While Evernote is, at this point, still the more robust product when it comes to supported platforms -the company offers Windows, Mac, iPhone, Android and Blackberry versions in addition to a platform-agnostic "web clipper" - Springpad is starting to catch up. Along with the numerous enhancements launching today, the company now offers their own "web clipper" browser bookmarklet (previously in beta) along with an iPhone application for mobile note-taking and reminders.

Like Evernote's iPhone app, Springpad's app (iTunes link) lets you input text or snap a photo, but it also integrates a barcode scanner which takes advantage of the phone's camera in order to record and save a specific product. In addition, the iPhone app lets you browse items by type in case there's something you want to remember, but don't have it right in front of you. This is ideal for adding things like restaurants or movies - the sort of things that come up in conversation ("You really should rent this movie - it's great!") but are later forgotten as we return to our busy lives.

The Smart Web Clipper Knows What You're Bookmarking

Also new today is the web clipper. Now out of beta, this bookmarking tool lets you save anything you see on the Internet to your notes. This can be a product, a restaurant, a book, a movie, a recipe, a wine, a business or just a simple bookmark of a page which you can choose to annotate if desired.

What's different about this tool is the way it uses semantic technology to understand what it is that you're saving and offer relevant links to other information when you view it again in Springpad. For example, after adding a recipe, you'll be provided with "quick links" for actions like "add to shopping list," "search for coupons," "send to me" (an email option) and "print recipe." You can also add your own notes or personal tags (e.g., "March dinner party") if desired.

The App Store: Do Something with your Notes

Springpad users also have an included app store that helps you do things with the items you save. Although not listed among today's updates, this is arguably one of the company's standout features which should appeal both to new users or those switching from Evernote. Instead of just providing a searchable repository of notes and saved items, Springpad lets you add apps that help you actually do something with the items you collected. There's a wine notebook for those who want to record wine reviews and selections, a weekly meal planner for recipe snippers, a movie tracker for film aficionados, a travel checklist for vacation planning and even a blog post planner for scribes like us. And there are dozens more, too. Additionally, later this year, Springpad will launch an API for developers who want to build their own apps for this directory.

More of What's New: Sharing Tools & a Smart Quick-Add Bar

Other new features today include social sharing option which lets you post to Facebook and Twitter, a personalized email address for sending in thoughts, notes, itineraries and confirmation numbers, and a smart "quick-add bar." This bar lets you type in anything into Springpad's web interface to receive a list of suggestions from across a number of web services and the publicly shared notes from other Springpad users. If you find yourself always coming across suggestions from particular users, you may want to "friend" them on Springpad. The friending model used here is one that mimics Twitter's involving one-way connections betweens followers and "followees." This makes Springpad more social than Evernote without the pressures of having to accept or reject requests like on Facebook.

As of now, Springpad has a lot to offer those interested in a web-based and mobile note-taking application. However, you may find Evernote to be a slightly more stable service. We ran into a couple of slowdowns when using Springpad's website today. In addition, the suggestions displayed in the quick-add bar aren't as speedy as your typical search engine's autosuggest feature is. However, if you're looking to do more with your notes than simply collect them, Springpad is shaping up to be a viable alternative to Evernote. It's no longer a mere note-taking app - it's more of a digital assistant...and who couldn't use one of those?

Alternately, you can choose to download the CloudPrint driver to your PC and save the files to the CloudPrint server before you travel so you'll have them ready in advance.

With the new partnership between RIM and HP, the CloudPrint service will come to BlackBerry devices in the form of a software download which will be made available to BlackBerry Internet Service subscribers and BlackBerry Enterprise Server customers. Of course, CloudPrint includes support for the new BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0, also launched this week.

There's no word yet on how soon the technology will become available. However, at the time of writing, HP's CloudPrint site at cloudprint.hpl.hp.com has gone blank, stating only "thank you for your interest" along with a link to HP's home page. Perhaps that means they're making changes to it now.

