The excellent webworker daily, posted a link to an online-project management system called Wrike.
Here is the story and review.

Over at CRN, they have an interview with Bill Gates on Microsoft’s sally into VoIP. Ok, I can’t exactly imagine my phone system running on Windows, but Microsoft Office Communicator and the Office Communications Server are the latest and greatest entries from Microsoft. Predictably, Gates isn’t enamored about open source solutions for VoIP. This is one of those things…you think that Microsoft is really late to a particular party, and then after five years of chipping away at it, they flatten the competion. (c.f. Novell and Netscape).

There’s a growing open-source community around VoIP right now. Do you expect that open-source will take on as big a role in voice as it has in some of the other technology areas you’re playing in?

Gates: Well it hasn’t taken on a big role in most areas. Take a look at virtual machines or databases or things like that. Go back and look at the prognostication about the role they would play. The value of support and having the relationship and the way that packaged software certainly from us and some others is sold in a very high-volume, low-priced way. There’s always an interest in open-source. Open-source will always be there. I’m not saying it’s going away, but in terms of what’s actually used in many of these categories, it’s actually proven to be very, very small.

And you’re expecting to see the same in VoIP?

Gates: Well in consumer voice, Messenger is free, Skype is free, so at the consumer level, it doesn’t have to be open-source but you’ve got a lot of free options. But as you move up and you want the encryption, manageability, connection to the directory and just that incredible relationship … I think this would be a category that’s particularly difficult for open-source software to have an impact on. You never know.

The Oil Drum is considered one of the best chronicles of our current energy and global warming dilemma. They posted a scenario today about what life might be like in 2034.

Oil has gone up $92.00 today. A new high.

So, what does the price of oil have to do with non-profit technology? Well, we’re going to have to reduce our energy consumption along with everyone else. Fewer desktop computers and more laptops. Fewer servers humming away 24×7. More efficient screens.

This will only be generally available for seven days, after that it disappears behind the paid firewall at the WSJ. Their tech columnist, Walter Mossberg has a nice written review and video of the changes that Apple has incorporated into their new OS…”Leopard”. The OS is due to be released on Friday evening.

I’m wavering.

Lunch reading today.

Although this is mixed up considerably with Bill Clinton, an article in the October Atlantic describes a new paradigm for philanthropy, using “business models”. Interesting. The full article is behind a subscription firewall…but there is an excerpt and interview with Clinton online. They describe how their organization changes the market for things like AIDS drugs and florescent bulbs.

From the article:

The modern era’s predominant model for philanthropy, the grant-making foundation, is a century old. When the Rockefeller Foundation created the template, Woodrow Wilson was a new president and World War I was still a year away. Since then, the world has changed more than foundations have. In recent years, new generations have come to see the traditional approach as hidebound. ‘Everyone’s searching for new models and new ways of doing things,’ Peter Frumkin, the author of the recent book Strategic Giving: The Art and Science of Philanthropy, told me. ‘There is an urge for something other than the standard model of the grant-making foundation that dutifully delivers funds to nonprofit organizations that dutifully deliver the services.’

Two more lightweight web applications to help you manage your life…

Stikkit

This is a “sticky note” application that allows you save to-do lists, create reminders, and lists of your “peeps”.(which can then be exported to your eMail application). Looks promising. Doesn’t quite pass the Five-Minute-Test….but maybe ten?

Sandy

From the same developers, Sandy is an eMail version of the stikkit application. This is currently in beta…I received a login within 24 hours of trying to sign up. Nice 50’s graphics…where is her apron?

Tim Nulty has been the spear-head for our local municipal fiber optic network. He has announced his resignation. My hope is after a well-deserved rest he’ll continue to help other local towns get their own fiber network. Excerpts from his letter:

The BT project has demonstrated the viability and desirability of publicly owned, universal, open-access fiber-to-the-premise telecommunications networks. Such networks are the “electronic public roads” of the future and proving their feasibility is a major contribution to our society. Having established this important principle, I would like to spend the remainder of my working life building other such networks elsewhere in Vermont where they are needed.

The communications scene in Vermont presents various points of interest:

• Verizon is trying to sell all of its dial-up land-lines (voice lines) in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont
• FairPoint communications wants to buy these…via what looks like a very strange financing deal, that among other things, appears to reduce Verizon’s tax obligations by millions of dollars.
• Verizon is buying Rural Cellular, (Unicell) which was the major wireless competitor in our region. We don’t have ATT here…and that means no IPhones (!) So, on the one hand, while Verizon is buying additional wireless capacity, they are attempting to unload their wirelines.

And no…Verizon isn’t installing FOIS in Vermont, (fiber to the home). That’s why Burlington Telecom are the heroes. They sell a triple-play tv, phone, internet connection for $99.00/month.