Online meeting tools

These services offer facilities such as virtual whiteboard (for the participants to draw/write together), text/audio/video and chat.

Of late, the collaborative meeting applications' space is agog with action.

The emergence of several simple but feature-rich free services attest to this observation. A few of the latest entrants are discussed here.

I have added some links at the end of the article.

Twiddla

If you wish to start an online meeting with a couple of mouse clicks, try out the free web-based on-line meeting service Twiddla ( http://www.twiddla.com/ ). To initiate a meeting, go through the one-time registration process and click on the ‘Start meeting' button.

You can make the meeting public or password-protected invite-only. When you initiate a meeting, you get a meeting URL for sharing with potential attendees. The service offers facilities for co-browsing, text/audio chatting and the like.

While browsing with others you can insert comments, and place coloured marks on the page being viewed. In addition, it provides a whiteboard that enables the participants to collaboratively write, and draw pictures.

Dimdim

Another collaboration tool worth a test is the free web-based conferencing service ‘dimdim' (http://dimdim.com/). Recently, ‘dimdim' has made its service public.

Here also, you can start the meeting and invite others via e-mail, directly from the browser. Apart from offering collaboration tools such as whiteboard, chat (text/audio/video) common to e-meeting services, ‘dimdim' has some additional unique features.

An advantage of ‘dimdim' is the desktop sharing facility by the presenter to share her desktop with the attendees.

Once the presenter shares her desktop (using the ‘Screen' option), the desktop screen will immediately be visible to all the participants. This could be useful in product demonstration and co-browsing.

If the presenter's computer has a TV tuner card, she can even share the TV show running on her machine with the attendees.

A shortcoming of the desktop sharing feature is the lack of facility for attendees to interact with the presenter's shared desktop. Also, there is no scope for the attendees to share their desktops. Perhaps, forthcoming versions of ‘dimdim' may incorporate these features.

Another feature of ‘dimdim' worth a mention is the facility to make live presentations with PowerPoint and PDF files.

Besides offering the hosted service for free, ‘dimdim' has made its software open-source/freely downloadable, for enabling enthusiasts to host their own ‘dimdim' based e-meeting service. However, when this author tried to use the Windows version, it did not function - this version seems to work only if you have Openoffice 2.3 (neither lower nor higher version is acceptable).

It seems ‘dimdim' developers are aware of it and may rectify this anomaly soon.

Palbee

Another service in this genre is the free web-based audio/video conferencing application ‘Palbee' (http://palbee.com/).

It allows you to conduct unlimited videoconference (with five people) sessions.

To enliven the video session, the service lets you run slideshows along with a whiteboard.

A great advantage of this service is the facility to record the sessions for sharing them with others later.

Text manipulation tools

It is likely that you come across a situation, where you need to get a few text lines sorted in alphabetical order. No need to hunt for a programme to do this. Access the service Alphabetizer (http://alphabetizer.flap.tv/index.php), paste the text, click on the ‘Alphabetize' button and obtain the sorted text.

If you are looking for a more versatile text manipulation tool, try out Textopus (http://textop.us/).

Apart from getting lines alphabetized, Textopus offers a variety of text manipulation tools.

For instance, if you wish to ‘clean' a text written without proper spacing, and capitalisation, the ‘Clean Text' option of Textopus could do the job.

Apart from the said features, Textopus toolbox contains tools for reversing lines, shuffling letters, adding line numbers, and deleting duplicate lines.

This service can also be used to convert text into numbers in formats such as hexadecimal, binary and ASCII.

Gtranslate

Owing to the availability of a variety of language learning and translation services such as Google Translate (http://translate.google.com/translate_t), language related communication barriers are gradually disappearing.

Now, if you want to translate a sentence directly from a web page using Google Translate, install the Firefox extens ion Gtranslate (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/918). Once the extension is installed, any text selected from your web page can be translated into any other language by just right-clicking and selecting the ‘Translate' option. Of course, the translation can only be done into the languages supported by Google's translation service.

Currency converter

Converting currency of a country to that of another is an important need in today's globalised context.

In this regard, take a look at the ‘Currency conversion tools' site ( http://www.currencyconverter.co.uk/index.html) that hosts currency related updates.