As noted earlier, I had the opportunity to put e-business cards to a real-world test this past week at the DEMO conference. While I found a somewhat workable solution for sending out my contact info to others, I still collected a large stack of paper business cards from the people I met. These cards had to be digitized in order for them to be of any use to me. While people with administrative assistants are fortunate to have this tiresome data entry process handled for them, those of us without are stuck doing it ourselves. We can either sit at the keyboard for hours or use a scanner. Shouldn't there be a better way?

Surprisingly, there haven't been many options for getting our paper cards to digital format outside of using a business card scanner until now. While it's true that many people use these small, portable scanners to update their email or CRM contact lists, it's hard to believe that folks are truly satisfied with this solution.

Now, scanning in a card or two by themselves is not a big deal, but after returning from a trade show or conference, you'll often have a much larger stack of cards to deal with. What before was a quick few-minutes task now requires you to carve out a much larger chunk of your day. Since you've likely been out of the office for some time, you probably have much more pressing issues than dealing with those cards upon your return. That task goes immediately to the bottom of your priority list. Eventually the cards end up in a shoebox somewhere never to be seen again.

Today, however, we have a couple of new options for dealing with this situation. The first involves a company called Shoeboxed. Primarily a service which digitizes and categorizes receipts, they now do business card scanning, too. You can mail your cards to them (they can even send you an envelope!) and they will scan them in for you. The output is provided in a format which can be imported into Outlook, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Gmail, and most other contact programs.

More recently, Shoeboxed teamed up with note taking application Evernote to provide a solution that's a must-have for any active Evernote users. Through the new partnership, you're able to send any Shoeboxed content directly to Evernote where it then becomes searchable.

Option Two: CloudContacts

For those already ingrained in Evernote, the above is a great solution, but if you're starting fresh you might be interested in a single company instead of a combination service. A new option is CloudContacts, a service create by Allen Stern of Center Networks.

Like Shoeboxed, with CloudContacts you also have the option of mailing in your cards, either with your own envelope or the company can send you one.

If you work in an office, access to things like manila envelopes and stamps or postage machines is easy, but for home workers it often still requires an extra errand to the office supplies store and the Post Office. That's why when CloudContacts announced they would now accept emailed images sent from your camera phone, it finally became a reasonable option for me. This email service starts at $4.95 per month for 20 cards and $8.95 per month for 40 cards. To use the snail-mail CloudContacts service, it's an additional $29.95 to upload up to 100 business cards, $79.95 for up to 300 cards and $124.95 for up to 500 cards. You can go with just the email-only package, though. I did both.

Via Snail Mail

The postal mail option is really no harder than stuffing the cards in an envelope and putting them in the mailbox. However, there is a piece of paper you have to print out and put in the envelope, too, and that means you'll need to keep ink in your printer. (There's another trip to the office supplies store!) Again, unless you have a fully functional home office complete with envelopes, stamps, a printer, ink, etc., the snail mail option isn't ideal.

Via Email

Instead, taking a camera phone photo and emailing it is much easier and faster. You're provided with a special email address which you can add to your contact list in your phone for speedy access. As you're out and about, you can snap photos and email them right away so you don't end up with a stack of cards at the end of the day that need to be dealt with.

There was only one problem with the email option in my case. I'm an iPhone owner and the iPhone has a terrible camera. In fact, it's downright unusable with this service. But there is a workaround for that. It's called the Griffin Clarfi case for iPhone and it was recommended by numerous people I ran into this past week. This iPhone case comes with a built-in macro lens for close-up photography, allowing you to shoot what you want in incredible detail - like business cards, for example. At only $15 (US) on Amazon, the purchase was a no-brainer.

In the meantime, though, I had to use a regular camera to take the photos. Fortunately, CloudContacts let me send in a batch instead of one at a time.

Once the photos are received and digitized, you'll receive an email from the service (from Allen himself, actually). I asked if the personal attention I received was typical and surprisingly, it is. Allen says he believes that support can make or break a company.

The CloudContacts Web Site

When you log in to CloudContacts to see your data, the initial interface is no-frills - but in a good way. It's just a list of your contacts displaying their name, company, address, and phone number. A search box sits at the top of the screen if you need to look for a specific person.

