Tech roundup for mediation road warriors

This month’s resource roundup gathers together tech tips and resources for mediation road warriors:

• Evolution of Security – The TSA blogs. Who knew? I’ve come to like Bob the blogger quite a bit. He’s earnest and direct and helpful. And there are surprisingly good little tips interspersed throughout, even some entertainment value. If you want to see what screeners can see of you beneath your clothes, check out Bob’s post on fully body image scans.
• KeepYouSafe.com – A free “online safe deposit box” for keeping private copies of important information, such as travel documents.
• Oh, Don’t Forget – This site does jut one thing: Sends text messages you request, where you request, when you want them to be sent. Time Magazine named it one of the 50 Best Websites of 2007. I can see its use on and off the road.
• Airport security tips for traveling with a laptop – I’ve kept my business card taped to the bottom of my laptop for ages, and here are a few other tips. Did you know you should make sure your laptop is fully charged?

Odds and Ends

I’ll be giving a speech on Making Mediation Your Day Job and doing a book signing at the annual meeting of the NH Conflict Resolution Association on the evening of June 4. If you’re an NHCRA member, you’ll get a mailing with the details. And if you already have the book, bring your copy and I’ll inscribe it. Hope to see you there!

Recover your lost cell phone with YouGetItBack.com

So many gadgets, so many opportunities to lose them.

Now enterprising YouGetItBack.com, a company based out of Ireland, is offering services to “mediate” the return of your wayward CrackBerry and many other phones, MP3 players and mobile gadgets. Even laptops.

They offer two services you may find helpful, one free and one requiring a single low-cost investment up front:

• Lost and Found Service: You purchase a security tag that’s placed on the back of your gadget. If an honest person finds it, they go to the designated website and use the security tag to notify YouGetItBack of their find. The company then notifies you. Tags run $9.99 US.
• Cellphone Superhero: A “clever piece of software that allows you to lock your phone remotely” if you lose it. It’s free and in beta.

They also offer to let you back up your cellphone data [Read more]

Skype meeting tips

As more and more of my business calls are international, I’ve found Skype an invaluable tool for keeping the phone bills reasonable and being able to see eye-to-eye with the person at the other end of the phone line.

So I appreciated Chris Garrett’s Tips for Better Skype Meetings. For example, Chris suggests, [Read more]

Wild Apricot: Association management software for ADR groups

Every ADR association board I’ve ever served on has struggled with this question:

Is there an affordable service for managing our website, member registration and database, communication and event registrations – that’s also easy to use by both the association and the members?

Too many of the solutions are cumbersome to learn, require a huge investment of time and energy that many volunteer board members just don’t have, or assume a level of geekery that’s just annoying. And some of them are ridiculously pricey for what they deliver and the energy it takes board members to make it work well.

Maybe there’s some hope on the horizon. [Read more]

Tech in the mediation room: colorado divorce resolutions

A while back I profiled Colorado Center for Divorce Mediation in my article, Technology in the Mediation Room: Innovation from Colorado Divorce Mediators.

The Center’s Lawrence King recently wrote to update me on their latest technology investments and innovations, including a switch from desktop workstations to laptops that also dock in the mediation rooms, dual monitors, and upgrades to more sophisticated software. I remember when I used to sniff at dual monitors as overkill…until I started using them and realized how much they help my efficiency.

You can read the details [Read more]

Simple software for organizing your business: a good time to try Backpack

I’ve written before about my fondness for 37signals’ free and low-cost web-based software for managing projects, client records and collaboration. I use Highrise and Backpack daily to manage my ADR business and keep myself on track and efficient during very busy client months like one I’m in now.

If you’ve been thinking about trying Backpack, now is a good time to take the plunge. 37signals posted this notice today: [Read more]

10 must-have tech tools for the wired mediator in 2008

What tech tools are most worth the investment of your time and money to support your quest for a thriving mediation practice in 2008? Here’s my list.

Some are free, some are close to free, and a few are an investment. Most are pretty simple to set up and use. I use all of these almost every day and consider them central to my mediation business success: [Read more]

Simplify how you handle email inquiries

A side effect of a thriving mediation practice is an increase in email inquiries, especially when you have a healthy web presence as part of your marketing strategy. I’ve seen my email inquiries triple in the last year and the increase shows no sign of abating…nor do I want it to!

But the increase made me realize that typing responses fresh each time was a monumental misuse of my time. So when I hired a VA in 2006, one of my first projects was getting her help in creating a series of pre-written email messages for my most common inquiries. [Read more]

Scan, Copy and Fax with Your Camera Phone

Geoff Sharp has just written about ScanR, a free online service for scanning, copying and faxing documents from photos you take with your phone. Says Geoff,

“At the conclusion of a long facilitation day recently I sat there and copied down the (non electronic) whiteboard and took the flip chart paper back to my desk where I laboriously produced a Word doc that I then emailed to the group for refinement of their ideas and comment. It probably took me 3 hours easy.

If I had known about scanR I would have taken pictures of the whiteboard and the butchers paper and sent those to scanR from my camera phone, in my case a Treo.

Seconds later I would have received an email with copies of my images in PDF format for me to send to the group.”

ScanR converts digital photos of documents, flipcharts and whiteboards into PDFs, re-mastering them in the process so they’re much easier to view and print. To use ScanR, [Read more]

Free Teleconferencing Is As Easy as Dialing

Eons ago I offered up some ways to teleconference for free. Since a year and a half is a long time in the tech world, it’s time for an update.

Of the three free teleconferencing services I wrote about back in January 2006, all are still in business and still offering free teleconferencing. But I don’t use any of them anymore because I was looking for more features without more cost. For general free conference calling, FreeConference is still a useful service and my faculty department uses it for our telephone meetings.

I look for these features in a free teleconferencing service: [Read more]

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