Feynman

This is strikingly similar to what the military does with alot of jobs. (Or atleast used to do.) Instead of hiring certain people out of college (Medical Technologists, as an example) they would build an intense training program that would train them for job they needed to do in 16 months or so. Kind-of reminds of of the old ways of training electricians and various craftsman through specialized schools and mentoring.

I love what Zoho is doing with this -- challenging conventional thought and bringing great jobs to people who would ordinarily be over-looked or counted out.

I come from an "enterprise" environment where all our IT management are goo-goo over Sharepoint. From my personal standpoint Sharepoint is really quite lacking in features. Yeah, it has a Wiki -- but it's no comparison to the likes of say, DokuWiki. Yeah, it has a forum-like portion -- but you could probably pick any of the top 10 forums available for free on the Net and it'd be 10x more powerful than what Sharepoint offers. It's also an online file manager -- with searching and ACLs built-in. Not exactly ground-breaking stuff here.

To pay for this kind-of stuff when there's far better options online and for free seems almost ludicrous to me. Not to mention a terrible waste of money.

I guess instant isn't fast enough now? Wow, tough crowd of users! =)

Back when I had more free time (no wife, no kids, no business) I used to participate in a few forums. Now, I usually stay updated with the topics via Google Reader and the # of forums I keep up with have dropped to maybe a handful. They mostly come in handy for when I'm searching for specific tech related subjects and certain good threads show up high ranking in the search engine.

List of forums: VMWare's VMTM Forums, Ubuntu's Forums, and Webmaster Forum at Digital Point are the top ones that come to mind.

I've done a couple sites in the past that used SMS messaging for notifications -- I found the quickest, easiest was to ask the user their provider and send the notification using one of the email->SMS gateways listed above by Elven.

Teleflip is nice. I remember giving them a try a long tim eago, only thing is I remember them inserting their brand into the message. I didn't particularly want that.

Also, speaking of Teleflip... I've heard people speculate how they're able to find the correct provider. Anyone know? Initially sending the message to all providers and then seeing which one doesn't bounce back seems spammy, but who knows. (And I suppose if you then cache the results for future requests, it ain't so bad.)

InstantDomainSearch.com is great. Bustaname.com is also very good for testing various keyword combinations.