Click on the view button for any contact and you'll be taken to a page where all their information is saved, including the photo of their business card. Also on this page is a Google map showing their address, links to their info on LinkedIn and Facebook, and, if known, their IM/chat networks are provided, too.

The data entered was entirely accurate. Apparently, that's because CloudContacts isn't doing OCR (Optical Character Recognition), or so reports VentureBeat. For data to be this accurate, it's easy to assume there are human editors on the other end, but Allen won't confirm this, calling it his "secret sauce." We're curious, of course, but as long as the data remains accurate, we suppose the magic can remain a mystery.

From any contact's page or from the main page of the site, you can click "edit" to add more details to the contact info including how you know them or other personal notes. There are also links for downloading an individual vCard or printing out a single contact's info.

Importing into Your Email

Again like Shoeboxed, you entire contact list can be exported into Standard CSV format, vCard format, Highrise CSV format, or in Yahoo/Gmail Contacts CSV format. Doing so provides a file which you can then import into your preferred program. Since Gmail merges duplicate contacts upon import, you can continue to use this option every time without worries of creating multiple versions of the same contact. Other programs may vary.

In Gmail, you're also able to tag your contacts upon import by adding them to a group. I've begun to use this option to group people by business and/or where we met (CES, DEMO, etc.). But with CloudContacts, I can't categorize or tag subsets of my contact list for selective import into Gmail. That would be a great feature. (Perhaps it will be added later - Allen seems open to feedback about the service.)

Conclusion: Worth It

When the iPhone case arrives, I'll probably turn off the snail mail service - I doubt I'll ever use it again at that point. But overall, the CloudContacts service was useful and worth the money spent - especially since I was able to get a backlog of cards into the system quickly. Now if they would just do an iPhone app too, I'd have a complete solution!

Image Credit: Andrew Turner

FriendlyFavor nicely integrates with your AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, Plaxo, and Outlook address books, so that you can immediately start to ask your friends for help with that big move next weekend without having to establish a new contacts list on FriendlyFavor. Whenever you ask for a favor, FriendlyFavor will send out emails with the details. These details can include pictures, deadlines, information about how to best respond, and other details.

Offer Services

However, while asking for things is definitely a major part of the FriendlyFavor experience, you can also offer your services. Maybe you have some tickets to a ball game this weekend that you can't use and would like to offer to your friends, for example.

Cash or Karma

Of course, not all favors come for free, so FriendlyFavors lets you reward your friends with good karma, but also with electronic gift cards, or a donation to your favorite charity through TisBest.

Overall, FriendlyFavor is is a fun idea, and we really like the fact that you can repay favors with charitable donations. While its focus is on asking for favors, the tool is also quite flexible. There is no reason why you couldn't use it to organize a party or ask your friends if they want to play golf this weekend.

With the new SynchroLive Communication platform, the service is now more scalable while keeping all live communications synchronized, no matter whether you're sharing audio, video, files, or web pages. This was one of the areas where Dimdim stumbled in the past. When we used it here at RWW for sharing our desktop with our readers during our testing of Chrome, the audio and video weren't matching up. That problem is, supposedly, no more. (We'll have to do another live demo and find out!) Says the company, the platform now makes it possible for five audio streams to be recorded, where before Dimdim only supported recording one.

The platform also allows for the new co-browsing feature to work. With this, a presenter can share their web browser with viewers who can then also be made presenters in order to browse along with the original presenter. The co-browsing allows for scrolling up and down, but does not track mouse movements, so it is not as good for using your mouse to point to an element of a web page. However, when you just want to share material on the web with a group - say, for example, a professor teaching remote students, it would be a good solution.

Open Source Dimdim, "Liberty"

Also launched today with the release of Dimdim 4.5 is the launch of "Liberty," the Open Source Community Edition of the new commercial hosted version. Liberty's complete source code will be made available under a GPL3 license with no limit to the number of attendees, meetings, or mashups that can be created. Liberty is also available as a downloadable VMWare Virtual Appliance.

