I like Market7. I used this great, new tool several times in collaboration on some videos with our video production team. I myself am not a video production guru so I appreciated the ability to easily annotate specfic time intervals and areas of the video with "looks cool but formatting seems wacky" comments and not have to worry that our experts would not know what exactly I was talking about. And that is the key. There is little to no confusion (certainly less than usual) and I do not have to worry that my comments are duplicative so I am more apt to comment! I feel like my comments are valued.

For a great break down / business case on benefits, check out Market7's model in video: http://bit.ly/3BQJkO. A big fan of such clean models, I found this to be very interesting; clean tie between issues and resolutions, inputs, outputs, waterfall charts and fun images. Clearly Market7 is thinking about the ROI of collaboration from their product's perspective. That gives me confidence that upcoming features will continue to be value-add.

I am a big fan of Mindmeister and have found it useful for lots of different things. I love how you can build thoughts and ideas in the form of a mind map and do it all collaboratively - live. It is very easy to use which is the most important feature I look for (usability), which means it is easy for team members to adopt. I especially find it useful for capturing meeting minutes because of the nonlinear nature of meetings. This makes it especially easy for those unable to attend meetings to quickly get up to speed and follow thoughts and ideas and see how they were formed. Compare that with run on sentences in a three-page Word doc.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Terminal is a great tool for taking images and making them searchable and editable. You can convert a number of image types into word, PDF or .txt file. Take it for a test drive - you can sign up for 20 free pages worth of conversion. Now, what does it do for those hard to crack PDFs that are locked ...?

I have been using Harvest for almost two months now and have found it to be very easy to use. We are in the business consulting industry and accurately logging time is critical to us and to our clients. Harvest enables us to easily log time from our desktop Macs via the web browser or the widget and then even from our iPhones. You can add notes for when you log time daily and then you get a nice clean summary breakdown of hours against projects and tasks within projects. It works great both ways because as a manger you also get easy-to-read summaries for each person. All this, means it is easier and more accurate to invoice and our clients have appreciated the level of detail and easy-to-read interface.

Similar to Slideshare, Slideboom allows you to publish your presentations to the world. They do seem focused on the PowerPoint world but you can also upload a flash version of your presentation. What I really like is the PowerPoint add-in by iSpring which integrates with SlideBoom and allows you to publish direct from PowerPoint while converting to Flash. They also do a really good job of taking a presentation that has animation, sounds, music and is entirely automated and keeping all features intact, converting to flash and allowing for upload to the site. Slideshare I found was not able to handle animations, sounds or music ... so depending on your purpose and intent of the presentation Slideboom is much better in that regard - although as of now it is not as popular. It will be fun to see slideboom, slideshare, authorstream and others go at it.

There are several URL shortening services that are out there, and bit.ly is one of the best. Easy to use interface that stores and tracks the clicks on your long URLs. The two features I like best are (1) the bookmarklet "shorten with bit.ly" that makes it really easy to snag a website and then the (2) easy to Twitter post or Facebook option. Both features make finding and sharing a breeze and the Firefox add-on which is not available for version 3.5+ yet provides all sorts of data (e.g., page name, actual URL) when you hover over any shortened URL.

I really like Poll Everywhere. It is surveys simplified. It is quick to set up, very visually pleasing and just plain cool. I used Poll Everywhere to get ideas for my nonprofit's new name. I listed seven or so of the best names I had heard to date then loaded them into Poll Everywhere, then sent the link to the poll to many of my friends and family. The results were awesome - I was able to see real-time results and stats with cool graphs. My friends could respond by email or even via SMS if they wanted. Use it. You will like it. (Oh, and it's free until you hit a threshold of responses.)

You, like I, probably experience a semblance of social networking silo conundrums - what do I mean? Well, there a lot of social networks now; so, when, how do I manage all the posts? After talking with our Fresh Consulting team, and feeling the need for some aggregation in my life, I turned to web2review and looked up social networking aggregation tools. Here I found ping.fm. Convenient because you can integrate all your networks,and designate status, microblog or blog for what type of post. If you have one unbelievable thought you want to share with EVERYONE, you can indicate that and then blast (some call it spam) all your networks. Again, it is convenient, but in some respects, I already feel like I am sacrificing a little of the potency and quality because Facebook has a different feel for me than Twitter than Friendfeed then LinkedIn then my blog, etc. So do I eventually go back to just posting on each network one-off? Will start to use more and more and will keep everyone posted on how my feelings evolve.

For managing a global nonprofit, Huddle has been great. They offer a fantastic upgrade (free) if you are 501c3 incorporated. That said, I have found their collaboration abilities to at par with what I know at BaseCamp and certainly better than say a Google groups. Huddle allows you to create multiple workspaces, manage teams and user access rights, set up appointments, assign tasks with owners and deadlines, it integrates with Zoho products for easy online editing of documents, Huddle has a wiki feature and of course a eRoom where you can upload docs. For managing multiple teams all virtual across the globe it has been great.

I like TripIt. It's an excellent tool for either (1) the person who travels weekly or several times a week or (2) the person who is planning a multi-week adventure or vacation. All you do is froward TripIt your itinerary (car, hotel, flight, anything) from any email address (work or personal) that is tied to your account and it automatically builds a comprehensive plan containing calendar, check-in information, address and phone, weather of destination, etc. What I love is the intuitiveness and ease of the tool but also the ability to share your trips with friends so they know where you are at all times and know how to contact you. It can be especially great for family.

I am an avid user of RTM and have found it invaluable for my sporadic to-do tracking. It is free, super user-friendly and integrates with all your favorite mediums - from the iPhone to my iGoogle page (even as a widget in Gmail). You can create folders, assign a priority, time estimate, tag, add notes and even access it offline and then upload when you are back on the grid. Perfect for adding a to-do that is 6 months out - you can set email reminders as well. Another feature I like is the ability to email yourself a to-do item using your own custom RTM email address. Love it.