Filed under: Business, Developer, Productivity, Web services, web 2.0

The clock just turned 5pm, and if you’re like us, everything you’ve worked on all day has instantly evaporated from your mind (yes, this just happens, we don’t need alcohol). Luckily, we left all those papers on our desk, the scribbled whiteboard, and a monitor-o-sticky notes to help us figure out where we left off.

5pm by QG | Software is a web-based project management suite that provides us the tools needed to get back on track at 8am.

The underlying features of 5pm are fairly standard in the project management world. You create projects and assign them to one or more users or groups. The project can have a deadline, a client, and a priority level. Once you have created a project you can add items such as tasks and files. Tasks can be assigned to individual team members and emails can be sent to the group when tasks are finished. etc…

To help visualize your project over the course of its life, there is a timeline feature that shows your projects and tasks in a “Gantt” style chart. In addition, there’s a reporting section that can help determine who is completing their projects on time and who isn’t.

Continue reading 5pm - Project management on time (so you don’t have to be)

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Filed under: Business, Developer, Productivity, Web services, web 2.0

The clock just turned 5pm, and if you’re like us, everything you’ve worked on all day has instantly evaporated from your mind (yes, this just happens, we don’t need alcohol). Luckily, we left all those papers on our desk, the scribbled whiteboard, and a monitor-o-sticky notes to help us figure out where we left off.

5pm by QG | Software is a web-based project management suite that provides us the tools needed to get back on track at 8am.

The underlying features of 5pm are fairly standard in the project management world. You create projects and assign them to one or more users or groups. The project can have a deadline, a client, and a priority level. Once you’ve created a project you can add items such as tasks and files. Tasks can be assigned to individual team members and emails can be sent to the group when tasks are completed. etc…

To help visualize your project over the course of its life, there’s a timeline feature that shows your projects and tasks in a “Gantt” style chart. In addition, there’s a reporting section that can help determine who is completing their projects on time and who isn’t.

Continue reading 5pm - Project management on time (so you don’t have to be)

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Filed under: Windows, Productivity, Freeware

Few things are as frustrating as having to repeat yourself over, and over, and over - like typing the same thing all the time. It’s a pain in the butt. Fortunately, KA Type In is the hemorrhoid relief you’ve been looking for!

Here’s what we like about it: 1) it’s under 1MB to download 2) it has a portable mode 3) it’s free 4) it’s simple to use…and last, but certainly not least, 5) it’s a huge time-and-effort saver.

Install it, move your mouse to the side of your screen, and the Type In windows slides in to view. Single click on one of your snippets and it’s sent to the active application. But wait, it gets superior! You can code fill-in fields and be prompted for values to input on-the-fly. This is an awesome way to make all your code snippets portable - take Type In with you on your flash drive and use them in any editor, even a browser-based HTML editor like FCK.

And get this: it does auto-completion with a single keystroke. Set up a snip, type the first few letters, and hit ctrl+; and Type In does the rest. Take that, inefficiency!

It’s a 6MB process that uses almost no CPU, and it has so many possible applications that anyone can benefit from using it. Windows only, which makes us a tiny sad - this app is so sweet, everyone should be able to use it!

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Filed under: Marketing and advertising, Nokia Corp. (NOK), Advanced Micro Dev (AMD), Business of sports

This post is part of a series on celebrity spokespeople who ended up doing serious harm to the brands they were hired to promote, or vice versa. See how we rank the 20 top spokesperson fiascos.

Before Michael Vick, quarterbacks were (mostly) tall, slow white men who passed the football, handed it off or got creamed by pass rushers. Vick changed the game by combining the strength, speed and agility of a running back with the arm and savvy of a quarterback. With it, he turned the traditional also-ran Atlanta Falcons into a contender. How could any company in the sporting goods field not sign such a sure-fire hall-of-famer as a spokesperson?

And sign him they did. Nike (NYSE:NKE) created a “Michael Vick Experience” ad campaign. He appeared on the cover of the 2004 version of Electronic Arts‘ (NASDAQ:ERTS) Madden football. The sponsor money rolled in, and when the Falcons signed Vick to a 10-year, $130 million contract, he had reached the pinnacle of sports success.

Then came the expose. News reports tying Vick to a dog fighting ring, then naming him as the pivotal figure in a horrendous gang who raised killer dogs in a kennel on Vick’s property and buried the losers nearby. By the time Vick was taken into custody, his brand was so fouled that companies couldn’t back away from him fast enough. The only sales of equipment with his name on it was to dog owners who used them as chew toys.

In a fiasco, everyone involved suffers. I just wish the everybody here hadn’t included innocent dogs.

