Online Collaboration Tools - New Technologies And Web Services - Sharewood Picnic May27 08

Create your own video conferencing room and hook up with your instant messaging buddies directly from your phone. Discover new tools also to send and share very large files without using email. All of the above and more in this week collaboration tools Picnic.

Photo credit: Mipan

From Sharewood, here my selected set of online collaboration tools for this week:

1. SnapYap: One-to-one free video conferencing room allows you to have free video-audio calls with your friends
2. ADrive: File hosting service gives you 50 GB for your files, and lets you share them with anyone
3. Ekiga: Free VoIP and video conferencing application for Windows and Linux
4. Alliance: Free open-source P2P application lets you share entire folders with your friends
5. Coffee Cup Live Chat: Downloadable software for chatting with your website's visitors
6. MyMapChat: Google-maps based web-site lets you chat with people and groups on a world map
7. Palringo: Multi-client mobile chat application enables you to chat, share files, and talk from your mobile device
8. TwitterCube: Upload and share images and documents up to 10MB via Twitter

1. SnapYap
   
   SnapYap is a free online voice conferencing tool, that anyone can use to have free one-to-one video-audio calls. Filling up a simple registration form, enables you to create your personal video conference room, in which you can invite anyone to join you: if they have a SnapYap account, you just need to insert their username, else just provide their email address and they will be sent an email with instructions to enter the room. Free to use.
   http://www.snapyap.com/






2. ADrive
   
   ADrive is a new web-base file hosting solution which gives you 50 GB of online free storage for free. After you create an account, you are able to upload all of your files online through a web-upload, but a new uploading solution will be available soon. You can use ADrive as your online backup hard-drive, but you can click the button "Share", and make your files public so that anyone can access them anytime. Completely web-based and free.
   http://www.adrive.com/






3. Ekiga
   
   Ekiga is a free and open source VoIP and video conferencing application for Linux and Windows. Ekiga supports both the SIP and H.323 protocols but also supports many other high-quality audio and video codecs. Plus you can also text-chat with your contacts. Ekiga is completely free to download and use.
   http://www.gnomemeeting.org/
   Windows Download: http://www.ekiga.org/admin/downloads/






4. Alliance
   
   Alliance is a free, open-source peer-to-peer application, that lets you your own file sharing network. You can add all of your friends to your network, share files, and also chat with them. The traffic between clients is encrypted at a low level, but you can apply an experimental SSL layer if you'd like a bit more protection. Alliance is a free download for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux systems.
   http://www.alliancep2p.com/






5. Coffee Cup Live Chat
   
   Coffee Cup Live Chat is a downloadable software that you can install on your server and that allows you to chat with your website's visitors. After a visitor clicks the chat link on your site, a new window will open on his screen and will add him into the chat room: you can have a conversation with an unlimited number of people, use emoticons, and get a chat transcript sent to any participant's email automatically. Free to try, $34 to buy.
   http://www.coffeecup.com/live-chat/






6. MyMapChat
   
   MyMapChat is a map-based site, based on Google-maps' interface, in which you can send messages to anyone in the world. MyMapChat has a very easy-to-use interface, made of a map, on which you can post a message of your own for anyone else to see, follow other users' messages, send private messages with attached pictures, and form online groups to easily collaborate with your team. It is completely free to use.
   http://www.mymapchat.com/






7. Palringo
   
   Palringois a freeware application that brings multi-client chat to your Windows Mobile device or Symbian smartphone. It fully supports MSN, Yahoo, AIM, GTalk, Jabber, and ICQ, in all of their features starting from voice-chat, emoticons, customizable-status, and more. To download the software, it requires sign up, and you need to be sure your phone runs Windows Mobile 2003(or up) or Symbian. Free.
   http://www.palringo.com/






8. TwitterCube
   
   TwitterCube is a web-based tool that you can use to share files via a Twitter post. After you provide your Twitter credentials, you just have to select any picture, video or document up to 10MB, click a button, and wait for all your readers/friends to get the file, which will stay online for 30 days. The service is free to use, with no sign-up needed.
   http://www.tweetcube.com/

Originally written by Nico Canali De Rossi for Master New Media and first published on May 26th 2008 as "Online Collaboration Technologies - New Tools And Web Services - Sharewood Picnic May26 08"