I haven’t participated in a lot of conference calls, mostly because I do a lot of my communications via email. Also, more recently, I use Skype to make free long distance calls and for conferencing people from California to Australia. But lately, I have been checking out a number of free conference call applications  on the Web (that do require calling a TOLL number) and thinking about how they might help me in my business. Those apps include FreeConference.com, Rondee, and I’m also going to check out Palbee and DimDim.

In the last few weeks, I’ve actually been putting one of the applications - Calliflower - to use. I’ve been corresponding with several other women and doing some brainstorming and mutual pep talks as each of us try to take our careers and businesses to the next level. We have a lot of ideas for ways we can help one another as well as work together.

Email was just not sufficient for our “talks.” So we’ve set up a regular weekly conference call with the four of us. And if one of us can’t make it? Calliflower lets us record the call and save it as an MP3 file that we can access later if we missed the call.

How else can you take advantage of the free conferencing apps out there? Let me count the ways…

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A few weeks ago, I heard the phrase “working in the clouds” for the first time. The phrase refers to the way many people are starting to use online-based applications for their work processes and tasks rather than computer-based solutions. Even without thinking very much about it, I’ve been “working in the clouds” more and more often in the last six months. But after my big computer crash and near-loss of all 10-months worth of data, I’ve been thinking a lot more about “cloud computing” ever since.

There are definitely major pros but also major cons to cloud computing, and weighing them out is often too much for my overloaded brain to handle. But I thought I’d share my thoughts on the topic and then hear from you as well so we can share best practices on this revolutionary way of work.

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I finally got reading glasses so can get back to reading to stay up on my industry and to try to get through a book again.

Yes, sad but true: my eyesight is starting to fail. I wasn’t sure why I was struggling getting through a page of text because the changes are so slight but really affecting my ability to see words on a page clearly. But let’s move on…

Here are some books that I really have enjoyed and that have helped me in my business.

These are perfect last minute holiday gift for an entrepreneur you know…or for you! Some are newer books while others have been around for at least a decade and still ring true.

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We interrupt our regularly scheduled program to bring you a little book review…

I have no time to read books as a mom of a 16-month old and as an entrepreneur trying to do full-time work half-time. But I’ve been skimming through Susan Wilson Solovic’s new book The Girls’ Guide to Building a Million-Dollar Business. She is also the author of The Girls’ Guide to Power and Success and the owner of SBTV.com.

So here are some of the main points Susan makes in her new book and some of my thoughts.

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