ReadWriteWeb

If you have to jointly author a spreadsheet with a colleague, what is the first thing that you do? Email it back and forth. This can be painful, particularly as you try to keep track of your partner's changes and hope the emails transit back and forth across the Internet. Add a third or fourth person, and things get worse. Luckily, there is a better way, and a number of Web-based service providers have stepped up with tools to make spreadsheet sharing a lot easier than sending attachments.

We've written about a few of them, including Longjump and Hyperbase (one of our products of the year for 2008), but I have tried a bunch others, and will show you what is involved and how they stack up.

This week Cisco released one of the first business apps designed specifically for the iPad 2: WebEx for iPad 2. Also, Smartsheet launched its first iPad app and VMware released yet another app for the iPad.

But is the iPad really a good business productivity tool? Read on.

In the world of risk management, it's all about probability. But often, it takes considerable time to get an answer to important questions. But as of late, risk management is seeing a transformation, in most part fueled by the advent of real-time communication.

The most recent example comes from Crowdcast, which has entered into a partnership with SAP's risk management group.

Let's say you want a list of every Fortune 1,000 CEO in the United States, along with a picture and contact information.

You can look through Google. Top page results may help a bit. But to get the granularity you need, top page results can only go so far. What's the best way to go about discovering and collecting information that is so often scattered and fragmented?

Crowdsourcing works but you need a process and a way to organize the information.

Why didn't we think of this? Project management startup Smartsheet released a new core feature this week - integration of Amazon's outsourcing service Mechanical Turk. The Smartsheet interface will now let you set up Turk research jobs that thousands of anonymous workers around the world will split up and perform quickly for a very low price.

In the example the company provides on its product page, the user publishes a series of small work orders for research on the names and profiles of top CEOs around the country. That kind of drudgery would take hours to perform, but with Mechanical Turk it can be done on the cheap, quickly.