Online WhiteBoards (OWB) aka collaborative whiteboards are a new class of web tool, which let remote users interact over the web in real-time using a shared virtual whiteboard. I have reviewed 5 of them and believe, that whilst they are not yet fully mature, OWBs could become valuable support tools for virtual brainstorming or open innovation activities.

Many company executives are now questionning the value of 'traditional' forms of teambuilding such as executive retreats or staff games (e.g. Executive team building: stop wasting their time). Recently I ran across a New York technnology company GoCrossOffice pioneering a more novel approach....

With such an ever-growing list of collaboration platforms and applications of all shapes and sizes I thought it would be useful to gather together five of my favourite Collaboration Software Directories in one place.

Mindquarry (an Open Source Collaborative Software Supplier ) have developed a visual resource: Periodic Table of Collaboration covering 60+ elements over 4 categories: People (Roles), Productivity Software, Collaborative Software and Methods.

Rapleaf is a neat application which takes an email address and returns an online reputation dashboard based on the owner's participation in online social networks etc. I interviewed Dan Scudder, Product Marketing for Rapleaf, to find out more.

BBC News (7 Feb 2006) report that Google is to integrate its popular e-mail service with its own instant messaging, known as Gmail Chat to allow users to chat and send e-mails from the same web browser window. The report also gives the current stats on the subscriber bases of the 'big 3' in Instant Messaging:

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.

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.

‘Social bookmarking’ is the name given to the family of technologies which began to appear a couple of years back to allow you to share your favourite internet sites with others and to ‘tag’ them with sets of keywords known as a ‘folksonomies’.

Maurene Grey in Collaboration Loop January 03, 2006 reports that two years after being signed into law, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have released their report to the US Congress on the effectiveness of the CAN-SPAM Act.