Emerging Technologies Consulting

I suspect there are 40 million project management software apps out there.  Considering how many people do freelance web work, plus almost every institution has projects and needs a way to track them.  While these won’t be particularly useful for faculty in non-business related disciplines, these tend to be the most professional looking sites.

• 5pm is our project management product for today.  I have to say I was struck by the art on the site.  Rather than just a few screenshots at the top of the page, they have cartoon people at an after-work party, emphasizing that the point of project management is to complete the projects and celebrate! The product itself looks slick and contains many features.  It looks more complex than the other products I reviewed earlier this week, which could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on what you need.  It actually looks like a good replacement for Microsoft’s Project Management software.  Like the other products, there’s a monthly fee for using the product.
• 8tracks is a music sharing site, allowing users to build playlists of, you guessed it, 8 tracks.  It’s a much simpler site than Last.fm.  The philosophy of the site is that people create better mixes than algorithms.  In that way, it fits in perfectly with the social software philosophy.  As for educational uses, you could certainly create a list of music for a class.  The list generates an RSS feed, plus a unique url so it can be linked from a course blog, website or CMS.
• 9cays is a group email viewing site.  I don’t really get it, I must admit.  Is reading group email so complicated it needs its own application?  That’s all I’m going to say.

Tomorrow I’ll pick a couple of the apps that I’ve already reviewed that stand out as particularly good or useful for education.  And Monday, we’ll begin with the As!