danwtmoon

We are feeling very un-Mondayish today, even though it is in fact Monday, the 15th of February. In fact, we%u2019re feeling positively %u201CFriday at the start of a long weekend%u201D! That%u2019s because the kind people at the Mobile Premier Awards, organized by dotopen, have just this minute awarded us the %u201CBest Startup in Mobile Experience%u201D, out of 115 other entries in that category!

This award was sponsored by MEX, whose founder Marek Pawlowski said:

%u201CInvesting in truly user-centered design is essential for a successful mobile service and goes far beyond creating a pretty UI for your app. Flook has embedded great user experience in the heart of its product through clever interaction flow, interesting visual metaphors, customer involvement and attention to detail. It is a deserving winner of this Award and a great example for other start-ups to invest in user experience from an early stage.%u201D

All our robots wholeheartedly agree with Marek%u2019s words. They%u2019d like to point out that user experience was the initial inspiration for flook, when we thought that swiping cards would be a much more mobile-friendly interface for location-based discovery than maps and pins.

We%u2019d like to thank dotopen and MEX for choosing flook, and Andy Chung of Eden Ventures for accepting the award on our behalf.

Jane of the silly hats did (and does) much of the design work on flook, but we%u2019d be very remiss if we didn%u2019t also thank Nick Healey of Slash Design and Pete Borlace of pbdesignsolutions for their massive contributions. Nick is our user experience guru and is a real person not a robot called Robert. Pete is our graphic designer and he dreamt up our rainbow of robots. I%u2019m not sure if he really does wear tin hats.

Yay for more well deserved awesome praise of Flook which rocks socks and generally shows how you should check out of checking in and start location browsing :)

I think this is a good move and it will be interesting to see how non-compete companies stay that way as products develop in to new markets.. E.g. the evolution of Apple and Google's relationship...

From independent movie shop in Bath... Finally Phil's email newsletter get's a worth expansion to a whole website.. He's not often off the mark with his reviews / comments... Good source of info for movie fans... Especially those with a skew to independent / quality cinema :)

Let's say you're about to make a very important presentation to a prospective client on the other side of the country. Before you depart on your business trip, you download all of your presentation materials and InDesign® hand-outs onto your trusty thumbdrive. Just in case, you also email the files to yourself.

But while you're in the air, your colleagues back at the office are making last minute edits to the files and your copies are now out of date. Worse yet, when you arrive at your destination, you realize you left your thumbdrive at home.

Sound familiar? The good news is that things are about to become a whole lot easier.

Over the next couple of weeks, we are rolling out the ability for Google Apps users to easily upload and securely share any type of file internally and externally using Google Docs. You get 1 GB of storage per user, and you can upload files up to 250 MB in size.

Now accessing your work files doesn't require a connection to your internal office network. Nor do you need to email files to yourself, carry around a thumbdrive, or use a company network drive – you can access your files using Google Docs from any web-enabled computer.

Combined with shared folders in Google Docs, the upload feature is a great way to collaborate on files with coworkers and external parties. Instead of using cumbersome email attachments, you can upload files to a folder and share it with coworkers, who can then access and edit the files from a single place. You can even have your sales team securely share contracts with external clients for review.

And of course, by using Google Docs, you can quickly and easily search across all your files from one place, getting access to the right file when and where you need it.

Google Apps Premier Edition users can also use the Google Documents List Data API to upload files to Google Docs in batch, or purchase applications offered by third parties that enable you to migrate and sync your files to Google Docs:

 

Memeo Connect for Google Apps is a new desktop application that offers an easy way to access, migrate, and synchronize files to Google Docs across multiple computers. (PC and Mac)

Syncplicity allows Google Apps users to synchronize, manage, and backup files across desktops and servers, making it easy to use Google Docs seamlessly with existing applications and files. (PC)

Manymoon is an online project management platform that makes it simple to organize and share tasks and documents with coworkers and partners, including uploading files to Google Docs.

We're always looking for ways to make it easier for you to access and organize your information online and we hope you find the ability to store, share, and collaborate on files in Google Docs helpful. In the coming months, we will enable Google Apps Premier Edition customers to purchase additional storage for $3.50/GB/yr (or €3.00/gb/yr in the EU). If you'd like to be notified when additional storage can be purchased, please fill out this form and we will contact you as soon as it's available. As always, we’d love your feedback and if you have any questions, please check out our help forum.

Posted by Anil Sabharwal, Google Docs team

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The choices today for business collaboration is such that it's almost criminal not to be using such a system as Google Docs, Box.net or Drop.io etc

Sharing and collaborating on content is key for improving business productivity by making workflows simpler and working across locations and device platforms easier.

Get in touch for help in understanding how collaboration tools such as Google Docs can benefit your business.

MindMeister is a great tool for collaborating on ideas and projects. For the project side, this is a short tutorial for using Tasks as part of your mindmap.