WebWorkerDaily24

Skype is one of the most revolutionary services to hit the Internet. Long before people talked about viral growth & network effects, it swept the planet with a simple idea: anyone could make free calls over the internet. Skype celebrated its 9th birthday August 29.

After buying a Chromebook four weeks ago, I quickly became a full time user of the device. Along the way, I picked up some tips and tricks that make my Chromebook more productive and fun. Here's ten of those tips for owners of Google's new Chromebook.

As of today, we've simplified our top navigation, closing down the Collaboration and Broadband channels. We'll still cover these areas, but we're making the changes to help our site reflect GigaOM's more focused approach to tech news and analysis.

New ways of working demand new workspaces, a fact that pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline clearly understands. It's building its second deskless office in Philadelphia, replacing cubes with fluid spaces, laptops and personal lockers, and saving money and speeding decision making as a result.

The hits keep coming from day two of Google I/O: The company announced the long awaited Google Docs offline capability, allowing users to edit docs without a connection to the web. Apple iOS gained the Chrome browser earlier in the day, but also get Google Drive.

Vacation season is in full swing, but small business owners continue to be besieged, as ever, with a tidal wave of responsibilities. The collision of these two realities could equal frustration, but according to a new survey, there's actually a happier result– more remote work.

High-tech tools and innovative management practices to ease coordination hassles may have their role in leading cross-cultural teams, but according to one expert on communicating with folks from different backgrounds, the real key to success is simpler and rarer.

Asana, the startup that wants to help workgroups collaborate easily, is adding a new feature to its SaaS to attack what it calls a huge productivity suck: email. And it's doing so with a new feature ironically called Inbox.

With Microsoft's recent acquisition of Yammer, it's clear social has arrived. And what goes for internal communication goes for recruiting as well, writes Josh Bersin, CEO of consultancy Bersin & Associates, in an article laying out the feverishly hot social recruiting start-up scene.

An article on women and work-life balance is stirring a predictable flurry of debate on the internet, but the piece is worth reading for those interested in remote collaboration as well as gender issues for what it says about "time macho" work culture and telecommuting.

Yes, mobile devices and social networks can produce a lot of distractions, and resisting that may be difficult -- as critics like Joe Kraus point out. But is this really a disaster in the making, or just another social evolution we need to undergo?

Executives may believe the hype that social enterprise tools boost transparency and cohesive company culture, but employees by and large aren't buying it, a new survey reveals. Instead frontline folks see social as just another form of empty rhetoric out of the C-suite.

Three common problems in project management today are complexity, linear working and poor management. Avoiding these leads to smoother processes, more-productive workers and better business practices, and distributed project management tools now on the market can make this possible.

You have probably heard about the rise of the independent worker and the impact of this trend on business practices. But your team is still all traditional employees, so this shift doesn't affect you, does it? Maybe more than you think, argues SAP's Julien Vayssiere.

Call it the gig economy, Generation Flux or Freelance Nation, but whatever you term the rise in independent workers, the trend is reshaping management. How can you ensure that the contingent workers on your team feel as engaged and appreciated as the long-term employees?

So your company is trying to be more social, leveraging new ways of communicating to break down barriers to collaboration and information sharing. Great, but what role should HR play in mandating or refereeing that process? IBM's VP of social software weighs in.

The online shoe retailer has big plans for its new downtown Las Vegas digs, CEO Tony Hsieh recently explained at Venture For America's Summer Celebration, where he laid out his vision of the community-focused, creativity-inspiring future of the office.

Microsoft's reported deal to buy Yammer for its enterprise social networking savvy isn't done yet, but the move -- despite what many see as a too-hefty price tag -- could make sense. Pairing Yammer with the Microsoft Office juggernaut could be a winner.

The tech giants have arrived in the online storage market and Dropbox and Box are in the midsts of parlaying their features into actual products--and, eventually into big-time companies. Heere's an inside look at the thinking behind a new product category.

With Google and Apple jockeying for position in the mobile markets, now probably isn't the best time to try and get the two talking. But that's just what I did with my 27-inch iMac and my new Google ChromeBook. And guess what? They get along famously!

Apparently, ProofHQ isn't the only successful British startup with a remote team across the pond. Ryan Carson, the founder of Treehouse, recently took to his blog to explain how he manages his widely dispersed team of 40 from his home in the UK.

As careers become more fluid, diverse and self-directed and more of us work flexibly at multiple gigs or projects, the hard lines between spaces for work, family and play are also becoming less stark. Behold the railway station/office and coworking space/daycare.

A new survey by collaboration tools company harmon.ie reveals that working while you're on the go is far from painless, finding that while mobile working is hugely common, remote collaboration tools are still slowing productivity, leading to errors and causing headaches.

A new study reveals that we're much more likely to choose others of the same gender to collaborate with and suggests that management should get involved to ensure teams are co-ed and chosen based on skills rather than personal comfort level. Is this really necessary?

At WWDC Apple unleashed FaceTime on the 3G network. While you would think a high-quality video chat service would be poison to consumers' restricted data plans, there’s another way to look at it: Compared to what mobile operators charge for voice, FaceTime is really a bargain.

A UT researcher spent several years asking Austin area coworkers and space proprietors to define what the movement was all about. The wide array of different and even contradictory answers he came up with is both intriguing and bewildering. Can anyone define coworking?

Have you seen the storefronts and billboards around the country for Critter, a social networking site that claims to connect “Your pets, 140 characters at a time.” While this is a ridiculous business idea destined to fail, other good ideas can succeed with proper business planning.

Email overload is the bane of knowledge workers' existence everywhere, as well as the impetus for numerous startups trying to perfect alternate collaboration platforms. But exactly how much inbox junk do we waste our time processing? Two new studies paint a grim picture.

In an interview, Terry Howerton, co-founder of Chicago-area incubator TechNexus, argues that rather than view big companies as innovation killers or community destroyers, it's time for some segments of the startup and coworking communities to grow up and leverage corporate America.

Companies and employees are finding unique ways to work in a world supported by mobile Internet access. We're seeing growth in coworking, and telecommuting in general, and Needle is a great example just how far you can push these ideas.