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Back to Best of the Web by L Ritzel
Pls Click for useful Sites in following Categories:
eCollaboration tools (Having talked about the Information Age for some years we now have entered the Collaboration Age. Here some of the Webs most usefull and innovative tools available on the WWW)
Cyberhelpers (some virtual helpers, once you know them you could not live without them anymore)
Innovative Searchtool (or what is beyond Google and Yahoo?)
Finding Multimedia on the Web (Sounds, Images and Animations)
eSwitzerland (Helpful sites about Switzerland)
Travel Helpers (You are planning vacations and need some virtual help)
Information from the World Wide Web
A bit more technical Sites for the Teckies among you
Cyberhelpers (some virtual helpers, once you know them you could not live without them anymore)
Start your day with reading the News, but how to make sure you get a ballanced collection of the latest global news? Check at two sources; Google News or then DayPop. DayPop beside being a Searchengine is one of the best index for WebBlogs (only News related), therefore really a great start in your News research. Additionally you might want to make use of Google Alerts . Those are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. Some handy uses of Google Alerts include:
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| Scenario: Did you ever want to know on how soap works? or would you like to show your kids in a fun way the hygiene aspects in a kitchen? The Science Box gives you answers on those questions and many more. Its one of those sites where you can dig in and loose hours. Check it out, its real well done and you will find information about safety, hygiene and sustainability aspects for all expertise level and all ages | |
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Scenario:
You have to organize the companies virtual meeting of all CEO’s
from 5 different cities all around the world. Living in a global world we all have to attend from time to time a international conference call, or even worse we have to set it up for our company and would need to get 5 different people, living in 5 different continents (time zones), some with summer-time and of course non of them want to have it in the middle of the night, or early morning at 0500 AM. But how to get it right for everybody and how to ensure that the participants are correctly advised about their local time to join. How to know if in Europe its already summertime or not yet. Just go to this very nice and user-friendly Global Meeting organizer and Worldclock site No complicated manual calculations are needed. Just enter date and time into the site, select the cities of joining participants around the world and you get a table with all details for all cities selected. It might still not avoid that perhaps one of the participants would have to stand up in the middle of the night, but at least you can check by color codes when it would be a best fit for the majority joining. Innovative alternative: As an alternative, use the revolutionary new way of looking at time in visiting and downloading the internet time calculator onto your computer from the people who re-invented the Swiss Watch at Check it out, it’s worth it! |
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Scenario: Your organization, your company or yourself want to make a survey. Why not to do it online using this on a basic level free fantastic survey creation tool. Zoomerang's premium survey software, allows users to easily create customized, professional grade surveys and analyze the critical feedback necessary to make important business decisions. Key features include the ability to use skip, or branch, logic, add images to your survey, personalize survey invitations and download and share survey results with others. This application has been created specifically for nonprofit organizations. Zoomerang Basic allows users to easily create and send shorter, less complex surveys and view survey data online for a limited amount of time. This version of Zoomerang is free for all users. |
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Scenario: You want to invite your friends, business people for a specific event and want to use a more creative as well as more professional tool than just simple email. Try Evite, Evite is the fun, free online social planning destination complete with all of the tools needed to coordinate get togethers for private events, public events or activities. From planning a dinner party for friends, to finding something to do on Saturday night, to locating a tennis partner, Evite makes it easy to explore local areas, communicate, coordinate, and make decisions |
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Scenario:
You would love to listen life to the sound of the world famous
‘Basler Fasnacht’ (Carneval) but you are many thousands
of km far away in Bangkok and working at your desk. (Note: some of them are streaming using the Media Player build into Windows, some others will need to have the “Real Player” plug in, available for free at www.real.com take care the player is for free but the site is cleverly built to always drive you to the professional version of the real player software that needs to be paid, when on the homepage, you first must click on the link for ‘Free RealOne Player’ at the top right of the screen. One the next screen you must then once more click the link for ‘Download the Free RealOne Player’ in the middle of the screen at the right. Only then you will finally reach the download site for the free player. During installation it will ask you to register, no need to do it for real, write what ever you want into the registration form to avoid being spammed by advertising later) |
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Scenario:
You need to know the Euro to Thai Baht rate from 34 days ago on a
