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Ever feel that if only you had the right tools, backing, money, time, background, education, encouragement and inspiration, you could build a killer app?

I used to think so; especially when I learned about efficient use of widely distributed human resources via frictionless online sharing (a/k/a crowd-sourcing). But like so much of new, new Internet, crowd-sourcing never actually took hold on the ground level where people like me dwell (that is, not in Palo Alto or San Jose). And it never, never penetrated entrenched industries such as law practice.

Then there’s SellanApp, a site that proposes to put the creation, financing, and distribution of mobile apps within the reach of non-techies like me.  Its wonderfully subversive. You might even call it a good way to hack the process of creating apps. And sure it probably won’t work, just as crowd-sourcing failed to catch fire 10 years ago. Then again, it just might.

SellAnApp from NewLogics on Vimeo.

You’ve heard about Q&A phenom Quora, right?  Well meet Opzi, the site started by Attorney Euwyn Poon that aims to bottle that Quora lightning and put in on your desktop.

Opzi is part bulletin board, part wiki, part e-mail in-box, part whiteboard, and part real-time-collaboration. The site threads, tags, and organizes every question and answer, then applies a powerful search engine and some machine intelligence. Voila – your office knowledge base grows effortlessly with every new question and answer. The possibilities are staggering. Deployed in a firm or across a group of solos and small firms, for instance, Opzi can draw information and resources, then deploy them when and where needed. In other words, instant knowledge-sharing.

Opzi is currently in closed beta. I’m just starting to appreciate it myself. If you’d like to join the experiment check it out here and let me know your thoughts.

So I demoed LexisNexis Firm Manager the other day. It’s a web-based app like Clio and Rocketmatter, built on the Microsoft Silverlight platform. And  I have to say … I was impressed. Here’s what you can expect from Firm Manager:

• Dashboard View: A quick, centralized view of cases, appointments, meetings, tasks, recent messages, and more.
• Smartphone Integration: Firm Manager syncs with Microsoft® Outlook®, iPhone®, BlackBerry®, Android™ and the iPad® right away. Nice.
• Time and Expense: Track time and expenses for anyone in the office. Firm Manager will compile and display the information by client or matter.
• Finally! No Contract, No Install, Pay as You Go, Data Freedom: Month-to-month payments. Don’t like it? Take up to 6 months to port your data!
• Contact Management: Find, create, or update contacts on the fly or at the office and use them without any lag time. Instant on capabilities.
• Conflict Search: Powerful embedded search technology lets users comb through existing firm records to surface any potential conflict of interest.
• Alerts and Notifications: Built-in notifications and reminders re events, tasks, and changes in their status for anybody in the firm.

The list goes on, and the app is still in development so there is also time to put in your 2 cents. Take advantage of this rare opportunity to be heard by the developers!

Want to know more? Click this link to register for priority access to the beta test of LexisNexis Firm Manager and qualify to win one of 5 spanking new iPads that LexisNexis is giving away to Practicehacker readers! And just for mentioning me, Mazy Hedayat, or ”Practicehacker” in the comment field of the sign-up form you’ll receive priority access to the beta.

Now aren’t you glad to subscribe to Practicehacker?

What is Topify? One of those applications that does what Twitter ought to itself. Since it doesn’t however … it’s a good thing Topify does.

The value proposition behind Topify is remarkably simple:

• Better Twitter e-mail notifications
• You can follow back just by replying
• Reply to direct messages by e-mail
• Block, unfollow easily and guilt free

And as a bonus, signing up is dead easy. All you have to do is get invited to the closed beta.

Click here to find out how.

The Problem: E-mail Overload

The Solution: That depends …

Finding too many new messages in our in-boxes is a stubborn, universal problem for lawyers: an occupational hazard if you will. I’ve examined various solutions to this problem, including as Outlook plug-ins ClearContext and Xobni, but was never satisfied with their performance.

Take ClearContext for example. It produces excellent coordination between contacts, attachments, tasks, and appointments, but requires way too much work. Basically for CC to work well, the user must do all the classification and draw the connections. By the time I’m done advising the program of what’s important, I’m already exhausted.

Xobni on the other hand, magically organizes e-mail and attachments by contact without the need for any input at all. It really is impressive at showing you who is who, and the history of your communication with them; but it cannot help me make sense of the 100+ new messages I get every day. And without visual clues as to what is worth reading I can’t even find the important messages, much less put them in context.

Finally, these applications and others like them are designed exclusively for use with Outlook; a notorious memory hog that can single-handedly slow down and crash my system. No thank you.

Then I read about Gtriage in a FriendFeed post a few months ago. Gtriage works with Gmail or Google Apps to identify important messages and give you visual cues with which to find them. Just sign up and within minutes Gtriage learns your e-mail habits, applies its machine-learning algorithms, then identifies and labels messages so you know which ones to attack first. Amount of work required on the user’s end: none. That’s more like it.

Gtriage takes less than 3 minutes to set up. Since it learns automatically there is nothing to do or worry about once you have signed up; but if you are the creative type you might want to see how it can be combined with Gmail plug-ins like Multiple Inboxes for spectacular results (see this example).

Special Offer for Practicehackers: At the moment Gtriage remains in invitation-only beta, but Unblab was good enough to provide the invite code for 10 new accounts. Simply go to http://gtriage.com and be one fo the first 10 readers to sign up using practicehacker as your invite code.

Let me know what you think of Gtriage by posting your feedback, compliments, or hacks right here on Practicehacker.com, send your thoughts by e-mail to mhedayat@mha-law.com, join our Friendfeed Group, or sound off on Twitter.

Posted via email from practice (redux)