Business Hacks

Bing is no stranger to giving stuff away in order to spread the word about search alternatives to Google. Earlier this year I told you how to get cash back from purchases using Live Search (Bing’s predecessor) and more recently, there’s the whole get-free-Wi-Fi using Bing thing. Now I’ve got news of more cash savings via Bing.

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Remember Pogoplug, the little gizmo that turns a USB hard drive into network-attached storage? Well, it’s back, and it’s…pink.

This second-generation ‘plug offers some intriguing new features, including support for up to four external drives, but we’re having a hard time getting past the…pink.

Granted, the Pogoplug was never expressly intended for business users (despite it having myriad small-business applications), but the new design will almost certainly keep non-consumer buyers away in droves. Men, too.

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Glad you asked:

As for the why-you-should-care part, you probably shouldn’t — at least for now. Chrome OS is at least a year away, and there won’t even be a beta until well into 2010.

That said, envision a netbook that boots in seconds, connects you instantly to the kinds of apps you use most (e-mail, Web, word processing, etc.), and costs around $200 — because you didn’t have to pay an extra $100 for a Windows OS.

That’s a little pie-in-the-sky on my part, but I’ll meet you back here in a year and see where things stand. You heard it here first.

More on BNET:

• Google makes Chrome OS open source today
• Google Chrome OS: a last minute review
• Speed Up Your Web Browsing with Google Chrome

Well, do you? We talk a lot about Twitter around these parts, and we’re proud to count hundreds of Business Hacks readers as followers, but we’re still curious about whether you actually use the service.

For example, I do a fair bit of tweeting (mostly in the form of links to BH posts), but don’t actually read many tweets from others. That’s because Twitter quickly leads to information overload (”twoverload”?), and I just can’t keep up.

What about you? Are you actively hash-tagging and retweeting and all that? Vote in our latest poll, then hit the comments to follow up. If you use Twitter, what for? If you don’t, why not?

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More Twitter goodness:

• A Businessperson’s Guide to Using Twitter
• Manage Your Twitter Account in Outlook with TwInbox
• Five Great Twitter Tools for Business Users
• Ten Tips To Make Twitter Work for Your Business

If you’re a Gmail user and you routinely access your account via browser, you’re probably a little sick of all the clutter. There’s that chat thing you never use, those annoying banner ads that appear at the top of each message, and so on.

Minimalist Gmail is a Firefox extension that lets you selectively hide or remove Gmail elements you don’t want to see.

Just how “minimalist” can Gmail get? Here’s how your page would look with virtually everything turned off:

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Getting feedback is important, which is why we often share Word documents with co-workers. Unfortunately, it’s rarely smooth sailing. Half the time, people edit your document directly without using revision marks, and even if they do, it doesn’t matter anyway, because you end up getting four different copies of the doc, each revised by different people. Making sense of it all and properly incorporating feedback into your original version can be a pain.

All those annoying days of meticulously comparing various versions of your documents are gone. I’ve got the bead on a free online service that makes comparing and reconciling your copies of Word documents as easy as pie.

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Traveling this holiday season? Well, it seems that pretty much all of the major search engines have conspired to bring you free Wi-Fi. Mind you, they’re not working together to make this happen; it just seems to have turned out this way.

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The cloud is the new floppy disk. Unfortunately, it’s hard to find a cloud with the right mix of features, capacity, and price. I love the way DropBox integrates itself into Windows, for example, but you only get 2GB for free. SkyDrive gives you 25GB, but there’s no desktop integration (aside from the nice-try-but-kinda-clumsy SkyDrive Explorer).

Now I’ve got a new option that has DropBox’s integration, a little more capacity, and a few other conveniences as well.

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A few weeks back I spotlighted three Web services I consider essential for modern business. Many of you chimed in with recommendations of your own, which was great.

So, because everyone loves sequels (as opposed to prequels, which invariably bite), I bring you three more indispensable Web services. If you’re not using them, you’re not taking full advantage of what today’s Web has to offer.

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As a general rule, mail servers don’t like large file attachments. While some can accommodate files as large as 20MB, others balk if they exceed just 5MB. In these days of mammoth videos, photo libraries, PDFs, and the like, that just doesn’t cut it.

Thankfully, one of our favorite file-sharing services, drop.io, just announced an Outlook plug-in that lets you send attachments as large as 100MB — without ever leaving the program. Take a look:

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