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!

Once again a rather random assortment of applications and we’re sticking with the number theme, a theme that was popular among Web 2.0 projects a couple of years ago.

• 16Bugs is a bug tracking site.  Believe it or not, just the other day, my husband asked me if I knew of a bug-tracking site that didn’t require software installation.  Well, I do now.  This site allows you to set up a project or company with multiple projects and track the progress.  Although it has some of the qualities of a project management site, it’s geared specifically toward software development and coding.  Also, the site follows the Web 2.0 style of using bright colors and large, friendly icons.  It’s pleasing to look at, as well as practical, a big plus in my mind.  In fact, their motto is “We make bugs pretty.”  To get the most use out of it will cost you, however.  There is a free version, but you can get almost all the features for just $8/month, very reasonable.  Obviously, the use of this in education would be primarily for computer science or for other on-site programmers.
• 1Time is project management/billing software.  I’m sure we’ll be running into more of these as there’s a huge demand for finding ways to track employee and project time.  Like 14dayz that I reviewed on Friday, the benefit of this software is to centralize the management of project and employee time.  It touts the benefit of reducing unbilled time.  They offer several different reports and the ability for clients to see how much time has been put into their project.  There is a free option, but to get the most out of it, you’ll need to pay up.  Like 16Bugs, the cost is on a per month basis and for US buyers, depends on the Euro exchange rate, but starts around $18/month.  Again, this might be useful in some way on the administrative side, but probably not for academic purposes.
• The final application is 22Books.  The name of the site comes from the number of books by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., which makes the site endearing already.  It’s a simple site compared to something like Library Thing, the go-to site for online book collecting and sharing.  All you do is make a list of books and give it a title, kind of like Listmania on Amazon. But I did see a school that was using it to list new books in the library.  Lists can be embedded in web sites or linked to directly.  Although the lists show who created them, you can’t click on the user and see other lists they created or anything else about them.  One of the tenets of social software is connecting people and this site doesn’t appear to have any way to do that.  However, this might be a simple way to create a reading list and embed it in a web site.

I’ll continue looking at sites tomorrow and on Friday, I promise a roundup of all the sites, with some picks of sites that I think are keepers.