In the process of managing non-profits and startups, I’ve used many different online tools to better enable collaboration and communication in organizations. Through the years, I’ve tried many different tools, and now think I have a pretty good list. Please bear in mind that the three dimensions I’m optimizing across are ease of use, reliability, and cost. I am still looking for solutions in two major areas, and would love suggestions if anyone has them.

Website Registration: I’ve used GoDaddy and Namecheap in the past and they are both really good. If you have to be anonymous, try International Alliance Privacy Services.

Website Hosting: I’ve tried self hosting, as well as many different online hosts. If you have a good technical person on board, and REALLY have the need for something advanced (cron jobs, RoR, significant processing needs), try either dedicated hosting or colocation. For dedicated hosting, I really like Softlayer. For NYC based colocation, I really like Pilosoft. For most website hosting needs, all you need is a good shared hosting provider. I highly recommend NearlyFreeSpeech. They are extraordinarily cheap for low traffic websites, and I have yet to see them go down. I do NOT recommend GoDaddy, or NameCheap for web hosting.

DNS Hosting: Normally I just use my domain registrant, or my webhost, for DNS hosting. However, if I really need to be anonymous, I will use FreeDNS.

Email Needs: I used to use my own mail servers, but now, I completely rely on Google Apps. If you are a registered 501-c3 organization, you can also get GoogleApps Education and Google Checkout for free. Therefore you get the hyped up version of Google Apps, as well as free payment processing!

Actual Website:: I am now a total Wordpress convert. It started as a blogging software, but has grown to become a very very stable content management system. I’ve tried other CMS like Joomla and Drupal, but they are really really complicated to work with.

Internal Website: Mediawiki, the software behind Wikipedia, is great for internal websites. Any member can just click on edit and then add or remove information. I’ve tried other wiki installations, but none are easier to maintain than MediaWiki.

UPDATE 1: I’ve since tried out “Google Sites”, an app that’s part of the ever expanding Google Apps, and found it even superior to Mediawiki. Here you’ll also be able to easily manage spreadsheets and files!

Phone Service: For those who simply need a phone number, but don’t necessarily want to answer it all the time, I highly recommend the currently freeGrandCentral if you can secure an invitation. If you can’t secure an invitation, you can use RingCentral.

Fax Service: For a great fax to email service, definitely try RingCentral.

Conference Call Service: Unless you really need a toll-free number, I highly recommend FreeConferenceCall. There is a short message in the beginning of the call saying this is a service provided by freeconferencecall.com, but do you really mind?!

Forms, Spreadsheets and Documents: I really like GoogleDocs (part of Google Apps mentioned above) for simple spreadsheets that are shared between multiple people, i.e. financial projections between executive committee members. However, if you need to construct a nice looking form to accept information, Google Spreadsheet really sucks. I’ve found Zoho Creator to be absolutely amazing in that respect though. They even allow for scripted actions like automatically sending an email using data you just collected as acknowledgment. For example, at the New York Interscholastic Mathematics League, we use it to collect registration information.

Business Banking: I am starting to really like Chase Business banking. They have a pretty high monthly service charge, but one that can be waived if you open a business credit card and charge any amount on it each month. So simply have your credit card make 1 dollar monthly payment onto Paypal.

Newsletter: I’ve tried out Constant Contact and they are a great service provider. Unfortunately, they are also decently expensive (15 dollars a month) for organizations starting out. I’ve tried open source solutions like Dadamail and Phplist and they are both too difficult to use for any normal human being. If anyone knows of any good newsletter provider, hosted or not, I would LOVE to know.

Project Management This is an area I’ve tried many tools and just can’t quite get used to any of them. BaseCamp seems to be the best at the moment, but they are REALLY expensive. Also, I STILL don’t know the difference between milestones and tasks. Ever since Activecollab betrayed the open source community, it has started to really suck even as a tool. I have found Collabtive to be a really good imitation of BaseCamp, but not nearly as polished. So if someone knows of a good project management tool, I would love to know.

So there you go, my years of trying out different tools boiled down onto one blog post!

As many of you know by now, my team and I launched PeerDecision recently. The site intends to facilitate high school seniors’ college admissions process. We have included a lot of features that we think would have been useful when we applied to colleges ourselves.. but that was quite a while ago. For any HS students who chance upon this site, go check out PeerDecision and tell me what you think! I’d love to hear any feedback that you have (jack at peerdecision.com).

