From now on all postings will be written in German. As this is the native tongue for all three authors it just makes sense to make the change. Hope you’ll like it

I just found a great tool that will definitely make a lot of things faster and easier in my daily Outlook work flow. As I’m working with partners spread all over the world I always have to consider the partners time zone. I don’t want to wake someone up, disturb the lunch break or mess with them after they left the office. Its easy to use Outlooks build in time zone feature when sending out meeting requests, but there was no such thing for the daily email communication.

The Lifehacker blog posted a nice articel on this nifty tool that will display the sender’s timezone on top of each email. And best of all, it does not only tell you “the sender is in timzone GMT+4, it will also tell you directly what the sender’s current time is.

This handy little plug-in for Outlook will take just a few minutes of your time on installation. Once the Sender’s Time Zone for Outlook plug-in is installed, no setting and no configuring is required. You just open an e-mail message and besides the standard Outlook timestamp you will see the sender’s current time as well as your time zone difference. From now on you will never be confused with the time zones differences. You will see at a glance when the e-mail was really sent, regardless of where the sender’s office is located, whether it be East or West coast (EST, EDT, CST, CDT, PST or PDT), Europe (GMT, WET, CET, EET) or Asia.

Download the Sender’s Time Zone Outlook plugin here!

via Lifehacker

These days i have received the link of academicearth.org. A site with “Thousands of video lectures from the world’s top scholars.”. Quite interesting i thought, and gave it a try with videos about:

Psycology:

History:

and Physics:

Like Rob, i’m an TED-addicted. Therefore it is really hard to convince me replacing my for-TED-preserved-time with ohter stuff. But academicearth definitely has the potential to do so. Beside speakers of Yale, MIT and Stanford, you’ll get access to lectures of Harvard, Berkeley and Princeton. Most of the lecutres can be downloaded as video (mp4) or audio (mp3) file or embed them in your site as we did.  Votings and the creation of your favorites is possible as well.

Totally awesome! Especially for going much more deeper in detail than TED, academicearth.org is worth a look. No doubt, here comes not a TED-replacement, here comes a very valuable addition. Congrats to such an ambitious asimpressive project!

I hope we can see lectures from German univerities as well in the future. The Technical  University of Ilmenau in Thuringia has experimented with lecture streams,  but afaik there are no complete semestres available.

One of the few applications I always install first when setting up my windows machine is Executor. It’s the Windows equivalent to Qicksilver and can easily optimize your work performance. It has ton’s of features , too many to list them all here, but I would like to highlight three of which I gain the biggest benefits.

1. Keywords shortcuts, just enter any keyword like “email) and and a shortcut for “new email” will be available.
2. Auto completion for keywords, if you only enter “ex” Executor will complete this into “excel”, hit return and excel boots up.
3. Url detection, Enter URLs directly (like www.google.com, mail.google.com, google.com or http://www.google.com) and your default browser will open up.

Best of all, its Freeware! If you don’t like the interface you can find tons of other skins on their website, they have different layout presets to define the size of the window and their online documentation is full of tips on keyword settings and tweaking. You should definitely check it out and give it a try, it will boost your speed!

A friend recently showed me a great article about things that could go wrong when you start a company with a (close) friend. The idea itself sounds just great, actually I wouldn’t start a company at all with someone I didn’t know for some time. But while this sounds like a perfect arrangement, there are some unspoken assumptions and hopes, hence something could be left unclear and unspoken of.

Daniel Tenner tells a story from his own experience, of unspoken promises and vague agreements. He advises his readers to be, even though working with a close friend, very specific on any kind of agreement, discuss the bad stuff that might happen and, most important of all, write it all down.

At the end of the article you even get your typical “things you have to do” list. When you read the article make sure you go through the comments as well. Lot’s of good stuff in there.

Daniel Tenner – Starting up with a friend

Remember when I told you about my Outlook rule to avoid “Ah, crap!” situations after sending emails? I just found a nice post on lifehacker explaining that this is possible in Thunderbird as well, only with a slight difference.

The entire thing comes as an addon for Thunderbird and can be found here.

via Lifehacker

At Online College Block is a very useful list of weblications and online apps for brainstorming, mind mapping, listing, organizing or just get ridd of too much mess.

As there are 100 tipps, here are my 3 favorite ones:

• delicious: everytime access to my bookmarks for me and my friends
• digg: worth a look everytime
• bubble.us: graphics and flows, on the fly

The official Gmail Blog reported a new Labs feature yesterday: multiple inboxes. This awesome feature allows you to display multiple message boxes on your front interface. This comes in very handy when you want to keep an eye on important or urgent emails … or just want to conciously monitor your spam folder.

First you’ll have to enable the feature in Google Labs:

You’ll see a new tab within your settings where you’re allowed to change the displayed inboxes. In the example below I’ve created a box displaying my mails labeled WICHTIG (German for important) and TODO. Notice the operator OR which will display mails with either one of the logos. More information on these operators can be found here. Other possible operators could be

is:unread
has:attachment
bcc:YOUR NAME
is:chat


The second box will display all starred items.
Notice that you can also set how many items will be displayed per box [Maximum page size]. You might want to use a small to save some real estate on your screen.

The last options will let you set the position of the box, which is a matter of your personal taste [Extra panels positioning]. I prefer the box on top of my regular inbox.

And this is how your new front interface will look like. I really like the idea how this draws my attention to the TODO and WICHTIG labels every time I check my inbox. (In the screenshot below I changed the maximum page size to 4)

I really like the new feature… Gmail is getting better and better every day.

via Lifehacker

I truely hope everybody knows what a rss feed is but after a conversation at work… well here!

If you work on different devices, e.g. private, work, phone and like to read your rss feeds on each of them you are maybe facing the same problem as I did. It is totally anoying to read like 50 feeds on one device and find them unread when you switch to another.

For mails the IMAP concept works quiet perfect. A similar concept for rss is realized through NewsGator.

NewsGator is a web-based RSS account with clients for Mac OSX, Windows, iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile and other smartphones supporting Java.  As I use a mac at home, a pc at work and an iPhone this was exactly what I was looking for.

NewsGator syncs your rss feed through the web-based account so that you have the same feeds on every device and if you have read your news they are marked as read on every other device after a quick sync.

I am using the combination NetNewsWire for Mac

NetNewsWire for iPhone

and as I was facing some Outlook crashes  with NeswGator Inbox

I am now using Feed Demon on my PC at work.

Another possibility is to use the NesGator web-interface called NewsGator Online

Screenshots taken from NewsGator.

I bet you know the great book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen R. Covey, a great book on productivity and self-improvement. Now you can download the entire audiobook for free:

What are the habits all successful people share? In this audio presentation, Stephen R. Covey answers that question and teaches you how to make the Seven Habits a part of your life. Each audio system is designed to help you create an empowering center of correct paradigms from which you can effectively solve problems, maximize opportunities, and continually learn and integrate principles of effectiveness in an upward spiral of growth.

Download it here: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

[via Lifehacker via Digital Inspiration]