This year for Earth Day, the team at Increo wanted to help contribute to the cause.  So, in honor of Earth Day 2009, we’re giving every free or new Backboard account holder two full weeks of premium Backboard features.

If we all use Backboard, we can save thousands of trees by not having to print out documents to give feedback.

Head on over to http://www.getbackboard.com to get started. If you’re an existing Basic Plan user, we’ve already taken care of upgrading your account for you.  If you are new to Backboard, sign up and you will be given a free 14-day Premium Backboard account as well.

Premium accounts enable you to create unlimited password-protected, SSL-encrypted Backboards from large files, and allow you to invite up to five other people to experience the benefits of your trial.

We are also having a random drawing to win a free premium Backboard account!  It’s easy to be entered to win - just create a Backboard during your two-week trial.

This offer is only for a limited time, so go to http://www.getbackboard.com to get started today.

Happy Backboarding!

In our quest to be completely buzzword-compliant, we’ve implemented Backboard and embedit.in as “cloud computing” applications; that is, the servers on which they run are virtual private server instances. It’s great: we can add as much capacity as we need without having to acquire and set up hardwarea and scale to traffic dynamically.

One piece of software without which this would be much less enjoyable is the RightScale libraries, released as open source by RightScale. They’re great, wrapping all of the Amazon Web Services APIs — and Amazon’s competitors’ APIs, too — in a straightforward, well-documented Ruby library. It’s interesting that RightScale is doing this open source play, since their bread and butter is creating deployment solutions and magic scaling sprinkles for cloud-hosted applications. But their libraries are solid and comprehensive, to boot.

Installing them is:

sudo gem install right_aws

after which you can use them from IRB or from Capistrano or from your application. No downloading one set of Java command-line tools for EC2 and a a Firefox extension for S3. No configuring environment variables and setting up a Java Runtime Environment. Easy!

One caveat to point out if you’re using JRuby: the jruby-openssl library doesn’t support SHA-256 for generating HMAC signatures, but it does support generating SHA-256 digests. This defeats the mechanism in right_aws for figuring out how to sign Amazon Web Services requests. To work around and force SHA-1 for request signatures, this monkey patch works:

# Icky, icky monkeypatch.
module RightAws
  def AwsUtils.blow_away_sha256
    class_variable_set '@@digest256', nil
  end
end

# Called later:
RightAws::AwsUtils.blow_away_sha256

We love the RightScale libraries for their completeness, allowing us to avoid learning a new library for every place we might want to do something with cloud computing or web services.

Yesterday, Seth Godin shared his thoughts on how to make a conference call more effective–by setting up a chat room for all participants and typing and conversing at the same time.

If your conference call is about a document or set of documents, why not set up a Backboard instead?  Share with all participants before you start so everyone sees the document in their browser.  Unlike screen sharing or typical web conferencing, there is no need for conference participants to download any software to get started.

Like Godin’s chat, comments are real-time and help to guide the conversation, but with Backboard you can see markup, annotations and approvals as well.