Now back to the main topic of this post. As I was researching for a blog post for PD, I came upon Princeton Review’s financial statements. Many would probably assume that they make money hands over fist from their books being pimped everywhere, and their classes costing a ridiculous amount of money. It turns out that in fact the opposite is happening! Princeton Review is in fact hemorrhaging money!

Above is a chart showing Princeton Review’s operating results per quarter since the beginning of 2002. The darker color bar is the result for the quarter, and the lighter color bar is the cumulative result since 1st quarter 2002. You’ll notice that in the first quarter of 2004, Princeton Review took a massive charge of 30 million dollars and can’t seem to get its act together ever since…. The reason for the 30 million dollar charge? This is from their official press release:

• An impairment charge of $8.2 million to write down the goodwill associated with the Company’s 2001 acquisition of Embark.com, Inc.; and
• A valuation allowance against the Company’s deferred tax asset in the full amount of the asset, which is $22.1 million.

So, essentially a REALLY bad acquisition at the height of the dot com, and delinquent taxes… Talk about a messed up organization! It’s my hope that peerdecision will never end up like that :)

If you use the internet regularly, I’m sure you’ve mistyped a URL at least once or twice, and come across a webpage with nothing but useless links. This is actually a phenomenon called “domain squatting”. Almost every single domain name that remotely sounds like a word, or even the combination of two words have now been squatted on. These scum of the earth assholes’ are actually making fortunes abusing the open internet model.

The man who owns the Internet

Kevin Ham is the most powerful dotcom mogul you’ve never heard of, reports Business 2.0 Magazine. Here’s how the master of Web domains built a $300 million empire.

(Business 2.0 Magazine) — Kevin Ham leans forward, sits up tall, closes his eyes, and begins to type — into the air. He’s seated along the rear wall of a packed ballroom in Las Vegas’s Venetian Hotel. Up front, an auctioneer is running through a list of Internet domain names, building excitement the same way he might if vintage cars were on the block.

As names come up that interest Ham, he occasionally air-types. It’s the ultimate gut check. Is the name one that people might enter directly into their Web browser, bypassing the search engine box entirely, as Ham wants? Is it better in plural or singular form? If it’s a typo, is it a mistake a lot of people would make? Or does the name, like a stunning beachfront property, just feel like a winner?

…

That’s right, the guy makes HUNDREDS of MILLIONS of dollars contributing absolutely NOTHING to society. In fact, he actually affects society negatively. As an internet entrepreneur, we often find our prospective domains squatted on. Not only is he filling the internet with junk, he’s preventing others from contributing to the internet. For a bloody spammer, he sure seems awfully concerned about his own privacy:

Registrant
KEVINHAM.COM
c/o Whois IDentity Shield
142-757 W. Hastings St., Suite #777
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6C 1A1

Someone should find his real address, and give him a serious beating.

As reported from Slashdot and BBC, Advanced Access Content System (AACS), the maker of HD-DVD’s encryption scheme has declared war on the blogging community.

It all started when AACS’s HD-DVD encryption was cracked and the compromised key began leaking onto the web. Instead of perfecting their technology, AACS decided to pressure various websites (including the tremendously popular digg) to remove the offending key. The online community revolted and the compromised key soon appeared all over the web.

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

Now AACS is promising legal and technical recourse for EVERYONE who posts the above key. (Read BBC’s account here, and slashdot’s account here). Hey, if they want a war, we’ll give them a war.

What is kind of amusing and sad about all of this is that an unrevokable crack has already been developed by the good folks over at doom9. Read more about it here.

I am storongly against DRM technology in general, and as these implementations become more and more draconian, it’ll only be a matter of time before the general public revolts too.

I started going to Starbucks regularly in the last two year and have begun to notice an increasing number of people lounging around in the back surfing the web. When I first encountered this phenomenon, I was extremely irritated at all these bums who just won’t give up their seats… sometimes for the whole afternoon. It turns out this phenomenon actually has a name, coworking.

Coworking is a movement to create a community of cafe-like collaboration spaces for developers, writers and independents.

Apparently, many of those surfing the web not only have jobs, but are in fact working! There are quite a few bloggers and .com executives who use cafes exclusively as their offices. Now that I travel pretty extensively, I am completely sold on the idea of co-working as well. Cafes are so homely and yet usually bustling with activity it’s really quite motivating. It’s also really difficult to beat the convenience factor. I can pull up to any city’s wireless enabled cafe, grab a coffee and immediately get to work.

Heck, I’m typing this blog entry from Baltimore’s One World Cafe! (BTW, it’s chocolate chai is really quite good.).