Franz Jachim's blog

Yes, I remember the cloudless days, when I started to work digitally. Digital work at that time was centered around a quintessential tool, the personal computer.

In her best-selling book "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can´t Stop Talking", the author, Susan Cain, challenges the suitability of collaboration as a means to produce great creativity outcomes or good decision making.

While Leo and Bernhard attended the Nextberlin conference, they tweeted about Refinder using the term "cloud productivity". What did they mean? I want to give it my interpretation:

"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts …."

(William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 1623)

Working in a collaborative online-environment has some resemblance with a stage play. Here´s the observation:

Lot of buzz this week around the arrival of Google Drive. The battle for cloud synch and filesharing heats up. While some commentators missed new functionality in Google Drive (compared to other contenders), others pointed to the fundamental difference between Google Drive and services like Dropbox: search.

A while ago I presented you the initial set of Refinder´s bulk operations functionality. In the meantime, the range of bulk operations got extended. In this post I´m going to focus on the new bulk function "Relate to a thing".

Bulk operations summarize all activities, which you can apply to multiple Things, like deletion or the assignment of multiple Things into a collection. 

To quickly recap how this is done:

When we participate in a meeting, our brain registers much more than just the spoken conversation. Next to verbal expressions, a good, often significant part of the communication happens in nonverbal manner. We have learnt to draw conclusions from the body language of our counterparts, their facial expression, posture, gestures or the signals sent through mere eye-contact. We decode a smile and flushing cheeks, the tone and volume of voice and plenty of other signals, through which we "read" others. In a meeting, everybody communicates, even without saying a single word.

In previous posts we told you about the interaction between Refinder and Dropbox. In short: once you connect a Dropbox folder with Refinder, all your Dropbox files become Things in a collection of your choice. From here, you can share, link and comment them. Beyond that, you can not only search for Dropbox files, but even search within your Dropbox files through the Refinder search functionality. 

But what about non-textual files, like images?

With Google Drive a further contender is entering the market for cloud-based storage. The appeal of carefree data custody and ubiquitous, multi-device access attracts consumers, not just for their private needs, but increasingly in their business roles. Services like Dropbox have lowered the "save-to-cloud" barrier dramatically. 

In the hectic rush of day-to-day work, employees need constant awareness of what is going on across their workplace, projects or areas of interest. For Refinder, this meant to provide a central landing page  (https://www.getrefinder.com/home/), which furnishes quick access to a highly informative and insightful snapshot of ones momentous business activities.