Online collaboration between schools, teachers, and students has become increasingly apparent as our everyday routines become more and more connected via the internet. Of course, there are paid solutions that satisfy this need through Learning Management Systems, such as Blackboard Academic Suite, which frankly isn’t very good at all in my opinion. I can’t even count the number of times both teachers and students have complained about paid services that their respective institutions utilize. Well, now comes Studeous, a free (and better) alternative that allows for online collaboration in the world of academics.

A program called DropBox has recently entered public beta and has been making the rounds on networks like Digg and Reddit. I’ve been a private beta member since January and have been using it pretty heavily in my daily processes - and it has worked absolutely wonderfully. Dropbox is currently available for Windows and MacOS X, and we are told that an Ubuntu or Linux client is in the works.

I recently interviewed the Founder of Dropbox, Drew Houston, to answer some questions I had about the service. You can read the interview below, after my short review of the service.

Another quick guide from MakeUseOf, this time it’s on group calling and conference apps. The ones that are simple, quick to setup, free, and probably something you would want to use. What do you get? Make instant calls to a group of friends, video chat with play mates, schedule conference calls with colleagues, live brainstorming dashboard, etc. As usual, all apps are free and fairly simple to use. Enjoy!

MeBeam - Online Video Conferencing

While writing my own blog actually I found that a Wiki was the best way to convey some information. If you too own a blog you may want to write some more detailed guides, build knowledgebases and so on. I can think of at least a dozen of reasons why you may need one.

Show off your product in an in-depth, much more technical way, allow others to contribute to this with their own experiences, you could also use it as a personal blog form, a way to manage your information, a way to collaborate with others, the uses are endless. The reason that a Wiki is so powerful is that it is not constrained to one of these uses, you can use it for all at once.

Remote desktop access is nothing new - Windows has had it for years - but as with everything else, Microsoft is rapidly losing the monopoly by smaller companies determined to bring out their own alternatives. One such alternative is Crossloop.

I have been watching Crossloop for a while and so far I have been extremely impressed. Now that they have brought out a new version, I am now totally blown away. Profiles and details of your remote sessions makes this a serious tool in the remote access market.

I’ve received a lot of positive feedback from people regarding my post on helping to create user-generated content on the web. So since this seems to be something that people find interesting, I decided to “do a George Lucas” and write a sequel! A long time ago in an internet far far away…..