| On the Road and Online. |
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Meeting professionals tend to be road warriors.We are often running or attending meetingsaway from our office. What’s your best solutionnfor staying connected while on the road? A key step toward good connectivity while travelling is to get a good smart phone allowing you to read and respond to email, to manage text massages, to view web sites, and, oh yes– you can even make phone calls with these things.
There aremany flavours out there, Blackberries, Treos, Iphones, MotoQ, and more. The ability to integrate with Outlook contacts,calendar, tasks and email can be very helpful.Many mobile phones these days have broadband, the ability to connect to the internet with faster than dialup speeds. My Treo 750 is EV-DO capable. EV-DO nonsensically stands for Evolution Data Optimized (in Europe and the rest of the world is 3G or Edge) – but what it means is that you can access the internet at speeds several times faster than phone dialup. I can plug my phone to my computer and it acts as a digital modem. It’s not blazingly fast but certainly fast enough to check email.Alternatively, If you are lugging around your notebook computer, you can use an EVDO card that plugs into the side slot in your computer, bypassing the phone entirely and log onto the internet everywhere there is cell phone signal capable of handling this – which is nearly every urban area in north America. Pricing for data plans start at about US$29/month.Similar networks are available internationally with data speeds expected to continually increase over time. Another means of internet connectivity is Wi-Fi – short for Wireless Fidelity. Nearly every notebook computer built since 2003 is Wi-Fi enabled, meaning that it can receive high-speed internet access via radio waves. Several airports and most midprice hotels and even some cities are offering Wi-Fi access forfree. Also helpful on the road is the ability to access your office desktop computer using a standard web browser. When you log in, the web browser will all alloy you to see exactly the screen on your desktop computer at work. There are lots of reasons why you might want to do this -- to email yourself a file on your hard drive; to be able to view documents that your smart phone can’t open, or even to check out your office webcam to see if you cat or dog is doing fine. There are a few software services that will allow you to dothis for you. The first and most common program around is GoToMyPc ( www.gotomypc.com )– a remote desktop viewing service costing under $20/month. However, another service, LogMeIn.com ( www.logmein.com ), does this for free! I have been using Log me in to remotely access my office desktop computer for nearly two years and it works great. Speaking of free web software tools, one that I use regularly(especially when I call or travel overseas) is Skype (www.skype.com).This is a VoIP (Voice over the Internet) software program that can be downloaded to your computer turningyou computer into a phone. As long as you have broadband connectivity, you can talk to another person who has downloaded the program on their computer on an unlimited basis for free. However, the feature that I use most frequently is Skype Out.With this, you can use your computer to dial any number in the world at a fraction of international calling rates – typically at 2 cents/minute. You have to prepay with a credit card to use SkypeOut. I prepaid US$10 and have made at least 100 short international calls using Skype and I still haven’t used up this credit yet. One tip about using Skype, bring along your headphones rather than using the speakers in your notebook computer. This will eliminate an echo the person you are calling would normally hear if speakers are used. |