adopt new modes of communication while they continue to enjoy the benefits of MySpace."
The .tel domain originally launched at the Demo conference last September. Right now, one of the most promising opportunities for the space is on the mobile front--using these electronic records as a way to exchange contact information in a meet-and-greet context.
A lot of this will depend on third-party developer activity (think iPhone applications). But Hayward said one of .tel's resellers, IWantMyName.com, can enable prospective users to complete the registration process entirely on an iPhone.
The other company generating buzz in this space is Chi.mp, a San Francisco start-up that offers members their own .mp domains. Both Chi.mp and .tel allow members to divide their profiles up into public and varying degrees of friends-only access.
Bruce Livingstone, founder and leader of microstock pioneer iStockphoto, is leaving the company he sold to Getty Images three years ago.
iStockphoto founder and former CEO Bruce Livingstone
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)Livingstone, who launched the low-cost photo-licensing company nine years ago, said he's leaving of his own volition, according to a forum posting from iStock COO Kelly Thompson, who is taking over Livingstone's duties.
"This is my last communication as CEO of iStockphoto and SVP Consumer at Getty Images. It's been a difficult decision, but it's the right moment to move on," Livingstone said. "I need more time with my family, and time to figure out what I'm going to do next. Anybody who knows me, knows I'm a bit of a workaholic. So I'm finally going to make some time for myself and the people in my life."
Thompson will lead iStockphoto and report directly to Getty CEO Jonathan Klein, the company said. iStockphoto got its start licensing royalty-free images for relatively low prices, and over the years expanded into video, Flash animations, illustrations, and, most recently, audio.
Livingstone's departure was unrelated to 110 layoffs at Getty Images reported last week by Photo District News, the company said.
"Bruce's departure was a personal decision and has been planned for some time, with a potential April 1 announcement date, which is within the wry character of Bruce," Thompson said in a statement to CNET News. "But due to the inherent difficulty in keeping something like this contained, we felt it prudent to move the announcement up."
Livingstone said he'll continue with some involvement at iStockphoto. "Don't think for a minute that I'm going away, though. I'm still a photographer after all, and I'll finally have time to take pictures now," he said in the forum posting.
