Evernote
www.evernote.com
Although it calls itself a note-making
site, Evernote can be used for much more than that. In short, Evernote lets you
quickly create a searchable database of all your interests and aide-mémoires,
whatever form they take – from photographs and webpages, Evernote will keep it
all for you, and has some clever little tools to let you find them again.
For example, if you want to upload a
picture with some text on it, Evernote has OCR (optional character recognition)
technologies built into it, so those words are automatically analysed and added
to its database. This means that any archived pictures of people with name
tags, slides from important presentations or screenshots of useful websites are
only a text search away.
You can also search Evernote’s database by
the date on which the note was created, or by the tags you use to label your
data. You can organise your notes and photos into Notebooks, keeping similarly
themed information together in the same place. If you’re worried about the
sensitivity of information you are placing on Evernote, you can encrypt notes
to make them as secure as possible. You can also share notes or notebooks with
others so you can collaborate on projects together, making it a handy business
tool too.
Another handy feature of Evernote is the
web clipper. This website extension lets you save the HTML of a webpage as a
note. Instead of bookmarking a site, you save the info on that page,
future-proofing yourself against the web page disappearing from that site.
Muck like services like Dropbox, Evernote
will also sync all your information between any of your web-enabled devices, so
the same notes and information are accessible whether you’re on your work PC,
on your phone or using a laptop on the train. Evernote syncs automatically each
time you turn your device on, so it all happens in the background without you
having to think about it. it always changes the way it works according to
whether you’re using it on a desktop PC, phone or tablet, so its functionality
suits the platform. For note-taking on-the-go, Evernote may mean you never
forget or lose anything again.
You can save entire web pages to your
Evernote account with its webclipper browser extensions.
ChallengePost
www.challengepost.com
What’s the best way to find the answer to a
problem? Ask us many people as possible until you find the perfect solution, of
course. How do you take the time to solve your problems? Simple, offer a reward
for the best solution. This is what ChallengePost does. It offers challenges
from companies, charities and even governments to see if the public can help
solve them, usually for a cash reward. It’s a clever idea: crowd sourcing is
the best way to get as many perspectives as possible.
Creator Brandon Kessler came up with the
idea after seeing a blog post that offered $100 to anyone who made a program
that would run Windows on a Mac. Other people also had the same problem and
added to the prize fund to the tune of a staggering $14,000. A programmer soon
came up with a solution to the challenge, which he wrote in three days. Kessler
was so impressed with the idea that he decided to create an eBay of
challenge-based problem solving and hired the blog post writer as his chief of
product. Once created, ChallengePost soon picked up high-profile clients,
including an app developer contest for the City of New York and a healthy
eating campaign headed up by Michelle Obama. ChallengePost has also been named
the official online ‘challenge platform’ of the US Federal Government.
The site clearly works; setting something
as a public challenge can lead a lot more people getting involved, creates more
awareness of the problem, and generates innovation in a way that isn’t usually
possible in more conventional methods. It isn’t just the financial reward that
motivate people either – acclaim or recognised need to solve a problem seem to
be as powerful, often leading to solutions involving a lot more work than the reward
would normally warrant. It seems ChallengePost is encouraging altruism simply
by making people aware that the problem is there.
So, a site that challenges you to make the
world a better place and rewards you for sharing your ideas or fully fledged concepts?
If it isn’t the future we’d like to be part of, we don’t know what is.
ChallengePost lets individuals and
organisations challenge the public to solve problems for cash.
