Using technology to work and play remotely
We are fortunate to have our own business www.cardshark.com and also to have some money in savings. This will make doing this whole trip to New Zealand much less stressful. I also do a lot of web based consulting work for companies in San Francisco and Chicago. My two big clients have agreed to keep me on while working from there. This is cool and should be an easy transition since I have worked at home most of my adult career and also have worked remotely for both clients for the majority of time I have had them. One client I have been visiting a lot lately in San Francisco so that makes the transition a bit harder, but I have been scaling back on my in office hours so that should help make it go easier. I am currently on "vacation" for next few weeks to help with the big transition over to New Zealand and to get an apartment over there.
Technology will be a great enabler while working with overseas companies. We have hooked up with a company called Skype - www.skype.com which has two services that allow you to call and receive calls on your computer. Skype In give us a 415-xxx-xxxx phone number for $38 a year that will ring through to our computer. This is very cool and allows us to be anywhere in the world and get phone calls. It also saves people money in calling us as most people we know are in San Francisco or have free/cheap long distance to call us. Skype-Out allows us to call anyone for like .02 a minute from New Zealand. This makes keeping in touch affordable and easy. We also get free voicemail via Skype and they have some form of video conferencing as well that we can use in the future.
With US based bank accounts, we can get direct deposits from these clients and have it dumped right into our accounts, we can move it around electronically to our investment accounts or to www.hifx.com to move it to our New Zealand account.
Other tools like VPN, Remote Desktop, FTP, Email, SQL Server, telnet, Net Meeting, Go To My PC and others
make it very easy to work with other people around the world and to get work done fast and securely.
I am bringing over my laptop which I hope to use at cafes (hopefully with free wireless) and my bigger computer for media (dvd viewing, mp3 collection, games, etc.)
The last big hurdle is figuring out time differences. From San Francisco it is about 3-5 hours + 1 day time diffence. So for instance, if it is Monday at 2 pm in San Francisco, it is Tuesday at 9AM in Auckland. The rule of thumb is that basically any day after lunch we will be available for calls from the US. The reason for the 3-5 hour floating difference is because of the opposite seasons. At some points in time, we are on Daylight Savings Time in the US and they are NOT on it there. There is a small overlap where one of us is on it, then the 3 hour difference is the inverse where they are on it and the US is not. Most of the year has a 5 hour difference to the west coast though, so we are basing things on that. Check out www.timeanddate.com for more info.
Matthew
Technology will be a great enabler while working with overseas companies. We have hooked up with a company called Skype - www.skype.com which has two services that allow you to call and receive calls on your computer. Skype In give us a 415-xxx-xxxx phone number for $38 a year that will ring through to our computer. This is very cool and allows us to be anywhere in the world and get phone calls. It also saves people money in calling us as most people we know are in San Francisco or have free/cheap long distance to call us. Skype-Out allows us to call anyone for like .02 a minute from New Zealand. This makes keeping in touch affordable and easy. We also get free voicemail via Skype and they have some form of video conferencing as well that we can use in the future.
With US based bank accounts, we can get direct deposits from these clients and have it dumped right into our accounts, we can move it around electronically to our investment accounts or to www.hifx.com to move it to our New Zealand account.
Other tools like VPN, Remote Desktop, FTP, Email, SQL Server, telnet, Net Meeting, Go To My PC and others
make it very easy to work with other people around the world and to get work done fast and securely.
I am bringing over my laptop which I hope to use at cafes (hopefully with free wireless) and my bigger computer for media (dvd viewing, mp3 collection, games, etc.)
The last big hurdle is figuring out time differences. From San Francisco it is about 3-5 hours + 1 day time diffence. So for instance, if it is Monday at 2 pm in San Francisco, it is Tuesday at 9AM in Auckland. The rule of thumb is that basically any day after lunch we will be available for calls from the US. The reason for the 3-5 hour floating difference is because of the opposite seasons. At some points in time, we are on Daylight Savings Time in the US and they are NOT on it there. There is a small overlap where one of us is on it, then the 3 hour difference is the inverse where they are on it and the US is not. Most of the year has a 5 hour difference to the west coast though, so we are basing things on that. Check out www.timeanddate.com for more info.
Matthew
Labels: email, mp3, remote desktop, skype, telecommuniting, vpn, working remotely
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