Google

Working in one of those companies where the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) Believes that Internet can cause productivity of employees to decrease (yeah I know…. it sounds stupid doesn´t it ????) . I did not have much access to a lot of sites such as hotmail, facebook, etc… Thank God they did not included Google and Wikipedia. I can tell you that most of my quick desired information needs, that do not require a lot of detail, I can get them from this two sites

SEARCH ENGING
The WWW is absolutely H U G E ! ! ! and trying to get some information that you need can be absolutely frustrating and time consuming, considering my curious profile, the five year old span of attention that I have, and the fact that most of the times I will always lose track of original objective. That is why I always use Google whenever I need to find something, every time I have a question, I will just “Google it” and get the first few links, read the extract of the site and see if it has what I´m looking for, and it is a lot faster than asking humans that most likely will try to explain something they are not even sure they know. I even use it if I have some orthographic question and will punch the word and see the famous message " Quizás quiso decir: SYMPATHY “ then I go feel very stupid, but will get it right and not lose that much time ;)


GOOGLE MAPS

It is not only super cool that you can actually see the street where you live at (this is a real photograph of my street taken from Google Maps…)



But it is really usefull when you come from Mexico to Madrid and everybody will just give you the address and then expect you to make your way by yourself, so they will tell you…. “Meet me at LATERAL in Velazquez”… Yeah, like that is going to solve my life…. And if you ask a cab and he happens to listen to your Mexican accent and you will go first to “El Escorial” and end up paying 54 Euros for a supposedly 5 minutes ride. So you go to Google Maps, punch in the address, and there you go… You get this…





GOOGLE SITES
I think this is a really productive functionality that I did not know previously. This is a workgroup site that has a calendar, hosting documents, task manager (To Dos), Information about the team amongst others. Usually if you are in a big Corporation you will have a lot of tools such as MSOutlook or similar tools that can help you with this, but if you are for example a student at IE you have no idea how powerfull this is. For example, we have already done two projects with this functionality and this tool probably increased our productivity by more than 30% compared to what I have heard of other teams. We made a specific TO Do List and everybody knows what they need to do, when do they need to have it done and they can post their answers or working documents in the same site so everybody knows what each person is doing. Also we use it to host working papers and final documents and different versions, and on top of it we can track changes online… yeah!!! It´s that cool.