Around the Web: Feed the Hungry, Feed Your Brain

Free Rice

Donate your free time to a good cause. Freerice.com tests your vocabulary skills and, for every word you get right, they donate 20 grains of rice through the UN World Food Program to help end hunger. It's fun and addictive to watch your rice bowl fill up! Give it a try - in just a few minutes of playing, you'll help people in need and learn a few new words in the process.

Doodle It!

This one came from one of our very own OfficeArrow members, MariC who shared this tool in a discussion regarding meeting scheduling. Doodle is a free online service that helps coordinate large groups of people by providing polls for making group decisions, like scheduling a meeting or choosing a meeting location for example. All you do is create a poll, forward the links to the participants and then watch how they all vote online. Pretty cool, huh? I can only imagine the number of ways this could come in handy - personally and professionally. Try it out the next time you have a decision to make that involves a large group. Everyone will get their say and you'll have an easy way to track it.

The Future of Work

So, I stumbled across this awesome site the other day - called Zoho - and it's really the coolest thing! Basically, this site provides free online applications. They have just about everything you could possibly want - all the standard stuff you find in the MS Office Suite (like word processing, spreadsheets and presentation tools) but also so much more (like database tools, invoicing tools, planners, wikis and e-mail service). But what makes this really cool is that, while using Zoho, your documents and data are stored securely online on their servers. This means you can access your things from any computer, anywhere as long as you have an internet connection. It also allows you to easily collaborate with others (privately) and even provides the ability for real time collaborative editing. This is a really cool concept and one that I think is going to catch on hugely in the future. Check it out and see what you think.

Creative Gift Ideas

With Big Huge Labs, you can make cool things from your digital images - upload photos to flickr and turn them into motivational posters, magazine covers, trading cards, jigsaw puzzles, calendars, whatever! This could be used to make some really creative and customized gifts for clients or employees. Make a company calendar or put your boss's face on a motivational poster for fun. Take a look at what this site offers and consider it for birthdays and holiday gifts.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Need some inspiration? Read the text of one of my favorite speeches ever, given by Steve Jobs at the Stanford commencement ceremony in 2005. It's a truly beautiful analysis of what life is really all about. Jobs is a fascinating and brilliant man, and he shares some wonderful insights in this speech. I keep this bookmarked on my computer because I like to read it often. Let me know what you think.