Thai currency purchase for your accounting department Currency translators with the most up-to-date rates are common on the Xe is one of the most user-friendly currency translators. Another good site would be Oanda this Foreign Exchange Currency Converter is a multi-lingual Currency Converter with up to date exchange rates provided from leading market data contributors and is filtered for validity. To get the exchange rates for any of the 164 currencies, select the desired currencies from the lists below, as well as the date, language, and amount for which you would like to conduct the currency conversion. Click on "Convert Now" to get the results of your currency conversion. |
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Scenario:
You already are at the airport. Your office is already closed and
you forgot the fax with the information where you hotel is on your
desk. You need to find a specific place to go. You need a precise and update map to find a specific hotel in what ever town in the world. You need to have this information on your pc, on your PDA or even on your WAP mobile phone, top free site for Europe at Mappy The Route planner site with many cool interactive features. Other
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BUT the coolest of the cool if it comes to Geographical software is not available online but for FREE download. Once again has the companie behind Google brought us the ultimative Georgraphical Saltelite Worldatlas System. Just download GoogleEarth and then "fly" to places that you always wanted to visit, see it down to the single house and even indulge in a kind of 3D side view. Cool - Cooler - The Coolest. But even the coolest tool has competition, and this competition is brought to us by NASA, check out their free 184 MB download WorldWind. It shows the borders of all the worlds countries with thousands of place names and you can even call up temperatures from anywhere around the globe and, if you are so inclined, you can even check out rainfall, barometric pressure and cloud cover as well. |
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Scenario:
You are big fan of a specific Band and would like to know other Bands
that make the same style of Music. Type an artist's name and you get
a weblike zoomable map of related musicians, with that artist at the
center (the map recenters when you click on another artist) and a
partial discography. You can hear sound clips for each artist or group. Check it at MusicPlasma The coolest visual Musicfinder application |
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Scenario: You ordered 2 Pints of beer but would like to know how much is this in liters. The Conversion Maestro is a rather simple site in its design but can come very useful. Length (feet, meters), Area (square feet, square meters), Mass and Weight (ounces,grams), Liquid Volume (pints, liters), Temperature (Fahrenheit, Celsius |
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Scenario:
You get a mail from a important business partner from Brazil in local
language and neither you nor anybody else around you can read Portuguese… There are many online translation sites for free available on the internet. Don’t expect them to translate your ‘memoirs’ perfect from one language in another. But if it comes to a situation, where you for example would receive an eMail by a Spanish/ Brazilian/ German or Japanese client written in his own language and you would at least like to know about what it is, such tools can be of enormous and instant help. Even if you want to surprise one of your friends or clients with a mail written in her/ his own language, you may want to use such tool. To
use them best possible, you have to follow some rules:
If yourself can understand more than one language (for example English and French), but would like to make a translation from a English text into Portuguese; first write your text in English and ‘test’ a translation into French. Check the French translation and if this translation came out acceptable, re-run the same text to be translated into Portuguese. You can be pretty sure that if it is acceptable translated into French, the Portuguese translation will be fine as well. There are many Asian languages like Thai, Chinese and Japanese available as well, but take care, your computer system (operating system), might not be setup to support these languages. If however you use Windows 2000 or Windows XP to get these Asian language support done is not difficult at all. The links:
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Scenario:
Bring translation capability to your site. With AltaVista Babel
Fish, your users can translate passages of text or
entire Web pages among nine languages, or they can
quickly translate your page into their language of choice. Adding
Babel
Fish Translation to your site is free and easy. Simply
choose the tool (or tools) you want for your site, click the "I
want this one!" button, then copy and paste the single line of
code into your page. |
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One of the best and fastest German- English / English – German online dictionary for common words at LEO - Link Everything Online There is as well now translations from English to French available, all for free |
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For correct Writing in English, check the online Thesaurus and online Dictionary to ensure that your words are chosen correctly: Even larger
and in different categories is the Free
Dictionary.com |
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"Everybody
is entitled to their own opinion, But not to their own facts"
Check FactCheck
on politicians. A serious site with loads of information for your
next analysis or political report. Another serious facts site
is RefDesk.com
The site with a very special VISION STATEMENT: Refdesk
is not about revenue. Refdesk is not about traffic. Refdesk is not
about promotional vehicles or any form of commercialism. Refdesk is
only about indexing quality Internet sites and assisting visitors
in navigating these sites. At Refdesk that is all that counts and
that is all that will ever count. Since 1995, Refdesk free and family
friendly. Avaritia facit Bardus - Greed makes you stupid. |
| Sometimes the most simple things can be of such use, when ever you are at the phone and must spell such a complicated website address or the name of your tibetan wife comes this official NATO phonetic alphabeth very handy. Handy as H=Hotel, A=Alpha, N=November and Y=Yankee |