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Filed under: PepsiCo (PEP), Marketing and advertising, Scandals

This post is part of a series on celebrity spokespeople who ended up doing serious harm to the brands they were hired to promote, or vice versa. See how we rank the 20 top spokesperson fiascos.

Ahh, Madonna. I was a teen in the late 80s and so she had me right where she wanted me: hanging on her each lyric, willing to be titillated, shocked, or otherwise addicted to her poppy music.

She had PepsiCo (NYSE: PEP) right where she wanted it, too, as a spokesperson for the would-be-edgy soda company in 1989. Pepsi and Madonna produced a very long and affecting commercial using her “Like a Prayer” song, in which Madonna watches the eight-year-old version of herself in a video dreaming of being a pop star one day.

The commercial was extremely well-done and well-received (it still gives me goosebumps today, despite those awful late-80s hairdos; that is, until the real video for “Like a Prayer” came out. It took “suggestive” to an entirely new level, what with the obvious flirtation between Madonna and a statue-cum-priest, the stigmata on her hands, and the burning crosses and racial tensions.

Pepsi pulled the ads and canceled all its appearances with the singer immediately, though I wonder if the company couldn’t run the ads again now? If you can get past the salacious nature of the rumored affair with A-Rod, Madonna isn’t almost so controversial today, and now the commercial seems sweet.

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Filed under: Marketing and advertising

This post is part of a series on celebrity spokespeople who ended up doing serious harm to the brands they were hired to promote, or vice versa. See how we rank the 20 top spokesperson fiascos.

Okay, to begin with, I should be totally honest: I’m a definite Kirstie Alley fan. I’ve watched her since the beginning, since she walked into Shelly Long’s shoes on Cheers and took the show to a whole other level. I watched as she began to mature gracefully in Summer School and the Look Who’s Speaking movies, and even stayed with Veronica’s Closet for way longer than I should have. Over the years, I watched her bloom, blossom, expand her horizons, umm…

Okay, yes, I also watched her gain a lot of weight. Somewhere between the overripe evil of Gladys Leeman in Drop Dead Gorgeous and the impressive avoirdupois of Fat Actress, Kirstie Alley definitely put on some serious pounds. When they started shooting her in low light with dark clothes, I had my suspicions; when Fat Actress debuted, there was no longer any doubt.

Still, I was rooting for Kirstie, and I was happy when she got a gig working for Jenny Craig (a division of Nestle, VTX:NESN). While I’m not sure that weight loss is for everyone, I have no doubt that, for Kirstie Alley, it meant the difference between being gainfully employed and using her royalties from syndicated TV shows to buy herself an island and a bunch of muumuus. I hoped that the marriage between Kirstie and Jennie would thrive and be, if not fruitful, at least healthy.

For a while, it was a happy arrangement. Kirstie lost 75 pounds, had a highly-choreographed appearance on Oprah wearing a bikini-esque article of clothing, and generally basked in her apparent comeback.

Then the hammer fell, as Jenny Craig decided to let her go. Given her still-voluptuous dimensions during the Oprah show, some sources, including the National Enquirer, assumed that she had been fired for gaining weight. Jenny Craig spokesman Scott Parker was vague about the reasons for her departure, but was swift to note that Kirstie was still using the company’s maintenance program.

Another possible reason for Alley’s dismissal might have been her association with the Church of Scientology, which has its own detoxification and weight-loss plan. However, regardless of whether Alley left because she was gaining weight or because L. Ron Hubbard told her the secret to slimming down, she was still out the door.

Her replacement? Plus-size diva and former Pizza Hut pitchwoman Queen Latifah, who has pledged to lose 5-10% of her body weight. As long as she stays away from the Scientologists and the stuffed crusts, this should be a match made in heaven!

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Filed under: Developer, Blogging, Productivity, Social Software

SweetCron is a bit of self-hosted lifestreaming software from Yongfook, the creator of opensourcefood. It’s kind of like a hybrid of Tumblr and Friendfeed. While SweetCron hasn’t officially been released yet, Yongfook is already using it on his own blog, so we’ve a pretty clear idea of what you can do with it: feed in photos, videos, status updates, bookmarks, etc, each with a distinct look, so a reader can distinguish content types at a glance.

If this sounds a bit like Tumblr, that’s probably because part of it uses the Tumblr API. SweetCron is customizable and extensible via new PHP classes, though, and it lives on your own domain, so you have greater control over the data you’re feeding into it. The basic theme can be seen on Yongfook’s blog, where he’s testing it out, but he says you’ll be able to develop your own themes through a template editor. If you’re interested in SweetCron, sign up to be notified when it launches.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

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