RubberSquid Helps Orchestra Keep Together

There are few lifestyles more chaotic than those of professional classical musicians. For the rank and file, there’s no 9 to 5 routine, no office, just a constant kaleidoscope of airports, hotels and concert halls. As a player, your mission is to turn up where you’re told, when you’re told and play sublimely.

But pity the poor souls who have to manage these itinerants. Orchestras range in size from about 40 players for a typical chamber orchestra, up to 100 or more for a symphony orchestra, and all require different levels of organising, reminding, cajoling and harassing. Players often come from many different countries and are very frequent travellers.

For most, email is a reasonably practical solution to keeping in touch, not only because of its cost effectiveness – orchestras often struggle to balance their books – but also thanks to its ubiquity. Email though has its drawbacks, especially for people with busy in-boxes: important emails can be mis-categorized as spam, misaddressed, lost or forgotten.

Wikis provide an alternative method for communicating with a group. Like email, a wiki can be ubiquitous so that anybody with a browser can access it, but, unlike email, wikis have the important advantage of being centralised information stores so that anybody needing to communicate with the group only need enter information as a web page; no need to worry about keeping email address lists up to date, etc.

The downside is that wikis can be complex, and not everyone is compatible with challenging technology. And that’s where RubberSquid comes in.

RubberSquid offers all kinds of groups and teams a wiki that:

• is very simple to use;
• works on almost anything with a browser including mobile phones;
• is free to use on a desktop and very cheap on mobile devices.

RubberSquid is being used by several major European orchestras as a simple and convenient way of keeping in touch with widely dispersed players and other support staff. They have found that, for most people, RubberSquid is simple and quick to use on a PC, requiring only basic knowledge of browsers. Getting people to use RubberSquid on mobile phones has been a bit more of a struggle as many still believe they are charged by the minute (and through the nose) for an Internet connection on a mobile. Once over that fear, and set up with appropriate data tariffs, most find using RubberSquid on a mobile phone both simple and enjoyable.

But streamlining communication has not been the only positive outcome, some of the peripheral benefits have been surprising. Chasing down scores is an important part of many musicians’ lives, so having a RubberSquid channel for storing information about who’s got what score has saved valuable practice time, players simply type in some information about the score they’re looking for and RubberSquid’s AI assisted search locates the most likely entry.

But, of course it’s not only orchestras that can benefit from adopting RubberSquid. All kinds of groups and teams can reap benefits from this easy to use, cross-platform wiki, be they small companies, consultants, sports teams or social groups.

Whether you’re a musician or not, you can register for RubberSquid here (registration and use on a PC is free).

Team Collaboration the RubberSquid Wiki Way

If you run a SME, you’re probably:

• Too busy generating revenue to have the time to learn, setup and maintain a complex IT system;
• Frequently working closely with several realtively small ad-hoc teams, often on different projects;
• Cost conscious and careful where you spend your money.

If so, then a RubberSquid wiki can improve your efficiency and save your business time and money.

Top 5 Business Benefits of a RubberSquid Wiki

#1 Make Project Information More Accessible
RubberSquid allows project information to be assembled in one secure place and accessible by any team member wherever they are, using whatever device they choose. It’s like having private web space that only team members can read and contribute to.

#2 Centralise Team Communication
For most businesses, team collaboration involves email, lots of email. Reading, sorting, finding and replying to email is time consuming and there is always the risk that team members may miss or forget about an important message.
RubberSquid can be used as a communications hub; a private, centralised forum where team communications, and not only email ones, can be shared efficiently and clearly.

#3 Streamline Team Collaboration
Today’s project teams are often geographicaly dispersed and often in different timezones. RubberSquid is an access-controlled information repository that’s available over the Internet 24/7, so there’s less time wasted waiting for returned calls or information sent by email.

#4 Leverage Group Knowledge
Most domain specific knowledge is held in people’s heads: when the relevant person isn’t around, neither is the knowledge they possess. Team effectiveness is often compromised by the non availability of specific knowledge, knowledge that can be quickly and easily entered into a wiki such as RubberSquid.

#5 Mine for Information
Valuable information comes in many forms: telephone and face to face conversations, client and consumer interverviews, press releases and competitor information, etc. This information is usually “unstructured” (i.e. free form, natural language) and therefore difficult to store in such a way that it can be used later.
RubberSquid allows you to store all kinds of unstructured information and then to do information mining on it later by simply typing natural language questions such as “what are the main features of ABC’s widget?” or “what was that company that manufacturer blue and green plastic widgets?”. If anyone has enterd the information into it’s repository, RubberSquid will find it.

