Better living through the Internet

A Cleveland company Lafenet has just introduced a hot new utility to do a better job of compressing your files and shooting them through cyberspace. It's called Miliki Shrink and according to the press release, it "significantly reduces the time required to send and receive large images and documents over the Internet and optimizes storage spaces on hard drives, optical discs, flash cards and USB Keydrives. With Shrink, you can further compress your ZIP files. You can also convert a Shrink folder into a ZIP folder."

These are worthy goals indeed, as we begin to live and work increasingly through the Internet. And we can only hope this product has a better shot at success than one introduced a couple of years ago here in Cleveland--also very effective (I had a review copy that worked pretty well), but not marketed well (the company got into financial troubles, too).

But as mobility becomes more the norm--workers moving from office to office, city to city, even country to country--it makes total sense to have better ways to exchange documents. New programs such as BaseCampHQ make it possible to begin to live as if your "desk" is actually on the Internet, where multilple people can view and work on documents (though BaseCamp's file uploading seems a bit glitchy), and where you can access your work from any Internet connection instead of having to lug around computers, disks, or documents.

Good for you, Lafenet. Now, can you please explain why your website requires a password to visit? That's certainly not the smartest marketing move, folks.