Tools: Dropbox and Evernote - Wow!

I just signed up for Dropbox and Evernote tonight and I am so excited.  I love this cloud computing stuff.  I'm thinking of all kinds of personal, business, project management uses for this.  They are both so incredibly versatile.  I have to let everyone know about it.  If they would just try it they too could think of all these possible convenient uses.

Dropbox:  My daughter's Mac recently crashed and she lost all her photos.  She had some on Picassa, but not all.  Mostly it was her older files.  My own computer crashed in May and my email on Yahoo was hacked in June (4 times).  I lost everything going back to March on my Yahoo account.  It would have been easy to save files on Dropbox.  I could then access them on various devices, even at school or the library, switching easily to job applications or to homework assignments.  It's so easy.  The best part is the SSL security.  With SSL (Secure Socket Layer) you know this is going to be secure.  No more fretting over jump drives or thumb drives and forgetting them, losing them, or destroying them.  Just access your Dropbox account through the web.  Slick.

This makes a great collaboration tool.  All anyone needs to do is set up a folder for the project and allow team members access to it.  Great collaboration tool.  It would make it easy to work on documents that need everyone's input and/or approval. 


Evernote:  Whoa, the possibilities are incredible.  I imagine researching antiques, for example, Tiffany lamps.  I keep all my notes in Evernote, including pricing, descriptions, pictures, and warnings about fakes.  Then let's say I'm at a rummage sale and stumble upon something that looks like a Tiffany lamp.  I pull out my smartphone or iPad and look up my notes about it in Evernote.  Then I snatch up the lamp before anyone else realizes that this is the one long last lamp that is so rare no one else realized it.  (Well, this is my example and I can have fun with a little fantasy, right?).  That 's one use of Evernote.

I can also envision this being used to manage projects, homework, recipes, scanned documents (to finally archive my huge paperwork mountain), and various things I come across and want to note.  No more little snip its of notes tucked into my purse, Filofax, desk, bulletin board, Rolodex (yes, I have one that I scrapbooked  up into a very girly looking one), and lots more.  This is probably the one tool that will free me from paper and yet give me access to whatever I feel needs to be archived - just not in my little place. 

What am I going to do with all this free space once the papers are archived?  More craft and antiques!  Yeah!  The 21st century technology allows me to collect 19th century antiques. There's poetic justice in this.