ReadWriteWeb

It seems as though the minute the iPad was announced, innumerable light bulbs went off as developers and entrepreneurs everywhere came to the same realization: "We could totally use this device as a digital whiteboard!" Indeed, a search for the word "whiteboard" in the App Store returns a whopping 170 iPad apps.

Although the device's 10-inch screen may not compare to a full-sized, physical whiteboard, it can be quite handy to use a virtual whiteboard with team members remotely, and the iPad's form factor suits itself quite well to exactly that.

We have written before about MindTouch.com, the open source alternative to Sharepoint and Salesforce discussion and collaboration tool.

The Web has enabled a growing number of us to work remotely and even collaborate with one another from distant locations. While online meeting services like GoToMeeting, Fuze and WebEx are effective at letting us communicate with one another, they don't quite compare to the experience of actually being there.

What if you could go to the office without physically leaving your home? That's the idea behind telepresence robots, a few of which have become commercially available in the last year.

FuzeBox wants to make telepresence a less proprietary, boxed-in experience for businesses. To do this, they've begun integrating Fuze Meeting, their cross-platform online meeting product, with high-end telepresence systems like Polycom, Tandberg and LifeSize.

This move lets companies hang onto their legacy teleconference solutions while easily extending their functionality onto smart phones and tablet devices.

There were a few updates to Google Docs last week. Discussions, a new feature we covered previously, received some improvements - most notably, the ability to see how many times a document has been viewed. Google Docs also added a new font, made it easier to restore deleted sites and the spell checker gained an additional feature.

I guess it's collaboration day at ReadWriteEnterprise. Earlier today we looked at Jeff Jarvis' thoughts on collaboration and left you with some questions to ponder.

So here are some more things to think about. Gartner has identified five common myths about collaboration.

If you're like most modern professionals, you conduct a lot of discussions over email. We don't often realize it as we go about our day-to-day, but the information contained in some of those emails can have some long-term value to the organization.

Even with a system of stars and labels such as what Google Apps users are accustomed to, important emails can easily get buried several pages deep. In the event that an employee leaves the company, that knowledge can disappear with them.

That joke about how your smartphone can "even make phone calls" is pretty cliche by now. But it raises the question: why hasn't anyone done anything to improve the state of voice calls on smart phones? After all, we're carrying around powerful computers in our pockets, but the technology involved in phone calls on smart phones hasn't evolved much.

One company trying to change that is Thrutu, an application that adds real-time features to Android calls. For example, using Thrutu you can send money with PayPal from within a call, share and view a photo or "doodle" on a shared screen. It adds a number of possibilities for collaboration using mobile phones.

Today, Thrutu announced that an API that will enable developers to build new features or integrate existing applications with its platform. You can request access here. Use the reference code RWW1 for priority access.

Jive Software, the company that has been one of the leaders in collaboration software, has acquired OffiSync, the company that makes social media add-ons to Microsoft Outlook. You gotta love a company that starts out its corporate overview by saying "old business processes and technologies suck" right on its website.

Chatbox is a free OSX application that adds project collaboration features to Dropbox. It adds the ability to leave comments on or chat in real-time about about particular files and folders in Dropbox. Everything is stored in Dropbox, so you don't need to register an account with Chatbox.