telecommute

Yes, the long anticipated Firefox 3 Web Browser is finally here. It became available yesterday and according to Information Week it’s fast!

There are many enhancements made to the Firefox 3 browsers. Besides the increase in speed, there is easier navigation, super simple bookmarking, an awesome address location bar, download manager, improved full page zoom capabilities, text enhancements, instant website identification, and many more. Actually, according to Mozilla, there has been 15,000 enhancements.

The download of the new version of Firefox has been incredible. For the first 24 hours, the download was at 4%. Quite impressive.

So, if you are a huge Firefox fan as I am, you can download the new version here

Carrot Korea connects Korean customers to English tutors in the U.S. and Australia and provides opportunities to practice English conversation skill with native speakers.

CarrotEnglish.com is hiring part-time people to help teach English to adults in Korea. This is slightly similar to the job at Idapted.com that I wrote about a few weeks back.

From what I understand is that the students read in English and you correct them on their pronunciation. They are looking for early morning and morning hours from 5am to 11am due to the time zone difference.

They pay monthly by Paypal.

So if you are interested in this kind of work, check here.

Are you looking to obtain a new, catchy domain name for your business or website? Now, may be the time to get one because a new domain extension has been released, the .me domain. With all the “good” .com, and .net domain names already taken, now may be the time to latch on to a catchy one with the .me extension.

During the so called “landrush”, domain names are open to the public and anyone can apply to purchase one. After the landrush ends on June 26, 2008, the domain names will be auctioned off.

I wonder if help.me, love.me, bite.me, or byte.me is taken?

If you want one, it will cost you $49.99 for a year from GoDaddy. That’s with a minimum of a 2 year registration.

On Friday, June 6, 2008 episode of ABC’s The View, a segment on scanning business receipts came on that I thought would be useful to some of you telecommuters out there.

As telecommuters, we can oftentimes take tax deductions for home office expenses. (Of course, check with your accountant first).Things like computers, ink, printer, fax, paper, postage, computer supplies, and others. Well, there is a neat little device and program, aptly called Neat Receipts, that will help you maintain and analyze your receipts virtually without having to keep all that PAPER!

The device was demonstrated on The View and it seemed really simple. One thing I liked about it was that it was very small and seemed portable. It seemed like it would be useful for the business traveler that has to fill out those dredged expense reports.

The feature I really liked about it was that it comes with software that allows you to organize and analyze your receipts. You can export statements to Excel, Turbo Tax, Quicken, and QuickBooks. You can also scan business cards.

I really like what this product claims to do. In honor of their segment on ABC’s The View, they are offering a $20 discount using the coupon code found on their site. How cool is that?

The price listed today on NeatReceipts.com was $199.95 but you can also purchase Neat Receipts at Staples, Amazon, Costco, Target, Buy.com, Office Max, Best Buy, Sky Mall, Office Depot and a couple of other places.

You can read more about it here.

Did you happen to catch the Today Show on NBC today? Well I did and they ran an over 4 minute segment on the Four-Day work week and telecommuting!

Stories were presented on employees being hit hard by these rising fuel costs – some saying that they are using up to one week’s pay out of the month’s pay for gasoline! Unbelievable isn’t it?

Because of these soaring costs, some businesses are taking notice and offering employees telecommuting and yes, some are offering a four-day work week. One company mentioned in the segment in particular, Lathem Corp is offering offers telecommuting, van pools, and four-day work weeks.

Benefits of telecommuting mentioned are increases in morale, loyalty, productivity. Some studies suggest that some companies are experiencing 10%-20% increases in productivity from telecommuting.

Matt Lauer interviewed John Challenger, CEO of Challenger, Gray and Christmas, the nations leading employment and consulting firm.

You can catch the full video here

Google sites is a new free website creation tool that Google claims can be used for such things as sharing information on a secure company intranet to connecting with family members to collaborating on a team project.

You can choose website themes and can edit the website just like a document. Attachments can be uploaded as well, links can be added, images can be inserted, and documents can be embedded. Pages can be added through the create pages feature. There are different pages with different features. Pages such as announcements, lists, dashboards, and others. It’s single simple click creation with no HTML needed.

There is site sharing and you can decide who and how many people can view or edit the site. In other words, the website can be public, semi-private, or private. You can allow access to view or edit the website by email addresses. In other words, you can allow multiple people such as students of a classroom or members of a club to submit and edit content.

Check out Google Sites today!

It’s a sad day for the users, writers, and of I am sure the Founder of Brijit.com today. They are closing their doors due to lack of funding.

If you are not familiar with Brijit.com, they are/were a company that provided Abstracts of articles from authoritative sources such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Salon, ESPN The Magazine, and many others. The abstracts were about 100 words which would summarize and provide a brief commentary on the article at hand. One benefit of this is that it would give the reader the overview of the article and help them decide if they wanted to read the full article.

Writers would get $5 for each 100 word abstract that they wrote. For someone that loved to read articles and write these short abstracts, it is a nice work at home writing gig. All abstracts published through May 15th will be paid to the writers.

According to Jeremy Brosowsky Founder & editor-in-chief, Brijit, he is still working to find a way to be able to relaunch the service. Sure hope they do as I am sure this was quite a disappointment to the loyal readers and the writers who enjoyed writing these abstracts as well as the income it provided.

You can keep up with Jeremy and Brijit at their WordPress blog named Brijit.