The Venture Skills Blog

Due to the nature of our business I spend most of my time travelling, blog entries are normally done, on trains, buses and in coffee shops (In this case its the Cambridge Arts Picture house). When meeting clients I tend to suggest places that I know offer free WiFi such as the Picture house in Cambridge I have a pretty extensive list suitable for everyone.

When I do this sort of travelling I take my now trusted Acer 4400 with me, this provides me with all the computing power of a small country and pretty reasonable battery life (about 2.5 hours under my usage), this is pretty much all I need, though I am accompanied by the obligatory mobile phone and pen and paper.

On the machine is Firefox 2.0, OpenOffice for off-line documents and keynote for quick note taking. The machine also has Apache and MySql installed along with a web development suite again principally for demonstrations though it is also my main development machine.

Finally it has Skype, VoipCheap and Shtoom SIP phone and Google Talk providing the communications end and VNC client, putty for SSH providing the connectivity.

Now you may have been thinking that seems to be a short list and it is, I do have a few other applications mainly games and media based stuff, but for the business that is all I need the rest of the stuff is done through the browser (hence the need for WiFi) These include.

• Google Hosted Applications – Calendar and Mail
• SugarCRM – Customer Relationship manager
• This Blog
• Del.icio.us – Bookmarking
• Google Reader – RSS Feeds
• Google Maps – for route finding

What do you take travelling?

Like what you see try these articles on the Venture Skills Network
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