Pajama Entrepreneur

Andy Abramson’s wish list is something those of us who travel a lot can relate to. As part of the work-from-anywhere crowd, I have suffered through hotels without double-glazed windows, slow (or non-existent) broadband service, and poor lighting. Hotels that advertise themselves as business hotels fail miserably when they don’t provide enterpreneurs with an environment in which they can do their work and also relax.

If you work freelance or have small business with no staff, you need to organize everything yourself and work efficiently. Fortunately, there are a lot of online tools for time tracking, invoicing, project management, shared workspaces, customer relationship management, etc. available from Freelanceswitch.com.

I work from home, which means no office noises such as fax machines grinding away, printers humming along and no colleagues chattering on the phone. From time to time, I miss them — those office noises that let you know you aren’t alone.

There’s a solution: the Thriving Office, a recording of office noises you can plan in the background if you miss having people around, or if you are on an important call and want the person on the other line not to know you are taking his call in your bed in your pajamas.

[Via Techcrunch]

If you travel for business and need to go online frequently, there’s nothing better than having Wi-Fi everywhere in a city. A number of cities in the US and abroad (e.g. Taipei) already have citywide Wi-Fi, but in the largest US cities, they are still either in the planning stage or being rolled out. Philadelphia and Portland are deploying citywide Wi-Fi together with their partners, EarthLink and MetroFi, respectively. Both cities will offer free and paid access.

I track all these developments on my other blog, Muniwireless.com. You can even download a list of US cities and counties that have: (a) live networks; or (b) networks being rolled out.

But if you happen to be in a place that does not have ubiquitous Wi-Fi, what do you do? The most obvious is to use your hotel’s Wi-Fi network. Hotel Chatter has posted a list of the best US Wi-Fi hotels for 2007 and a list of the worst (the expensive hotels tend to be in this group). For those who travel outside the US, here’s a list of best/worst international hotels — based on my own experience and on the comments posted on Muniwireless, if the provider of the hotel’s Wi-Fi is Swisscom Eurospot, it’s terrible and expensive. It might have improved from 2 years ago, but I tend to avoid Eurospot.

Of course, nothing beats free Wi-Fi. Free-hotspot.com has a directory of locations that offer free Wi-Fi access in Europe (where prices for Wi-Fi access are outrageous).

Tip: if you are traveling with a companion, you can share a Wi-Fi connection between your laptops. Just turn on your Mac’s network sharing feature. What, you don’t own a Mac? Get one, please.