Resources
Women Grants
Find women grants for programs & organizations (click here for a full list)
More Grants for women
13 Grants & Scholarships Listed As of 2010 (click here for full list of grants)
Online Tools courtesy of Mashable.com
Online word processing provides you with ways to manage and write documents without a download – great for collaboration or those using multiple computers.
Google Docs– A way to create your documents and share them too.
Zoho Writer – Serious competition to Google Docs. There are some options present that Google Docs lacks and of course vice-versa.
ThinkFree – Think Microsoft Office, except this is the online equivalent.
Buzzword – A recently discovered service that is still in private beta. It has many offerings and a slick interface to boot! (Private Beta)
Web Portals
You have the potential to be productive the moment you turn on your computer and fire up that web browser. You can have all the information you want and need accessible to you immediately by using one of the following services.
Netvibes – Generally considered to be the first successful, independent startpage.
Pageflakes – Pageflakes could be considered the brother-in-law to Netvibes and both have very similar offerings in customization and content.
iGoogle – If you have a Google account, then the iGoogle comes part of the package deal, and since many of us have Google as our home page anyways, why not give iGoogle a trial?
My Yahoo – The offerings are somewhat more customizable than iGoogle, but essentially the same concept from a different provider.
Calendar Services
Let’s say you have your parent’s anniversary, project deadlines, and finally taking the family pet to the vet all coming up this week. Having all these things on a calendar is undoubtedly the way to go for keeping track of these events. Unless you prefer writing it on your hand…
Google Calendar– I personally use Google Calendar on a daily basis.
Yahoo! Calendar – Yahoo provides a pretty good, but basic, calendar application for organizing your life
30 Boxes – Has a lightning fast interface that is really easy to navigate makes this a good contender.
Kiko – A very nice calendar application with a drag & drop interface.
Contact Management Services
Your cell phone and e-mail program are likely your primary sources for keeping information about your contacts. This is fine. You must ask yourself though, what happens if your cell phone is lost, your webmail account goes down or you lose all the data on your computer? Time to rethink the way we do contact management.
Plaxo– One of the best known services which allow you to keep track of contacts. Other services that can tap into your Plaxo account and utilize your contacts with your permission.
Tabber – was created with the notion of linking together friends from many social sites and services, but it still serves very well as an address book and contact management application.
Highrise – A premium option to manage your business contacts. If you are more serious about keeping your contacts and have hundreds of them, this could be a cost efficient solution depending on your needs.
HyperOffice – Another premium service that offers control of your contacts. This is for more serious contact management.
Communication Services
Stickam– If live video conversations are your thing, then Stickam provides you an excellent opportunity to mingle with friends, coworkers, or just random people if you so desire. We wouldn’t use it for business calls, though.
Google 411 – This service from Google is likely something you have never tried before, but once you do, you might use it for a long time coming. A good 411 replacement. (US Only)
Meebo – If you prefer to communicate with friends and colleagues through IM, then Meebo is the site for you to do it all in one easy to use program.
Gmail – The king of e-mail? We think so. Much more efficient at handling large volumes of email than rival services.
Charting & Diagram Services
Ever heard of brainstorming? Of course you have! Well, the following applications follow the same line of thought, but now you can throw your ideas in charts and diagrams often referred to as “mind maps” to plan any future project you may attempt. I personally use these types of applications very often.
Flowchart.com – The title says it all really. Flowchart allows you to create charts and diagrams in a nice drag & drop interface. (Private Beta)
MindMeister – Offering both a free and premium version, MindMeister focuses on collaboration in an easy to use “mind mapping”environment.
Mind42 – Yet another “mind mapping” web app that allows you to collaborate with others. This one is completely free.
Gliffy– Likely the most technical and detailed option on this list. It has many more options available than the others.
Mapping Services
If you need to find out where you are going, and how to get there, these tools can help prevent (or at least reduce) the amount of times you get lost on those long road trips.
Google Maps – Recently has taken over as one of the best mapping tools out there. Not only does it have streets, but you can get an insane amount of data displayed on Google Maps through other services like StreetAdvisor.
Yahoo Maps – Google has obviously driven Yahoo to improve its mapping services, and it shows here.
Mapquest – A very reliable source for getting you from point A to point B.
