Stay Productive With Mobile Services

These eight mobile tools can help you manage your business when you?re on the go.

Meeting with clients. Visiting suppliers. Presenting at trade shows. You have a lot of work to do outside the office. Fortunately, staying productive when you're mobile is getting easier, thanks to Web-based services.

Each of the following eight mobile tools can help you more efficiently manage some aspect of your business while on the go--without your having to fire up your laptop. Many of the services are free. Like any software or service, however, these tools each have some limitations, and may not appeal to everyone.

Short Message Service (SMS), or text messaging, isn't just for teenagers anymore, and Teragram'sMyGads.comis a prime example of SMS's benefits for business users.

MyGads.com lets you create a Web-based repository of data, such as employee and partner phone numbers, shared calendar events, and wiki-style information about your company's products or services. You can set up multiple "Gads"; each Gad is a set of text or HTML-formatted information, such as a calendar or a phone list.

Using natural-language queries, you can retrieve information from your Gads by sending an SMS message from your cell phone, or by using a Web browser or instant messaging application. You can create and update Gads using the same access methods.

For collaboration purposes, you can share each Gad with a specific group of people. Access to your Gads can be password protected, with varying privileges (such as the ability to update) assigned to different users. For example, you could give employees the ability to access and update your company's phone directory while denying that access to anyone outside the firm.

MyGads.com can be particularly helpfulfor grabbing information on the go. The service, currently free, is expected to be supported by advertising at some point.

Every day, countless e-mail messages swarm your in box. Wouldn't it be nice to receive an alert when an message arrives from one of your top clients?

That's the idea behindTeleFlip, a free new service. TeleFlip will automatically forward e-mail from people you specify, as SMS messages to your cell phone.

Due to SMS's length limitations, e-mail messages are broken into text messages of no more than 120 characters each. Unfortunately, that means that a lengthy e-mail will arrive as multiple text messages, and not necessarily in the correct order. You can't view attachments, for obvious reasons. And unless you have an unlimited text plan, your cell phone service charges could quickly accumulate. Nonetheless, for instant alerts of messages from important business contacts, TeleFlip could be a lifesaver.

Given the risks and hassles of carrying a laptop, traveling without one is tempting. Inevitably, though, if you've gone on a trip and left your laptop at home, you'll wish that you had brought a particular Word document or other file with you. That's where a remote-access service such asWebEx PCNowcomes in.

In its most recent incarnation, WebEx PCNow version 4.0 (which costs $10.35 per month) allows you to view and access files residing on your Windows-based PC or Mac via the Web browser on any other computer. You can also access files remotely through any mobile Web browser, such as those on Treos, BlackBerry devices, and iPhones.