Google Calendar

Of course, figuring out who has what time available is a critical piece of the puzzle. So something like Google Calendar could be very helpful in schedule meetings and conference calls and such. The advantage to Google Calendar over traditional calendaring systems is that it is cross-platform and cross-organisation. The users aren't tied into a Notes or Exchange server.

Google Calendar

However, there's still an open problem here. Given a moderately large number of users (i.e. more than three) finding a common free time across calendars is not a trivial task. Therefore, it would be really useful to have a tool that could examine several peoples calendars to find a common free time. One difficulty in solving such a problem is that in larger groups, not everyone will have the same calendar application. Such a tool needs to work across applications. Some sort of common micro-format or API would be critical to such a tool.

CiteULike: A free online service to organise your academic papers

CiteULike: A free online service to organise your academic papers

CiteULike is a tool that's been generating quite a bit of interest amongst my colleagues and myself. It has been quite useful as a personal tool and as a collaborative tool. I've been able suggest background papers by just saying "Go to my CiteULike page and click on the subject tag".

Browse my CiteULike page

How to check professional relations of scientists?

It would be nice to have a place to go and check all the professional relations of scientists. Who's working on what project? Who knows who? What are the inter- and intra-institutional relations? How can we contact others? What languages are people working in? Where are their publications and who's reading them?

Jigsaw is a place to build up buisiness contacts and relations, it could serve as a model of how to build up contacts in the science world.

Directory of Business Contacts and Company Information from Jigsaw