The Open Source version also integrates with other web applications, including:

• Zimbra: Dimdim now offers a free zimlet for Zimbra's open source email system;
• Moodle: Dimdim is integrated with version 1.9 of Moodle's Course Management System;
• SugarCRM: Dimdim is integrated with the leading open source customer relationship management system,
• Claroline: Dimdim is embedded within with the collaborative learning environment.

More Enhancements

Those who have used Dimdim in the past will notice some subtle UI changes in the newest version including a smaller top frame and revamped menus on the left. Drop-down arrows have been added to those menus for easy access to files and shared web pages, too.

In the future, Dimdim will also allow for skinning changes and templates. Because Dimdim's service-oriented architecture is composed of a handful of different services (screen sharing, audio streaming, video, etc.), the platform makes it possible to use customize the look and feel of the Dimdim interface and create a template just for your needs. If you're only sharing web browsers, for example, you could turn all the other features off. The templates created by Dimdim users could then be shared with each other. Dimdim says these new features will be available sometime early next year.

In addition to the no-cost Open Source version, Dimdim will continue to offer a free version for meetings with 20 or fewer people. Dimdim Pro 4.5 starts at $99 per year for unlimited meetings plus video chat.

Zimbra is already available on a host of mobile platforms such as Windows Mobile, Palm, Nokia, and Blackberry. Their latest support for the iPhone 2.0 platform will help to increase their market share. While the iPhone has progressed with its support with email, documents and more, Zimbra is looking to make it easier for its users to stay synchronized regarless of the platform.

Enteprise Capabilities

Zimbra Mobile for iPhone 2.0 software provides users with enterprise class features including OTA synchronization of e-mails, calendar and contacts. Zimbra Mobile for iPhone 2.0 software will allow iPhone users to maximize their business functions on the iPhone. Additionally, Zimbra Mobile for iPhone will enable OTA photo-sync, so photos associated with iPhone contacts will sync with the Zimbra address book as well.

Zimbra has provided numerous ways for uses to access the Zimbra Servia via the iPhone including:

• IMAP / POP - Standards based access to email only
• Connectors - Use Zimbra's Connector for iSync (Mac) or Outlook (PC) to sync address book and calendar; combined with IMAP email it is a completely native UI solution. (Network Edition only).
• Mobile Web Browser - Zimbra Web Client is optimized for Safari on the iPhone; you can take advantage of iPhone's unique browsing capabilities to access your email, address book, calendar and more.

The users interface for accessing Zimbra's services via Safari on the iPhone is gorgeous and efficient. Zimbra makes great use of the screen real estate by providing a plethora of options right from the start. The new interface for the iPhone gets even better with a navigation menu at the top of the screen and important information right below it. This minimizes the number of finger tapping you'd normally have to do with the previous design.

Off to a Good Start

Zimbra is now approaching the same area territory Google is dominating at this point. However, the new Zimbra Mobile for iPhone 2.0 is looking to be off to a good start with more than enough features available from the iPhone to keep its users happy. Users can test Zimbra Mobile for iPhone by heading to Zimbra's Hosted Demo page.

Developed by Insophia using Django and Python, Privnote allows you to send a message and have it be immediately deleted once it is read. Spotted by MakeUsOf, simply head to the homepage of Privnote and type in your message. Once you're done click the "post it" button to grab a link to send to a recipient. Once the message is read or the link is clicked, the link is no longer accessible. You can also receive notifications for when your link is clicked, which will include the ip address of the reader.

The best reason to use Privnote?

"If you send a note and suddenly regret having done so, you can click the link yourself which will destroy the note and prevent the receiver to read it."

You can't do this with email, IM, or Twitter.

Have A Little Fun With Privnote

Privnote provides security in numerous ways. You'll notice that all links generated begin with "https". This means that the link has a certain level of security associated with it to prevent eavesdropping. However, I wouldn't recommend taking the service too seriously and start sending FBI classified files. But for secret love notes, messages, and meeting locations, Privnote would be a cool and fun service to use.