For the upcoming Labor Day weekend, I thought it would be appropriate to share a cartoon of our favorite office worker Dilbert, who really doesn’t like to labor.

Dilbert clearly illustrates why so many people use Qipit rather than buying a scanner. It costs less and can be used with your digital camera or camera phone, which you probably already own, and it is much easier.

I hope you have a fun and safe Labor Day Weekend.

~ Conrad

How do you send a fax, when there are no phone lines, power plugs or fax machines?

Ever since fax machines became a staple of business in the 1980’s this problem has faced business travelers, long haul truckers, construction site workers, emergency responders, sales professionals, anyone on a remote job site and people caught in an emergency situation after a natural disaster.

To solve this problem using existing wireless networks, you can take the brute force approach, and build a specialized piece of equipment such as a portable facsimile machine. The problem with this solution is that it is expensive and still a little bulky. One example of this approach is the Greta (aka PM-70), which uses GSM networks and costs almost $1,200 plus a monthly recurring wireless data plan.

Our approach is to use a device as familiar, cost effective and ubiquitous as the mobile phone in your pocket. Why carry any more than you need? Plus your mobile phone makes phone calls, sends texts messages, probably can check email and does a lot more. Even making a call with a portable fax machine can be a little awkward unless you are calling flipper.

LG Dare (3.2 Mega-pixel camera phone) from Verizon Wireless
Dimensions: 4.1″ x 2.2″ x 0.5″ (Weight 3.76 oz)
Cost: $199.99 plus monthly data plan

Of course there is a lot going on behind the scenes to allow you to use your camera phone to fax documents anywhere in the world. A traditional or portable fax machine has a very controlled environment to create scans. Qipit does not have this luxury and must compensate for uneven document illumination, shadows, glare, motion blur and noise. Qipit must also dewarp (or straighten) and crop the document to eliminate unwanted background information.

But you don’t need to know all that, nor do you probably care. All you need to do is take a picture of your document then send it to Qipit (copy@qipit.com). Include the fax number in the body of the message, if you want, type your fax subject in the subject field. It’s that simple, no need to buy any more equipment or download any software. Best of all Qipit is free and works any time and any where, just like you.

How to Send a Fax Using Your Mobile Phone

If you want to learn more about faxing with Qipit, just check out the post I did a while back, Four ways to use Qipit to Send a Fax for Free .

There is always an elegance to simplicity.

~ Conrad

This is the second post of the series on Visual Expression (Also see The Power of Visual Expression)

Back in March, at the South By Southwest Interactive conference, yes this was the conference with the now infamous interview of Mark Zukerberg by Lacey Peterson, where twitter helped, well you know…..

Also checkout this graphical recording of the interview by Marilyn Martin if you missed it, click the image to see a full size view.

Now back to my point. At SXSWi, I picked up some information on Dan Roam’s new book “On the back of a Napkin”. For those of you who are not familiar with Dan, he is an author, speaker and thought leader in the field of visual thinking. In his recent book, Dan explains how simple drawings can express ideas that can be universally understood. Dan believes that anyone with a pen and a piece of paper (Dan likes to use napkins as he believes they are less intimidating) can convey the most complex business ideas, as well as communicate better with customers, vendors, and employees.

In his book, and in the video of his workshop below, Dan draws on twenty years of visual problem solving combined with the recent discoveries in the field of vision science, to lay out simple tools to take advantage of everyone’s innate ability to look, see, imagine, and show. In his workshop, Dan relates a simple example which takes us back to the days of elementary school. As kindergarteners we all knew how to draw and visually express ourselves. This is something I discovered to be true when I visited Westwood Elementary school a while back. Children at that age show no inhibition towards putting what they are thinking onto paper. But Dan points out, if you visit that same kindergarten class ten years later, hardly anyone will say that they can draw or use visual images to describe a problem. Something in the education process happens to push us away from visually expressing our ideas, even though it is so fundamental to how we think.

Here’s a video of Dan Roam’s workshop, from a visit he did to Google’s Mountain View, CA headquarters, this event took place on May 27, 2008, as part of the Authors@Google series.

The video is about 55 minutes, but I think it is worth taking the time to watch. In the workshop, Dan lays out our 6 visual pathways:

• What
• Where
• How
• When
• Why
• How Much.

Dan shares simple techniques to enable anyone to visually express even the most complex of ideas, but don’t just take my word for it. Here is a video interview by the Wall Street Journal of Tim Armstrong an Advertising Executive at Google. In the interview Tim explains how he uses a simple pen and paper as a visual tool to explain their advertising model, rather than a complex Power Point slide deck. His methods are exactly what Dan preaches in his book and workshops.

