Back to Best of the Web by L Ritzel

Pls Click for useful Sites in following Categories:

Cyberhelpers (some virtual helpers, once you know them you could not live without them anymore)

Innovative Searchtool (or what is beyond Google and Yahoo?)

WebCollaborator tools (the best mostly free tools for teamworking on all levels, visual, audio, threaded, virtual office and even research)

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

Fun and Leisure

 

Collaboration = Teamwork using digital Technologies is after events like 7/11 of even more importance. Here below some of the most useful and latest collaboration

Skype in a nutshell: The software’s quick and easy to get started with. Download, register, install, plug in your headset, speakers or USB phone and start calling your friends. The calls have excellent sound quality and are highly secure with end-to-end encryption. You don’t even need to configure your firewall or router or any other networking gear. It just, you know… works.
Bridging the gap: And it doesn’t just work on Windows, like some other software you may know. Skype is also for Mac OS X, Linux and PDAs using Pocket PC, with a native look and feel for each platform. Talking, sending instant messages or even file transfers work between different platforms like a charm.
Calling regular phone numbers: If there weren’t enough ways for you to contact your friends, they have a little thing called SkypeOut. It let’s you make calls to old-fashioned phone numbers all around the world. Landlines, mobile phones... it works with almost all of them. SkypeOut is not free but it is pretty cheap since it is always at the price of a local phone

The new kid in town is launched by Google - Google Talk (a mixture of Skype and MSN chatt, if it will be another killer application will be seen in the near future
Wikipedia is a multilingual "copyleft" encyclopedia designed to be read and edited by anyone. It is collaboratively edited and maintained by thousands of users via wiki software, and is hosted and supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. In addition to typical encyclopedia entries, Wikipedia includes information more often associated with almanacs, gazetteers, and specialist magazines; and coverage of current events.
  Calendars Net is a free interactive web calendar hosting service, where you and anyone you choose can post events visible and printable by whomever you choose, or everyone. You can post events that span more than one day (with text flowing across days or even weeks) or that recur every 1st or 4th Tuesday of each month, etc. You can copy the calendar data to your own computer and edit your calendar offline.
 What is it? Audioblogger enables audio posting to your current blog site with any phone at any time from any where. Its easy and fun.
How does it work? Actually, it is simpler than publishing a text post. You call the number, record a post, then your blog is updated with an audioblogger icon and a link to your recorded audio. Super simple.
How much is it? Audioblogger is FREE. Attention you need to sign up for an account with www.blogger.com (bust it's as well free)

With Foto-Mosaik you can create mosaic-pictures, which are composed of many small pictures (tiles), from your own photos.
The individual tiles, from which the mosaic-picture will be created, can be selected at random. After analysis, Foto-Mosaik puts them into one or multiple databases. As a basis you can grab the pictures from your private collection, or from a photo-cd.
A simple to use wizard will guide you through the freeware/postcardware program. So it’s a piece of cake to create you own mosaic pictures with an extraordinary effect.
Amaze yourself and other people and check it out ...

This website creates a new free and easy way to collaborate. Before Web Collaborator, to collaborate on a project meant passing papers back and forth, hours of painstaking corrections, hundreds of wasted pieces of paper, headaches, and plenty of coffee. Web Collaborator coordinates collaborations automatically, keeping backups of every revision ever made to the project, letting you see who made the changes, and allowing you to focus on the work instead of managing the work. Better yet, it is absolutely free for all uses.

Each project has three components.
The discussion This is where you can plan your project and discuss which parts of the project that need improvement. This allows you to have a clear vision for the future of your project.
The project This is your actual project, be it a paper, a poem, a story, a grant or a proposal. Any collaborative writing can be done in this area. A Fog index is embedded within the project to gauge the level of writing. At any time, you can download it as a PDF document to archive or print for a hard copy. You can also protect the project with government standard Rijandel 256 bit encryption so that even a malicious hacker would never be able to get a hold of it.
The history This section keeps a backup of every revision. You can see word for word, letter for letter what was changed at any point during the project

Our own Webcast site allows eLearning, virtual communication, web conferencing and much more. To listen to a webcast on how to use the Webcast, check here.

Samples of Webcast projects are:
Farewell 2005 reBroadcast
reBroadcast with Chef Black
(Needs latest version of IE installed)

More sample on usage of Webcast by Lukas Ritzel are available at the Website of NGO Digital Workforce Education Society - Digibridge.org where we covered some of the presentations during the 2004 World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva through Webcasting

L Ritzel is the contact person for you in case you would be interested to have your very own Webcast room for one single event or on a subscription basis
Digimask allows the creation of realistic 3D heads for commercial use. Using our SDK, you can build fully articulated and animatable models in a tiny fraction of the time it would take to manually create. This process is ideal for generating large numbers of diverse, high-quality heads in a short timeframe. Each Digimask Head is fully scaleable and the SDK gives access to the mesh, texture and boned animation settings, allowing complete editing control. For non professional usage there is a free download available to create your very own personal 3D heads. Avatars will become more and more used in the very near future. Check some of the samples such as SitePal or Chat with AI Alice at AliceBot
One Site presents itself as a 'portable favourites folder', and that's a great way to describe it, as with one simple web address to remember you can access all your favourite sites and loads more, from any computer. As well as being able to add your own personal favourites, Onesite also provides a directory of useful websites for both the family and business user. But perhaps the most impressive thing is the unique method of navigation that guides you through the various subsections. It uses a radial menu design developed by its developer. All you do is click the spoke for the direction you want the search to go in, and then keep 'dialling' one of the radiating links until you arrive at your final destination. Any time you want to back up, just click on the centre of the circle. To see my own links, just write "lritzel" into the field 'Fetch my links' to see them
Backflip can really help you to organize bookmarks, Backflip also makes sharing pages a snap. You can send individual pages or entire folders to friends simply by typing in their email addresses. If you send a page, the email will include a direct link to that page. If you send a folder, recipients will be taken to your Backflip folder, where they will find a list of links and descriptions
PageQ is the home of an application that allows you to create a slideshow of selected web pages, which can then be saved for future reference, or emailed to a friend to share.
Uploadr is an online service that allows you to store your Megahuge files temporary for 48 hours on their servers. Up to 150 MBytes of space can be used. You then can inform your colleague to download this file within the next hours (of course all password protected)
  Flickr This public showroom for personal pics just might be the fastest-growing social network on the Web, and it's completely addictive. You upload your images and assign each an identifying tag; these tags help other members find your stuff, and you theirs. You can join groups and create new ones, post comments about particular images and designate favorites. Free membership is limited to 20 megabytes worth of uploads per month
  Vyew is a browser-based conferencing and always-on collaboration platform that provides instant visual communication without the need for client downloads or installations.
Vyew's multimedia workspace enables shared viewing of presentations, files, photos and one's desktop. Included are tools for whiteboarding, annotating, text chatting, and phone conferencing.