There has been a great deal of news of financial institution failures. Many banks have been swallowed up by larger institutions and mergers seem to be occurring almost on a weekly basis. Unfortunately, the troubled banking situation has opened up a door for Internet scams and phishing attacks.

Google officially announced the release of a their new web browser on Monday, 9/1. The new browser – which Google is calling Chrome utilizes the Webkit technology, the same open source technology used by Apple’s Safari browser.

Sitemeter – a popular web site statistics counter and tracking tool, has apparently made some changes which in effect, have rendered sites running their tracking code as dead to Internet Explorer 7 (including their own site – sitemeter.com). A nasty “operation aborted” popup appears and the site will refuse to load. No word yet on […]

As you can tell from some of my previous posts, I’m into productivity tools. I recently found a site that helps solve a problem – keeping track of my stuff. Have every tried to remember something you heard, saw on the net, or viewed on television and didn’t have a place to jot it down? Remember all those Google searches you were going to do once you got back to your computer? Of course not, you forget them all.

We’ve all gotten them. That email that a co-worker or friend forwards to us about about a sick child who wants to break a world record for receiving the most postcards, or perhaps you’ve seen the email urging you to quickly put your mobile phone number on the “Do not call” registry or else you will start receiving telemarketing calls on your cell.

If you like to be mobile with your computer, then you probably have used public Wi-Fi or perhaps even a pay-per-use Wi-Fi hotspot. If so, then you should be careful about how you read email while connected to one of these public access points. Most public Wi-Fi providers do not require you to make a secure connection to their wireless router. This leaves your transmissions easily readable by eavesdroppers. You can protect yourself with a very simple change to your web browsing behavior.

Have you wanted to find an online document editor with a few more formatting features than Google Docs? Check out Adobe’s Buzzword as an alternative.

Adobe has released Buzzword; an online word processor with an intuitive user interface and some additional features that make it worth taking a look at.

Have you ever needed to have a document signed, but didn’t want to bother with faxing or mailing the document to the recipient. Try using EchoSign. This service will help you get that document signed using the Internet.

Here is a cool tool to help keep you organized and productive. Try Stikkit.com for some intelligent post-it notes. When you create your Stikkits, they try to extract keywords to help identify what you are trying to do. A meeting, note, todo, etc…

In a previous reader poll, I asked folks whether or not they did online meetings. A few of you said yes, but most of you answered, “What is an online meeting?” I’ll try to clarify online meeting for you and introduce you to a tool that makes online meetings easy to do and at no cost.

An online meeting can be defined as a session where you and at least one other person are collaborating on a project in real time via your computers.