Wednesday, LatPro held its first video conference! We used ooVoo.com's video conferencing application to hold our fourth quarter planning meeting (usually held on site in Fort Lauderdale, Florida).  It was a grand success and a great relief for those used to traveling to Florida, not to mention a significant cost reduction for the company! You will see in the screenshot below that my PC would not do the 3-D effect that you can see on the ooVoo homepage (but still might with a little tweak). Here's what it looked like:

So

I have not set foot in the LatPro office for over a year. Living 2,000 miles away in Colorado came as quite a shock considering the perfect nine minute commute I previously enjoyed. Furthermore, LatPro moved to a new office in Plantation, Florida last week which I have not seen at all. And yet, despite the recession and level revenue, I see the company growing stronger.

How is this possible? Telecommuting from 2,000 miles away (for health reasons) is challenging, but it has had its silver lining. Our team has always been far flung geographically with key people in Delaware, Florida and Guatemala. But when I could no longer walk into the office and roam around at will, I felt significantly disadvantaged, disconnected and out of touch... at first.

I'm on twitter now too -- fashionably late according to Toby Dayton. Until recently, I thought twitter was just foolish but somehow in a very short matter of time, I have completely reversed my opinion. It took me a few years to start blogging and I generally prefer to arrive late to a technology party. So, I still consider it a bit early for twitter in spite of Toby. In fact, I am intrigued by my own reversal.

The most important reason, is perfectly articulated by Joel:

If you read blogs, give Google reader a spin. I switched from Yahoo's reader and found Google vastly superior. Among other nice tricks, it allows you to categorize your blogs which lets you read just the ones you're in the mood for...

• basecamp is a phenomenal project management and collaboration tool.
• clicktale.com is an alternative to focus groups
• 
• drupal.org is a great publishing system and powers this website. 
• google reader is great for reading rss feeds.
• editpadlite makes an editor far better than the windows version.
• npr.org is radio that speaks for itself, no?