File Storage Services
Box.net - A very nice solution to uploading and backing up your files, as well as sharing them. You can sign up for free and get a gig of space, or you can have additional storage with the premium options.
MediaMax – Another powerful and useful service to regularly back-up all your important data.
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RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, saves you time when consuming news and information. Instead of visiting hundreds of news sites and blogs, just subscribe and receive all your updates in a single news reader. If you need an RSS reader, choose one from the list; and if you’re a little more tech-savvy, check out the browser plugins and management tools that can make your RSS consumption even more efficient.
PeopleAggregator aims to become a social identity hub. It works through a desktop software application which currently runs only on Linux, and although we applaud its reliance on OpenID and open standards in general, the decision to start a service that aims to connect social networking users and their profiles, on a Linux platform, seems like a suicide. The official FAQ which is at the moment a bunch of spam links doesn’t help. Look at the presentation of the service in HTML form here.
SocialURL helps you organize your online identity and get back in touch with all of your friends and classmates. It’s a unified profile with support for photo galleries and videos, as well as a central portal with links pointing out to all your other social network profiles. It’s all spiced up with lots of additional features, like on-site email, reminders and bookmarks.
We’ve already said quite a lot about Social Stream considering that it’s not even in beta stage yet – all that’s available at this point is a vidcast presentation of what Social Stream can do. However, the huge amount of attention that Social Stream got is a clear indicator that some pieces of the puzzle are still missing in the social network aggregator space.
Tabber is a personal profile page, which displays some information about you together with your latest activity on Digg, del.icio.us, your blog, Twitter, or any RSS feed. It’s very similar in concept to ProfileFly, and just like it, it lacks any possibility to interact with your lifestream.
Naymz is another personal profile site, which goes a step further than services like Tabber or ProfileFly by giving you the possibility to actively monitor certain sites for mention of your name. Naymz also actively promotes your profile by trying to make it more visible on Google.
Second Brain takes a radically different approach to aggregation than other apps on this list. You organize your data – this includes data from your social network profiles, like Flickr photos or YouTube videos – intocollections. A collection is basically a bunch of links, photos, or other bits and pieces of data thrown onto a dashboard; you can create your own collections or explore what others have collected. While the concept seems powerful, I’ve found myself trying to find something to do with it all. In any case, Second Brain is currently in invite-only beta stage and there will probably be some changes in the service until it goes public.
UpScoop lets you upload the contacts from your address book (Gmail, Yahoo!, Hotmail and AOL are supported) and it lets you discover which of your friends are active on social networks like Hi5, MySpace and others. Unfortunately, at the time of this writing UpScoop didn’t work with my perfectly valid Gmail address, so I couldn’t properly test it out. Hopefully, it’s just a temporary glitch.
ProfileOMat advertises itself as the last profile we’ll ever need – if only things were that simple! ProfileOMat doesn’t really aggregate your social networking profiles; it merely creates a profile from which you can reach all of your other profiles on social network. It does have a couple of nifty features, for example, you can set up your geographical location with the help of Google Maps.
MyLifeBrand tries to go a step further by really integrating various social network sites within a MyLifeBrand frame. While this approach brings a far more streamlined experience, it’s unlikely that social network users will want to open their favorite website within some other website; also, there’s always the possibility of unexpected errors with this approach. At this time MyLifeBrand is in invite-only beta, so if you don’t have an invitation code, you won’t be able to try it out.
Amongst the rounded corners and reflections that have become the usual visual identity for Web 2.0 ProfileLinker stands out by looking very Web 1.0-ish. After registration, you can add your various social network profiles and your contacts, and all this activity will be shown on your ProfileLinker profile. The look and feel of the interface leaves a lot to be desired; for one thing, I’d like to be able to remove random information about ProfileLinker’s history that shows up on my profile; in general, the options for personalization are quite limited.
Snag takes a no-nonsense approach: no registration required; just enter some of your social network credentials (Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, Friendster
and LinkedIn are supported) and you get a group lifestream of your activity on these networks. The application needs much polishing, though; for example, entering the wrong credentials won’t result in an error; instead, your lifestream will consist of login errors retrieved from that particular network. At this point, Snag looks more like proof-of-concept than a full-fledged app.
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