TC50: I’ve seen the future of email and it’s on the desktop.  Maybe.  Postbox is a new company launching today here at TechCrunch 50.  The application - and make no mistake about it, this is a full blown, download and install it desktop application - has set for itself some incredibly ambitious goals.  From the demonstration of the software, in addition to the standard functions of send, receive, store, search, spell check, attach files, and the other things a typical email client does, Postbox also offers some truly interesting additional features.  Features so compelling, the site - which the founders announced was open for a limited beta - was instantly knocked offline due to so many simultaneous download attempts from the people attending TC50 plus those watching TC50 streamed to their homes or offices.

Features?  Like What?

In seeking to describe the nature of the improvements that Postbox seems to offer the best general descriptive term I can come up with is semantic auto organization.  Just great, another confusing acronym, right?  SAO.  But what makes this new acronym worth remembering is what it means to you, the user.  Postbox founders claim (and demonstrated) that their software is capable of automatically grouping messages by topic.

If you’re interested in confectionery, model boats, knives and hedgehogs Postbox will identify these divergent interests in without any intervention on your part it will actually group the messages for you.  What’s more, it will go far beyond a mere gross grouping of the messages themselves.  The software is capable of identifying the various multimedia components in these messages and retaining them in individual galleries.  Imagine it, an end to peering into email folder after email folder or worse, message after message trying to find that one image you just know is there…somewhere…

In fact, based upon the demonstration I witnessed I think it’s safe to say that what we’re looking at here with Postbox is one of the first iterations of a truly semantic application or perhaps email. 3.0.  It’s tempting to say Web 3.0 but I’m reminded that this is not a web based application and probably won’t likely be one any time soon.

But Wait, There’s More…

In addition to making your mail contents much more broadly available as a reference database, Postbox offers a comprehensive suite of authoring tools that enable the creation of email messages and other documents that are a much richer experience than the email messages we craft today. Not only does Postbox make it possible to embed audio or video in an email, you can also search the web (from within the application) and again embed these results right into an email.

From what I understand Postbox also has a fairly tight integration with certain Adobe tools however I didn’t see this functionality demonstrated so I can’t tell you what to expect in this regard.  What I can say is that from the demo alone this appears to be a truly profound change in the way email can be used, managed and created.  That it will open up heretofore inaccessible realms to the user when it comes to data that you have already acquired but previously could not find or access in any reasonably convenient way.  Likewise the way in which searching the web and embedding results in messages is allowed within Postbox will, in my opinion, increase the value of both resources to the user.

Finally, by stealing a few notes from Google’s playbook and eliminating folders and replacing them with their semantic organizational structure plus some truly advanced searching and grouping functions Postbox brings even the most massive message stores into a much finer focus.  By getting rid of the silos and exposing the critical information in each email along with its relationship to other email, Postbox brings the information contained within each stored message closer to the user where it can do more than simply take up space on a hard drive.  By adding options that previously didn’t exist to the creation of email messages, Postbox has created an entirely new doc-type that has the potential to improve various communications, speed up decision making and review processes, and by developing an application that appears to offer these previously mentioned services as the result of semantic information, it appears that Postbox has begun the new era in applications.  2.0 is dead, long live 3.0!

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Rob Thompson, an obvious fan of GTD has taken the time to compile a fairly exhaustive list of GTD related content, sites and resources.  There are sites on here even I haven’t seen before so I’m sure there are plenty of resources you’ll find useful too.  You might as well take a fifteen minute break right now and check it out.  Productivity porn at its finest!  (Even if Rob did leave out GTDtimes.  I’m trying <sniff> not to take that personally)

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Every day it seems we spend more and more of our time in front of a computer screen.  Whether it’s a monitor on a desk or a tiny hand held display on our phones, computers are such an essential part of our day to day lives that for most of us they are almost as indispensable as oxygen.  Given that so much of our time is spent in front of these machines, it behooves us to learn as many ways as we can to do our computer aided tasks as quickly and efficiently as possible.  Or, as David Allen said upon learning  that he’d been awarded the “Golden Slacker Award”, “the laziest people come up with the coolest ideas.”

With this in mind it occurred to me that we could create what could possibly be the ultimate list of online time-savers ever compiled.  Basically what I was thinking was that each of us has probably discovered at least a couple online resources that we now find indispensable to our daily routine and what I am hoping is that with all of your help we can catalog these into a truly exhaustive list that can then become its own page on this site and serve as a truly exceptional reference for GTD’ers and Lifehackers of all stripes.