Business Orientated Features

1. Cross Platform: RubberSquid works on any device with a browser and an Internet connection: mobile phone, PDA, Blackberry, smartphone, iPhone, notebook, desktop, Mac, Windows, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Linux, etc. etc.
2. Easy to Use: You do not need a computer science degree to use RubberSquid. ANYONE can use it. Even my mother, and she’s over 70.
3. Privacy and Access Control: RubberSquid is private and secure. You have full control over who (if anyone) can view each of your channels. This means you can set up multiple channels for multiple projects and keep them all separate.
4. Data Security: Your information is valuable, so we provide a data backup function. This is a one click function that creates a single zip file containing all your text information in XML format together with all your attachment files, and downloads it to your computer. Its sister function allows you to upload a RubberSquid backup file so you never need worry about losing data.
5. Printing Memos: Sometimes, nothing beats having information on paper, so RubberSquid has a print function that filters out page menus, etc. to give a more professional result than a simple page dump.

Easy and Low Cost

Setting up a RubberSquid account is very simple and costs nothing – free – gratis – so why not give it a try?


Register for RubberSquid here, and see how RubberSquid can improve your team collaboration – registration is FREE

RubberSquid: the People’s Antidote to Wiki Chaos?

When we started out with RubberSquid’s distant ancestor (in 1997!), the term “wiki” usually drew blank looks. Even now, in the era of the Wikipedia (an uber-wiki amongst wikis), the generic wiki concept is at once both so simple and so novel that, for many, it’s difficult to grasp. In some respects, it’s similar to riding a bicycle: simple and natural for one who knows how, and a useful mode of transport – yet seemingly absurd to somebody who has never experienced it.

Wikipedia and its descendants aside, most of the wikis deployed today are on corporate intranets providing an invaluable way for teams to collaborate through pages of information delivered to conventional browsers.

But, left on their own, wikis can be chaotic beasts. In the enterprise environment, it is only the stakeholders’ vested interest in the information contained that tames the wiki’s natural instinct towards chaos. Given an infinite number of monkeys on typewriters, one of them will eventually type a “Midsummer Night’s Dream”, but give a finite number of anarchic employees a wiki and, pretty soon, information chaos prevails. It’s not so much that participants maliciously set out to damage the wiki, although there is always some risk of that, it’s more to do with the different approaches that people take to organising and presenting what is after all “their” information.

RubberSquid is a “wiki for the masses”. It is a wiki that anyone should be able to use in their everyday lives. It is also a wiki that needs to work on any device with a browser – not just the big friendly PC screen with its full keyboard and mouse. At heart, it’s a wiki that needs to tame and restrain itself from its natural tendancy towards chaos.

And how does it do this? Simply by keeping it simple.

Look at almost any other wiki and you’ll see an approach designed for enterprise PC users, one that does not migrate well to the mobile environment, and one that is not going to be embraced by the avarage consumer.

RubberSquid is different.

• It uses an easily understood information hierarchy: account >> channels >> memos >> attachments; a hierarchy that’s already familiar to any PC user, and one that migrates cleanly and clearly to mobile;
• It has a user interface that adapts itself according to which device you’re using: a simplified display with a slightly deeper hierarchy for mobile phones compared with a richer, shallower view on the desktop.
• It encapsulates all the operations (such as Edit, Rename, Delete, etc.) that users may want to perform on an entry into easily accessed menus instead of seemingly random pick-points in a page; menus that retain continuity across device types;
• It provides numerous ways for mobile users to get RubberSquid on their phones, ranging from QR Codes, through to email and SMS invitations;
• It allows users full control over who gets to see their information. A RubberSquid channel can be private or it can be shared with up to 120 other people. Also, channel owners can define privileges for each sharer of a channel, choosing whether a particular sharer is allowed to add memos for example.

A hardcore wiki purist might argue that RubberSquid is not really a true wiki precisely because it curbs the wiki’s instinct towards information chaos. We don’t think it’s really worth debating. RubberSquid provides wiki functions to all kinds of consumers and prosumers ranging from individual contractors, to small companies, to families – all of whom need to share information without it being public, and all of whom need the ability to access their information when they’re away from their PC.

RubberSquid does what it says on the tin, and that’s why RubberSquid really is the people’s wiki.

Register for RubberSquid here, and see how a wiki can work for you – registration is FREE