It is still January and I think many of us made the resolution to “be more organized” for 2010. Organizing your personal information is important, of course, but we’ll address your business documentation here. However, many of these services and tips will work for home!

Pixily is a service a friend of mine has signed up for. There are a variety of plans but I’ll tell you about the one she signed up for because she is a solopreneur without tons of paperwork to deal with. Pixily is a document scanning service that lets you send in your paperwork and they will scan and store it for you and then send the hard copies back. For $14.95 they will scan and store 50 pages which includes a prepaid mailer and return mail. Monthly storage for up to 1000 of these scanned pages is $4.95. So, she is having them scan ALL of her existing necessary paperwork and store it. If she needs more than the initial $14.95 she will request another envelope. Then she can access anything she needs from “the cloud”.

Some of you will have concerns about privacy and safety of the hard copies. She isn’t sending anything like a birth certificate or other crucial documents and isn’t worried about the other stuff. She wants that pile of paper GONE and doesn’t have the time to scan it on her flat-bed scanner.

Google’s new “Gdrive”. It isn’t really called this but a little advertised new Google feature that is rolling out over the next several weeks will allow you to store a ton of stuff on Google Docs. Not just documents but music, photos and more. You can read about it in detail here but if you are looking for an incredibly affordable offline storage site, this might be the spot for you. You get 1GB of storage free (if you convert documents into Google Docs formats it is unlimited) and then it is 25 CENTS per Gigabyte per year. This means 20GB for $5 per year(remember when computer hard drives were 1GB?)! Individual files need to be 250MB or less.

Finally for an ongoing resource for all things organization, head over to Unclutterer.com (prepared to spend awhile at first because there is a lot going on). There are great categories like Paper, Workspace of the Week and Cable Clutter to get you started. The site has a very active forum, as well, where you can connect with other people for suggestions and input on your particular organizational demon.

Photo courtesy of Unclutterer

1. Everything goes mobile. Video will be the way most information is conveyed via mobile phones because it is easier to view. And mobile internet will completely change the game because of the number of mobile phones in use. (Do thumb through a few of the slides on the Morgan Stanley link we’ve provided).

2. Education continues to evolve. Online learning is becoming increasingly accepted and professional. MIT offers almost all of its course syllabus and materials online now for FREE. Fast Company is offering its online 30-second MBA series. College graduates continue to wonder why they went into so much debt for a piece of paper that doesn’t ensure, well, anything.  DIY “Edupunk” is the new wave.

3. Entrepreneurship increases. Previously downsized workers who are discouraged by the current job market and lack of security in corporate emmployment are creating their own businesses at a record pace. Ready to help them are sites like Escape from Cubicle Nation and Career Renegade.

4. And thus, Outsourcing increases. Because there will be so many downsized workers converting to running their own consulting, coaching, teaching, designing businesses but will not have the administrative and other types of support, you will see continued growth in the need for Virtual Assistants/Professionals.  

5. Cloud computing. We will dowload fewer and fewer programs, but will, instead, use them from “the cloud”.

6. Sites, news and blogs will become “hyper-local“. Instead of turning to CNN or NBC for our news, we will consult more sites for hyper-local information about our communities.  

7. Stories (and thus, advertising) will be told in a variety of media (video, real print, online text, events, IM, audio, ebooks, etc.) Books will include codes for short films online. Films online will have tie-in ebooks, etc.

8. Lean and mean. Everything will get smaller and leaner (from businesses to our homes and cars) and we will continue to befuddle designers and engineers with loving things that are ‘good enough’ in quality so long as we can get them where we are and fast.

9. Augmented reality. Point your iPhone at an actual restaturant and watch reviews from Yelp pop up on your screen. Point it at a constellation and it will overlay a picture of the part of the sky you are blocking with your phone and give you details about what you are seeing. There are many examples of augmented reality online.

10. Real time (aka “nowism“). Google Wave allows you to collaborate in real time. Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook allow you to stay up to date on what your contacts are doing right now.

Have a Happy (and safe) New Year everyone!  We look forward to working with you in 2010!

Photo via Creative Commons by Wonderlane.

Add another new term to your computer vocabulary: The Cloud. If you haven’t seen it already, you will. The Cloud, in its most basic form, is the ability to compute almost entirely using Web-based programs. Part Open Source/part Web 2.0, The Cloud often frees up hard drive space, gives you a broader range of computing options, and are free or low cost programs. If you choose to, you can manage almost all of your needs, including file storage, without using hard drive space for much of anything but your operating system. If you choose Linux, an increasingly popular choice for more knowledgeable users, your OS won’t take up much space either.

What’s available on The Cloud? You can choose Open Office Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters full movie

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Down and Out in Beverly Hills trailer or Google Docs vs. Microsoft Office, Gimp instead of Photoshop, Mint instead of Quicken, multiple options  instead of Adobe Reader. A vast number of you are already using The Cloud for email, using Yahoo or Gmail instead of Outlook. Want to listen to music without storing it all on your computer? Try LastFM, Rhapsody or imeem. Photo storage? Flick or Photobucket. And lastly, you can store your regular document type files at Box or My Other Drive.

I checked in on Chris Brogan’s blog and discovered this post Dance of the Dead movie

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. So I went over to check out Zoho.com

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Hostel movie download . Zoho is similar to Google Docs but is much more robust in what it offers. I remember seeing Zoho mentioned awhile back when Google got rid of its Notebook feature and recommended Zoho as an alternative, allowing you to import directly. Then it fell off my radar. It’s back on!

Zoho’s user interface is more appealing than Google’s, you can import directly from Google Docs, it has the Notebook feature that Zoho doesn’t have. Like Google Docs, it has cloud versions of Microsoft’s Word, Excel, and PowerPoint as well as an integrated document management system which looks much more like your Window’s Explorer (aka: tree) than Google’s does. They also have a planner, group chat, a wiki application-all of which is free. If you have higher-end needs for a business, for a free they also offer the equivalent of MS Access, MS Sharepoint, Quickbooks and more. Despite the fee, you not only get a cheaper deal than buying MS Office and other software, you also get secure online storage in case your hard drive fails and ongoing upgrades. For entrepreneurs and small business owners, this savings can be significant.

As cloud computing becomes the norm and not just for tech geeks, Zoho should be a site you check out for the long-term. Let us know what your experience is with this and any other great Web 2.0 applications we might be missing out on.