Dan’s techniques along with a pen, your writing surface of choice, and Qipit to easily save and share those ideas, make for a powerful combination. What do you think?

~ Conrad

This is the first part of a series of posts on Visual Expression. (Also see Dan Roam’s Technique’s to Visually Express your Ideas)

Through out my life I have always been a visual thinker. Concepts seemed to solidify when I could see them, whether it was in an illustration, graph, chart or video animation, for me visualization is the quickest way to learn. Professionally my career has taken me to Asia, Europe and Africa, far from my roots in Texas, and when faced with language and cultural barriers my universal translator has always been a pen and a whiteboard, flipchart or a piece of paper, along with some visual expression of a concept, problem or question. People universally, seem to understand pictures and illustrations, charts and graphs, maps, timelines and flowcharts.

Visual thinking is so fundamental to how we think, that when the tools of visual expression are used can understand what our ancestors where trying to express over 32,000 years ago. This illustration is from a cave in Lascaux, France and is among the oldest known drawings in the world.

You can clearly see a bull running in a herd, and then you can imagine the animals that existed and how fundamental they must have been in the life of early man.

This got me thinking, if I was to express my life today what would a visual expression of my environment look like, there weren’t any cave walls close by so I used a writing surface more familiar, called a whiteboard.

The visual expression of my environment shows a computer, my mobile phone, buildings, construction, and a herd of cars (aka traffic). Of course the caveman was a much better artist than me. Please share a visual expression of your environment. We will store them here for future generations to ponder.

Check back next week for part two.

~ Conrad

Recently the Dumb Little Man blog made a back to school post, which included Qipit! The post got me thinking how close we are for school to be back in session. As I live in downtown Austin, home to well over 100,000 College Students (not including faculty), back to school means everything downtown gets more; more cars, more people, more everything! So in the spirit of reducing the need for students to leave the dorms, apartments or libraries, I thought I would share a few more online services.

First things first, pick the best professors. There is nothing worse than getting a professor who doesn’t inspire you to learn, or one who you can’t even understand. Checkout PickaProf to see who everyone thinks is the best. There is even a PickaProf facebook application.

Online Books

Rather than buying paper books and having to go to the store, get your books online. Read them on your computer, and print the pages you need.

Questia is the world’s first and largest online library of books and journal articles. It even includes textbooks. Yes there is $14.95 per month fee, but it is much more complete than Google Books, this is much cheaper than purchasing your textbooks.

Google books is Google’s answer to Questia, it is free, but it is not as complete. Not sure why they just didn’t do a deal with Questia, but that have to do something with all that money.

Online Study Guides

Pink Monkey and Spark Notes offer free online study guides, book notes, book reviews, online chapter summaries, and analysis for literature.

Get Organized and Stay Productive

DailyLit manages your class reading schedule by sending you regular installments of your latest reading by email (on your PC, mobile, etc.). Helps keep you on track, so you don’t have to cram.

Remember the Milk is an easy to use online to-do-list for all of those activities and projects students always have.

Drop.io is a very simple way to share files online with other students. It is really quick and easy and does not require others to sign-up, nice!

Timebridge is a tool that helps you coordinate meeting times with others for those projects you get assigned. This tool makes it easy, rather than playing middle man with 4 or 5 others.

Online Reference Resources

BBC Languages offers resources in multiple languages including Spanish, Mandarin, English, French, German and more – resources include MP3 downloads, tutorials, and testing.

Ninjawords is a free online dictionary that emulates three ninja characteristics – they’re smart, they’re accurate, and they’re really fast. Plus it is just cool use the word ninja in a blog post!

Refdesk is a great all around reference resource. Interested in learning the value of a dollar in Mongolia, how to make soap by hand, what happened on this date 20 years ago, which are the top 100 US newspapers, and the definition of “omniscient” – it’s all here.

Wikipedia is the mother of all encyclopedia Wikis. It is a great place to start your research. Just don’t copy what it says, because your professor certainly uses it too! He may have even written or contributed to the article.

Other Lists

Here are a couple more links to some of the better comprehensive student resource lists I have stumbled upon over the years.

100 Insanely Useful Web Tools You Never Knew You Needed

Top 50 Web 2.0 Tools for Info Junkies, Researchers & Students

And of course, Qipit has a facebook application called Qipit NoteShare, specifically designed for helping students share class notes. If you have more student friendly services to add, please share the knowledge.

~ Conrad