Online business meeting

Meetings, meetings, phooey. Even if you’ve already taken some of the sting out of meetings by using a good online meeting tool, you can take more sting out of them with free and nearly free tools for keeping your get-togethers efficient. In this post, I’ll round up three of my favorites. Do you ever get frustrated with the amount of time it takes to simply get an online meeting scheduled? You often have to send out multiple e-mails, keep track of who flaked out and didn’t even answer your meeting proposal, and inevitably right after attendees one through 19 confirm the same time as available, attendee 20 can’t do it. If you run into these problems, definitely try ikordo. The video on the home page of the ikordo site makes very clear what the application does. ***

Part of being a web worker is getting some actual work done once in a while. Whether it’s writing a proposal, creating a web site, banging out code, or auditing financials, web work tends to require concentration. But the same tools that help us be connected from anywhere also act to interrupt and destroy this concentration if we’re not careful. Take instant messaging, which is a wonderful tool for pulling together a geographically-dispersed team. As you grow to depend more on IM, you’ll likely also find that random interruptions from well-meaning friends and colleagues pop up on your screen with increasing frequency, pulling you out of the zone and making it tough to get your work done. Short of ***

Our good friend and former Yahoo executive Jeffrey McManus has just launched his new company, Approver.com. A boot strapped operation, Jeffrey has build a web-based application whose sole task is to allow people to review and approve documents. How many times have you sent an email attachment to a group of people with the intention of getting feedback on it? When I was working in big Internet companies as well as running my own business, this happened a lot and it drove me crazy every time — to the point where I’d have call a meeting (ugh) or print out a document just to get people to review a 10-slide powerpoint deck or a two-page press release… … Approver.com was created to solve this problem. ***