Box Introduces Notes For Real-Time Collaborative Documents

Cloud storage service Box — which some say is great for photo storage — has stepped into the online collaborative note-taking game with the launch of Box Notes, a new free service that lets you create documents, share them with friends and work on them in real time.

Box Notes is currently in beta and you can sign up to ask for an invitation. A few users we know have already got access to the service a few hours after registering their email.

Essentially, Box Notes is a blank online text field for you to start writing. The rich text formatting tools aren’t shown by default, but highlighting any word will have those appear for you to add a link or leave a comment.

The commenting system is part of the focus on collaboration, encouraging users to add profile pics so your coworkers can see you through the new ‘note heads’ — similar to chat heads — which are little circles with your picture. When in collaboration mode, these note heads always show up outside the left margin at the point where your cursor is. This way, it’s easier to know what your colleagues are looking at, and draw their attention to a paragraph that you are reading (since they can see your chat head).

You can also add or embed images, videos and rich media files, which can be played in the note.

And of course, this is all built on top of Box, so the notes are stored in your cloud drive and can be accessed from anywhere. “Fire up your notes on any platform, anytime. No exceptions,” says Box. Currently, Box itself is available on Android, iOS, Blackberry, Windows Phone, Windows and Mac OS X.

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document? That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the docum...

Build Your Own Awesome Personal 3D Avatar with Avatara

Do you use social networks and want to build your own awesome 3D avatar? Maybe you want to send someone a cute cuddly image of yourself (kind of)? Or maybe you have your own ideas of what you would do with an Avatar… Well look no further than Avatara which I discovered from the MakeUseOf directory . You can create 3d avatars out of pre-set up templates or create your own from scratch. To start, visit Avatara’s homepage . You will see this screen: Click Get Started to umm, get started! That will take you to this screen: You see that you can build your own Avatar using an uploaded head shot like the Obama one above (just an example, guys). Or roll with one of their awesome avatars. I chose to start with a blank avatar by clicking Start with a blank avatar at the bottom of the screen. That takes you to here: I clicked on the filter at the top and told it to filter out everything but male characters and then I saw this: I rolled with Buck and continued. You need to click Select...

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a...

Kiran Upadhyay

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