Imagine if you could turn the text and illustrations on a traditional whiteboard into digital data in real-time. That’s the premise behind the eBeam Edge Whiteboard by Luidia, Inc. The technology works with any whiteboard and most Mac or PC computers.
I have to admit, I’m still not convinced that the iPad will be my laptop replacement. However, with the help of the Apple wireless keyboard and some other peripherals and apps, it can come close. Here are some tips to make your iPad work-worthy:
I often extol the virtues of virtual work. But no matter how much I love virtual, I’m also keenly aware that being remote isn’t always ideal. In my experience, there are four specific situations that should never be handled by phone or email.
Poor management, communications breakdowns, badly integrated team members, ill-equipped staff, personality clashes — there are many reasons why a virtual team can fail. What can you do to ensure that your team succeeds? Here are five common failings of virtual teams, and ways to avoid them.
In an effort to better understand the dynamics of virtual teams, I decided to interview my own virtual team members at the social media marketing agency I co-own, Conversify, to determine what helps them to work well together. Here’s what they said.
Glasscubes, a virtual collaborative workspace provider, seems to be flying under the radar, but not for a lack of innovation. The company recently announced some new features and a shift in overall direction. I spoke with its founder to get some insight into what’s happening.
Is it really possible to take a company from a physical location to a virtual space, and take a team used to face-to-face work entirely online? Here’s a breakdown of some of the things to consider before making the leap to the cloud.
I was thrilled when I saw a tweet about the release of Parallels 6. Earlier I wrote a lengthy evaluation of gaming on virtual machines. I thought I’d run the same games through Parallels 6 to see how its claims work out in the real world.
Composer and conductor Eric Whitacre auditioned singers via YouTube video clips for a performance of a piece called Lux Aurumque, and then stitched together 185 of the clips that were submitted in order to create a virtual choir composed of individual singers from a dozen countries.
As more and more companies and teams are going strictly virtual, there are a whole new set of issues to consider and challenges to address. Using my own virtual social media marketing team as an example, I’ve identified a number of needs that require some kind of technology solution, but at the moment, we are “patchwork quilting” our tech infrastructure to accommodate all of our needs.
Here are some needs virtual teams face daily:
| Communications | Management | Archiving | Interaction |
| Conference Calls Video Conferencing Virtual screen demos Virtual meetings Virtual PBX |
Project Overviews Task Assignments Time Tracking Scheduling |
Correspondence Document drafts Small files Large files Knowledge Base |
Document Collaboration Team Member Integration Status Updates Watercooler Socializing |
Here is a diagram of what we’re currently using as our solutions and which issues and needs each solution addresses. The software we currently use is in orange. Yellow designates the software we are considering.
Read More about What Does It Take to Run a Virtual Team?