To keep the list focused I thought I would establish a couple of criteria to narrow recommendations down a little bit.  Thus, for inclusion in this list, the application must result in an actual time-savings of some type- whether by virtue of reducing keystrokes, condensing multiple tasks into one task (or at least fewer tasks) ,  by eliminating the need to do extensive navigation with a mouse, by automating complex actions or by virtue of eliminating the need to navigate to a site to obtain a query result from said site.  Second, the time-saver in question must be free and generally available. (No closed betas allowed although open betas are fine).  Third (and this one should go without saying but I’ll say it anyway) these time-savers must work on a Mac or PC or Linux machine, a PDA, a mobile phone or a tablet computer.

Please provide your time saver in the comments and what I will do is regularly update the list by moving the time savers up to the body of the post.  If/when we get a number of time savers sufficient to justify creating a unique page for the list  I’ll create such a page and provide a list of credits to those individuals that have taken the time to help us expand this list.

I’ll start with a couple of my favorites.  Incidentally, contributing a time-saver is more than just saying “I like xyz”.  We need the application, the URL, what it does and why you like it. If if is a particularly complicated time saver an example would be helpful too.

Here we go:

1.     YubNub <http://yubnub.org>

This is my all time favorite time saver and one that I probably use a hundred times a day.  Primarily because it is incredibly versatile and is actually thousands of unique time savers rolled up into one slick Ruby on Rails application.  In essence YubNub is a command line for the web.  What it does is allow you to harness the power of thousands of different web servers to do specific tasks by using the URL bar of your browser (or a widget or a stand alone application) as a command line.

What can you do with YubNub?  Almost anything you can think of.  The limits are your memory and/or your imagination.  Some examples:  (after opening a new tab (or clearing the contents in the URL bar in an existing tab) I could enter: g David Allen GTD.  The results? This command would yield a Google search for the terms David Allen and GTD.  The savings?  Instead of first going to Google and waiting for the page to load and then typing these terms into Google I did this with one keystroke.  Okay, maybe that’s not that spectacular but what about this?  ebay Green Laser.  This would give you the results of an eBay query for green lasers; again, saving the navigation first to eBay.  Still not impressed?  How about this one?  gimyim Chewbacca. This little query would result in a split screen that contains image search results for Chewy in both Google Images and Yahoo Images (this one usually wows even the most jaded LifeHacking experts cause they’ve never seen split screen queries using two different search engines at the same time).

There are literally thousands of YubNub commands; everything from reverse number lookups to langauge translations to code checking, to site-specific searches.  Need to search TechCrunch for something?  Just type “TC” and your search string (leave out the quotes) and YubNub will find the terms assuming they actually appeared in the popular blog.  Plus if you want a command that you can’t find you can make your own.  The “create” command allows you to build your own YubNub command instantly.

I am constantly amazed by the power and versatility of this online time-saver, it never fails when I try something that simply seems intuitive and it does exactly what I thought it might.  What, for instance, do you suppose the “gmap” command plus a location would yield?  From my own experience at least, YubNub is hands down the most powerful, useful and utterly indispensable application I use.  I don’t think I could live without it.

2.      Fluid <http://fluidapp.com/>

Attention:  For Mac Users Only!  Are you a tabbed-browsing junkie?  Do you regularly use web applications like Gmail, Google Docs or WordPress?  Have you ever had your browser crash costing  you hours of work as a result?  Then Fluid is for you.  This application allows you to create site specific browsers.  In other words, Fluid allows you to create a browser that acts like a stand alone application.  Each one runs as a stand alone Cocoa app meaning that if your browser crashes it doesn’t touch what your doing in your SSB’s that you created with Fluid.

Fluid even lets you create a Dock icon to launch each specific SSB . Fluid can also be converted to a MenuExtra SSB (sits in the Title Bar at the top of the screen) and in spite of running in a separate instantiation of Cocoa each SSB still retains the full functionality of the parent browser (bookmarks, spell check, etc.)

I love fluid for using web applications like Gmail.  I don’t lose my work nearly so often and when I’ve got forty tabs open I don’t have to hunt for the ones I use most often.  If you’ve got a Mac I highly recommend you try Fluid  unless you’ve got nothing to lose! (get it?)

Okay, so that’s a start, now it’s your turn.  Please send in your favorite Time saving web applications and together we can compile a page that equals thousands of saved hours for everyone!

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Corporate Travel =  Sound of Piggy Bank Breaking

If you shudder when you pull up to the gas pump these days, or swallow hard before you tear open your utility bill every month image how your company’s controller must feel.  If you’re in a start-up or any small business and especially if you’re not cash-flow positive yet these times of soaring energy costs and economic uncertainty border on the downright terrifying.  Under such circumstances even the most financially stable enterprises are taking a hard look at expenses and trying to determine areas in which costs can be cut without reducing the quality of service or their future business prospects.

