Backpack by 37signals

Online wedding planner? How about a meeting organizer? Or a place to store e-mails by category? Backpack can do it all, and that's just the beginning of its capabilities.

Backpack is a Web 2.0 notes, ideas and scheduling application by 37signals, makers of the popular Basecamp project management tool. It has received great reviews from PCWorld magazine, BusinessWeek (Editor's and Readers' choice) and the New York Times among numerous other technology and business publications.

The service is essentially a Web 2.0 front-end to a very simplified web page construction system, but with a directed purpose. The first and most obvious use is to-do lists with checkboxes. Backpack has a built-in calendar for scheduling and can e-mail reminders or text messages. Lists and pages can be tagged and categorized as well.

Backpack is a good quick planning tool as well, although for anything more complex than a to-do list that thinks it's a project plan, Basecamp might be a better choice. For gathering information, however, Backpack is very good at what it does. The ability to categorize information including lists, photos and notes and to organize that information by tags has a great potential number of uses.

Because it is a Web 2.0 application, Backpack information can be shared in a variety of ways including just basic "publishing" of calendars and individual pages. Like the other 37signals applications, Backpack was designed to work extraordinarily well with e-mail, and e-mail figures prominently in a number of the application's features.

Some of the example applications for Backpack are almost as innovative as the program itself: craft projects, organizing coupons, travel planning, storing e-mail by subject or project, event planning, product reviews, recipes and even a light contact management application, although this will almost certainly be supplanted by Highrise.

Backpack is free for the basic service, and there are paid accounts up to $14 each month. There is an API for developers and a "Writeboard" feature included which does pretty much what the name indicates: allowing quick notes to be appended to an account for later reference. Developers are already beginning to develop add-ons for the service including browser plug-ins, and the service is compatible with standard calendars like the iCal application on the Mac.

But the power of these applications is really going to become apparent with the release of Apple's iPhone. Since the iPhone has a full-featured web browser, it's going to be possible to run most, if not all of these applications on a mobile device, which will be extremely useful and convenient.