In a couple of special electives I have taken in my last term on campus here, I have come across a whole bunch of interesting online resources to help accomplish various tasks.
It is brilliantly surprising as to what one can perform simply by being aware of the right sets of tools for the right kinds of tasks. Some of them might be old and heard of, but should you read this and chance upon something similar and interesting, please do leave a comment.
- Bill Monk – http://www.billmonk.com is a website that allows for you and your friends to spend all the money you want respectively on collective purchases. It keeps track of who spent how much so that people are then able to pay the actual amount at the end of the month, rather than sit and calculate how much each person owes the other.
Sure, a cleverly written excel sheet should help do the trick, but when this feature is offered on the go and someone else is able to do it for you without you having to write VB macros to program it, it is the shiite! - Gliffy – http://www.gliffy.com is an online diagram software that will help jazz up your presentations beyond your wildest dreams. I learnt the hard way in B-school that in some cases, good content is not the only thing that will do the trick for you to make a sound impact on the audience and that anyone who is sitting through a presentation also needs to be aesthetically catered to, even if that need of theirs is merely subconscious.
As a result, evolution towards the corporate ho life led to the quest for newer graphs and better diagrams and more jazzed up looking stuff that was brilliant to see even if it was utter garbage, used only to confound rather than clarify. Gliffy is the answer to all your prayers and then some! - Aardvark – http://www.vark.com – most of you that keep yourself up to date in the social media space would’ve heard of Aardvark to some extent. I don’t have enough patience to sit give a detailed explanation about what this site does, and so I’ll just provide you with an illustrative example.
I am moving to Gurgaon in April this year to begin working there, and I have been scouting for convenient and affordable accommodation options there. Google searches, searching for blogs with relevant content and other such queries led to more advertisement than content.
However, Aardvark let me sign up for an account and let me post my question regarding “good accommodation options for a person wishing to stay alone in Gurgaon”. Of course, once I’ve got a preliminary set of answers to my query on this website, I can further distill it down to more specific details such as proximity to my new work place, proximity to shopping centers and to the metro station, availability of car parking, rent range, furnishing and so on.
I am hoping that my questions get answered and that I get a good place to stay in a short span of time, especially considering the fact that summer will begin in full force and the NCR is not the most hospitable of locations to be in during peak summer time.
This isn’t too different from Yahoo answers in theory, but the interactivity, response time and the ease of use and convenience afforded by Aardvark beats Yahoo answers hands down.
If you do stumble upon interesting websites that offer certain unique features, please let people know about it too. It adds to what I’ve learnt is called the ‘one-sided network effect’. Heh.
myp2p.eu for the millions who don’t get sport channels at home and want to catch a match live. If you have a stud internet connection, this site will make sure you don’t miss any relevant match being played at any given time.