Tech Toolbox

Now people who like to talk to themselves have another way to avoid looking crazy. Jott is a start-up tech company that encourages users to pick up their phones and jot themselves an e-mail.

No matter where you are–stuck in traffic or waiting for a meeting to start–you can call a toll-free number and dictate a message up to 30 seconds long. The audio file is transformed to text and returned to you as an e-mail or text message. Why would that be useful?

The two former Microsoft employees who founded the firm say people get good ideas at unexpected times. They want to give them a way to capture those thoughts. Users may also want to Jott appointments and other routine tasks, they say. The messages can also be sent to family and friends, and even translated to postings in  popular web services.

So you wrote the perfect memo to a client—and then realized YOU WROTE THE WHOLE THING IN ALL CAPS? If you’d rather make the text whisper than shout, there’s a quick way to fix it.  TextOpus is a free web-based text-filtering tool, designed in Poland by 15-year-old Tomasz Klekot. Just paste in the problematic text, choose your preferred option and voila! The result is perfectly formatted prose. The tool can transform all caps to lowercase or make lowercase text all caps—perfect for those times you need to emphasize your point. The app also lets you strip the HTML from text, as well as hash, hexadecimal, and encrypt text.

Need to send a large file? If it’s too large to send via email, here are some options to consider. Most of the services offer both free and premium accounts, so check around to find the one that best suits your needs.

Mega Upload lets you send files up to 500MB.

Send Space lets you send files up to 300MB.

You Send It lets you to send files up to 2 GB.

MailBigFileallows you without registration send files up to 100MB. MailBigFile also claims unlimited bandwidth, but since they cap it at 25 downloads per month, there are indeed limits.

DropSend lets you send files up to 1 GB.

LeapFILE lets you send files up to 2 GB.

zUpload lets you send files up to 500MB.

MyOtherDrive lets you send files up to 2 GB.

MediaFire lets up send files up to 100 MB.

The Commercial Real Estate Calculator  lets you guestimate the maximum loan a lender will make on a property. You can get an estimate based on both the property type–apartment, retail, industrial, office, hotel/motel, owner-user or other–and factors including the property’s income, expenses and debt coverage ratio factor required by the lender.

But you can get even more details with the Chartered Financial Group Commercial Real Estate Calculator.

The comprehensive Windows software suite includes ten analysis tools and an integrated financing program for commercial real estate professionals. 

The best part: both calculators are free.

It’s a common problem. Clients sometimes enter ‘!’ instead of ‘@’or double periods ‘..’ between the domain, or inadvertently spell .com as ,con.

But Rancho Santa Margarita, CA-based Melissa Data claims it has a solution: Email Object, a product for verifying email addresses. The customizable API tool can be used to verify email addresses in databases, address books and spreadsheets, or from a website form.

It’s designed to remove invalid characters, as well as verify, correct and update the domains of email addresses in batch or at point-of-entry to reduce undeliverable/bounce-back emails and increase response rates.Email Object is a corporate solution. At $1,295 for a stand-alone version, it’s not for home use. But you can get a free trail.

Ribbit, a Mountain View, CA-based start-up, creates a single online phone that consolidates all your voice lines. Calls from your cell, landline or VOIP phone such as Skype can all be routed to your computer—actually, to any Internet-enabled computer.

In short, Ribbit’s Amphibian transforms your computer to a phone. It lets you make calls as well as store and retrieve voice mail. It also broadens your contacts by matching the names in your computer-based address books with data from online sources like MySpace and Facebook. You can register for a free account on the Ribbit home page, which will be activated as soon as the product is released.
 

Writing is a lot like do-it-yourself home improvement projects. It’s a lot harder than it looks.

In the not so distant past, busy executives had secretaries and personal assistants to type—and correct—their hurriedly written prose. But now everyone is pretty much on his own, free to send an on-the-run email to the most important client without even a cursory spell check.

So does it really matter that he wrote bread when he meant breadth—or used 500 words to say what could have been more effectively written with 200? Yes…it does.

Start-up Gramlee claims it has a solution: web-based while you wait editing, In fairness, it may be more like while you sleep editing, because it can take up to 24 hours for the company to transform your tenuous text to polished prose. It costs about a dollar to edit an average email, $10 for a six-page double-spaced report, $50 for a 35-page white paper.

It’s no secret  green construction and design is in demand. But finding sustainable materials to use in building projects can still be a challenge. Enter Ecolect, a six-month-old web–based company that wants to be a single source of information and news about eco–materials and practices.

The site was founded by Matt Grigsby, l, and Joe Gebba, r, two Rhode Island School of Design graduates. They said the created the site to answer three questions:  where to find sustainable materials, what makes them sustainable, and who else is using them and how.

MapsAlive transforms static floor plans and maps to interactive images with pop-up photographs and captions . Waitsfield, VT-based AvantLogic Corp., creator of the web tool, boasts that  it’s “the next best thing to being there.” Real estate companies can create interactive floor plans, site maps and locator maps to give clients in remote locations a better sense of space, explains CEO George Soules. “Clients can walk through property as they would in person ,” he said, adding that zoom and pan controls give clients the ability to focus on areas of interest. The company is offering free one-year memberships that allow users to create, edit, and publish interactive map tours.

One of the challenges of working remotely is feeling disconnected, especially when it comes to sharing and collaboration. But the Jing Project promises to solve those problems. According to TechSmith, the company that developed it, Jing is “the always-ready program that instantly captures and shares images and video from your computer to anywhere.”

 Snap a picture or record video of anything you see on your desktop, then instantly upload it to share in email, IM or blogs. Right now, Jing is not really a product. It’s just a concept TechSmith is evaluating “to see if it can improve everyday conversations.” You can help it decide by trying Jing, free of charge.