A team of one is sometimes best. It might sound like heresy but sometimes the most effective way to produce something is not through collaboration. Collaboration is best for tasks which cannot be fully achieved by a single person – if a job can be completed best by one person then to collaborate to do it will only make it worse.

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Newsweek report in Smoother Surfing (Jan 30) on a exciting new set of technologies known as Ajax which underpin applications such as Google Maps and promises to deliver desktop-like usability, smoothness and performance to web browser-based applications. The potential of web-based applications which are equal in usability to their desktop-based counterparts could re-energise both the ASP (Application Service Provider) and web-based application provider markets and threaten Microsoft's long-standing dominance of office-based applications.

Enter flash-based email

In a previous article, The virtual road warrior software checklist, I wrote about using web-based email to ensure that you stay connected whilst you are on the road. However the reality is that most forms of web-based email represent a compromise on the kind of email service you enjoy at home or at work.

SearchCIO.com, 2 Feb, reports on the emergence of sophisticated speech recognition software which can highlight words that can indicate trouble on the line such as ‘confused’ and ‘cancel’. The software can also monitor in real-time telltale changes in the pitch, volume and timbre of a customer's voice which indicate hostility or rising anger.