One area that is coming under the budget-crunch knife at nearly every company on the planet is travel.  Right now just about every aspect of travel has increased in price.  Airfares are skyrocketing and the new ancillary charges - since when did it become reasonable to charge passengers $50 for bringing along a single checked bag? What’s next?  Charging for inflight air?  Or perhaps pay toilets?  One thing is certain, flying is not only a hassle it’s also expensive.  From your CFO’s perspective anything that can help you avoid the cost and headache of another flight - and especially one overseas with the sinking dollar effectively doubling that cost - is going to be worthy of serious consideration.

Buy the Ticket, Ride the Ride…

The flip side to this is that some meetings really require that both parties see one another.  Sure, conference bridges are good and shared desktops like GoToMeeting are useful for certain things but sometimes you really need to look someone in the eye in order to move things ahead.  Traditionally that meant hopping on a plane and that usually meant at least a thousand bucks drawn down on the company coffers (and  lot more if more than one exec needed to travel or if the trip required crossing a continent or an ocean).  That’s a lot of expense for one short meeting. And until recently there was nothing that could be done about this but bite the bullet and break out the plastic.

[Read more →]

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David recently spoke with Dr. Relly Nadler on Voice America Leadership Development News.  Here’s a link to the streaming version of this very interesting show that includes a wide ranging discussion on GTD with David answering many questions on how to become more organized and productive.

If you’d prefer to download the show so that you can listen to it offline, that link is here.

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If you happen to be a road weary traveler who works in or even with any significant amount of technology, I am certain you would agree that accessing your data on the road is one of the banes of your existence.  Between lugging your “desktop replacement” aka your carry-on boat anchor (so that you have all your critical data with you - just don’t forget your Chiropractor’s phone number) and attempting to remember which files you’re going to need and then synchronizing them to your small and light “travel computer” aka your anemic, expensive, carpal tunnel causing DVD player.

On the one hand you end up dragging around this behemoth computer that does everything you need (so long as you are within cord’s reach of a power outlet) while on the other, you have ample run time however your productivity is limited by how well you planned ahead as to which data you needed to synchronize as well as how quickly you succumb to the hand numbing discomfort courtesy of attempting to work on a cramped keyboard.

Personally, I have found a third solution that allows me to use any computer while on the road and so long as the computer I’m at has a reasonable Internet connection it is pretty much just like I’m sitting at my own desk, working on my own computer.  LogMeIn isn’t really one program - rather it’s a company that provides an entire array of services that for the most part revolve around providing remote access and administration for one or more computers.

Their basic program, LogMeIn Free is free just like the name says.  Unlike most free products, however, this is not a frustratingly crippled version of some functional program that is purely intended to force you to upgrade if you really want the promised utility.  This is not the “walled garden demo-version”.  In fact, LogMeIn Free is not only the version that I, myself, am currently using, it is so robust and provides so many sophisticated capabilities that there are literally certain things that this program allows you to do to a machine remotely that are all but impossible to do while physically sitting in front of the machine that you are accessing via the LogMeIn Free interface.

[Read more →]

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Thanks to the DidIGetThingsDone Blog I just discovered FreeLine Reports and their most recent video which does an amazing job of describing several helpful and free GTD applications.  You may have heard of some of these, you may have even used them, but the refresher is quick and I can almost guarantee that at least one of the applications they mention is new to almost everyone.  Check it out.  Hat-tip to DigIGetThingsDone for the discovery…

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I hadn’t until I read this post by Rose Hulman who blogs over at A Nerd’s Haven. Tracks is a Ruby on Rails program that has been specifically designed for implementing GTD.

Tracks is a bit more involved to set up than most GTD software since it requires that you set up several packages of software including a version of Ruby on Rails, a SQL database and a web server - or you can get an account for free on a hosted server if you don’t feel your nerdly super-powers kicking in.

Here’s how the original author  of the software describes Tracks:

“Tracks is a web-based application to help you implement David Allen’s Getting Things Done™ methodology. It was built using Ruby on Rails, and comes with a built-in webserver (WEBrick), so that you can run it on your own computer if you like. It can be run on any platform on which Ruby can be installed, including Mac OS X, Windows XP and Linux. Tracks is Open Source, free and licensed under the GNU GPL.”

I just took a quick look at it and it looks pretty darn cool. I’ve been using Things for the past couple of months and life it pretty well (I can’t wait for them to release the iPhone update) but I’m considering trying out the hosted version of Tracks to see how I like it. If I do and can easily integrate it into my workflow I might try installing the full self-hosted version on one of my servers just to see how much pain the process really entails (or doesn’t depending upon luck, skill, and the blue gnomes that live in my Linux box).

Has anyone else tried Tracks? If so, how about giving the rest of the GTDtimes community a sneak peak? We’d love to hear from you!

Editor

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You can get it here. It’s Free! If they ask, tell them that GTDtimes sent you!

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I just discovered another new GTD application for the iPhone, 43 Actions. For a web based application designed for a mobile device upon which nothing is supposed to be installed, this is a pretty robust little application. [Read more →]

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