Remote working has become more and more prevalent in today’s corporate world.  With an eye on saving money on travel, energy, and other personnel related expenses companies are starting to look for software solutions that cut costs and increase productivity. Some friends of mine in Atlanta have come up with an application that seeks to address the problem of many remote apps not being immersive enough, or not having enough personality. Their company, called Meetsee, is a 2.5D virtual office built using Flash.  According to their site, Meetsee is:

“Your personal virtual office is a space online filled with rich
ways to communicate, share content, collaborate on documents,
and build rapport between remote co-workers.”

I signed up for my free virtual office on their Web site. You can choose between four different office templates that come bundled with a set of furniture and tools that you can use. Navigating my office was easy enough by just clicking on objects such as chairs, filing cabinets, and TVs to interact with them.

My Meetsee Office

The goal of any virtual office or meeting space is to facilitate communication between remote parties as easily as possible, and to make sharing information feel natural.  Having recognizable objects with familiar functionality is a strong point of Meetsee’s application. They rely on common metaphors in their environment, for example, the TV plays videos. 

To that effect, my room came with a whiteboard, an entertainment system for playing YouTube videos, a filing cabinet to share files, a clock, and a corkboard where people can leave photos, messages, or weird little animated stickers. I was also able to add new stuff to the room, like a news ticker style RSS viewer and a Twitter display. You can even open the tools in a bigger window.

My Meetsee Office Preview

Meetsee gives the room owner a lot of control over how their office or meeting space is used.  You can choose various permission levels that change what other users are or are not allowed to do, and you can even track room activity from a report on the site.

You can add your virtual office to your Web site or even your Facebook profile. If you want to check out my office you can jump in as a guest:

The (currently free) upgrade to a Meetsee Plus account gave me access to new tools including audio conferencing, a presentation viewer, web cams and new virtual meeting rooms. These tools provide all the basics to conduct successful business meetings and have integration with all the standards you’d expect: YouTube, Flickr, PowerPoint, RSS, and Twitter. 

My Meeting Room

For a virtual office, I could see many uses for my Meetsee room. The web cam would definitely be nice to have for meeting “face to face” with my remote team members.  The ability for my remote collborators to share virtual space together has the potential to really change the way we work.

Since Meetsee is currently in public Beta, all upgrades are free.  This means you can jump in and check out their more advanced features, like web cam and user networks.  There are many options for remote work and granted there are some that would prefer the colder, simpler style of doing things, however if adding personality to the experience is for your team, then I highly recommend checking out Meetsee.

You can start out by signing up at Meetsee.com or by adding their Facebook App.

mod_graphics is a new Apache module built using ImageMagick that allows you to generate simple graphics from a web site using a REST-only syntax.  Currently, the module has 2 primary features:

• Circles – generate circles of any size with a specified foreground and background color
• Gradient – generate a 1 pixel x any length rectangle that has a 2 color, linear-gradient fill in horizontal or vertical orientation

Many people are cynical about their impact on the political process.

Does my vote really count? Do my representatives care what I think?

One innovative website is focused on helping answer these questions while making it easier for every citizen to get involved in the democratic process is Freedom Speaks.  This week, Freedom Speaks launched a new set of APIs and widgets to help make it easier to create new democracy-focused applications.

To understand the power of their platform in action, let’s see if you can answer this simple question:

Who are your political representatives in federal and state government?

If you move to a new home, aren’t really active in politics, or don’t want to visit 3-4 government websites to lookup this information, then Freedom Speaks is for you.

Of course, all of this information is available online, but it takes at least 2 searches to find your federal congressional reps, and every state has a different way of finding those state representatives.  Too much work, and yet another reason to stay complacent in the political process.

Try out their new widget, so you can be informed at your next dinner-table debate:

Developers should checkout the API Information here.