After reading the 4 Hour Work Week, I wanted to experience a mini-retirement.  This was obviously going to be impossible with the way Connected Web Solutions functions but I thought why can’t I have a mini-retirement where I can still get work accomplished?  And so, here I am living in Costa Rica for 3 weeks running the business as though I were at home.  This is not the easiest thing in the world in terms of meeting with clients and potential clients but in terms of development and maintenance it has been perfect.  Communication has been fine thanks to some tools I would like to mention.

1. Skype
2. Syncplicity
3. Google Chat
4. Blackberry (As a modem)
5. Thunderbird
6. WordPress

Skype – Since before CWS was founded in 2006 we were using Skype.  Skype is a free VOIP solution to speak to other Skype users for free.  Skype also has a multitude of services that CWS takes advantage of.  SkypeIn associates your Skype account with an actual phone number that anyone can call.  For about $30 a year and and an additional $3 a month to make unlimited calls to and receive from the US.  This is perfect for CWS considering just about all of our clients are based in the States.  So here while the company is being run from Costa Rica I can still receive and make calls just like I would at our home base in Pennsylvania. 
USEFULNESS GRADE: A

Syncplicity – I had put off backing up data online for a multitude of reasons. One of these reasons being that most services charged you per computer. Considering our office has at least 2 computers running at any given time and usually 3 or 4 when working in the main office this would be expensive. After scouring the Internet I came across Syncplicity. Not only did they support unlimited machines but they also had an option to sync your folders between machines. This is exactly what I was looking for since a lot of work is completed away from the office and before leaving and after returning I would always have to manually sync at least 3 computers. Thanks to Syncplicity it knows when files have changed and reflects the most updated files across all machines. It even has some versioning in case you delete something or prefer a previously edited version. 
USEFULNESS GRADE:  B+

Google Talk – Google talk is basically a stand-alone program of the chat used in Gmail’s web interface.  This way you do not need to be logged in to Gmail to chat with your contacts.  We use Google Talk to communicate with some of our designers/developers as well as an outlet for clients to get in touch with us immediately.  We are not always on but it can replace a phone when you only want to get a quick answer to something.  Again a free utility that definitely serves a good purpose for business as well as personal communication. 
USEFULNESS GRADE: B

Blackberry – Now I am only going to mention 1 facet of the Blackberry but I have found it quite useful. It is possible to tether a Blackberry phone to a laptop and have it function as modem. This has been very beneficial when meeting clients somewhere without an Internet connection or when you don’t want to pay $10/hour to use the Internet in an airport. Granted the connection speed is quite slow but you can still view web pages on a laptop screen instead of a phone. This has saved more than 1 meeting in the past.
USEFULNESS GRADE: B

Thunderbird – Now like the Blackberry, Thunderbird alone is a fantastic application but I want to hone in one aspect it. Thunderbird is an email client similar to Microsoft’s Outlook. The main attraction is that it’s free. The power of Thunderbird is with it’s add-ons. With the correct combination of add-ons (Lightning and Google Provider) you can have a full-blown email and scheduling application that syncs with your Blackberry wirelessly. Schedule a meeting on the road on your BB and it is synced to your Thunderbird by the time you get back to the office and vice-versa. Make appointments and meetings in Thunderbird and a short time later you will see them in your BB’s calendar. Technology is a wonderful thing.
USEFULNESS GRADE: A-

WordPress – Finally where would we all be without WordPress. WordPress is a very popular blogging platform that is endlessly customizable. It is open-source so you are free to tweak anything and everything you want in the code. Companies have built themselves on customizing WordPress installations for a myriad of things. This CWS blog is built on WordPress with some heavy CSS editing but otherwise unchanged. I decided to set up a personal blog, www.mymovableoffice.com, to blog about living in Costa Rica for 3 weeks and it has gotten some fantastic buzz. The site is less than a month old and I am already getting about 15 visitors a day.  Granted that is nothing special but nothing else we have working on has gotten this much attention.  There are plugins for everything imaginable and I took full advantage of them (Google Sitemaps XML, NextGEN Gallery, All-in-One-SEO Pack, and more).  The reason I chose WordPress as a platform because of how easy it is to use, how quickly it can be set-up, and how much control I can get over the system.  Like I had mentioned before in a previous, starting this company blog has help double our traffic.
USEFULNESS GRADE: A-

Does anybody else out there have any good tools to help them work remotely?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 4th, 2009 at 9:06 pm and is filed under Business, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.