There are many free online project management toolse on the market. Today we take closer look at one of the more popular players: Basecamp. In this article, we highlight what we think makes Basecamp a great choice and some notes about it based on user experience.

Basecamp follows the safe formula of getting your team to collaborate in a very efficient and structured environment on the Web. Users get to have their own login details and dashboard, with the option to display only the information that is relevant at the moment. For the free version, users are limited to creating only one project. This is great for a “test run”, as you are given free reign to try out all the features on an actual project before deciding whether to subscribe to the full version.

Project Creation and Management

Starting out a project in Basecamp is easy. The Project Head creates a new project and can then give access to other team members. Everything is centralized into the system: discussions, schedules, work assignments, project queries and memos. A simple login to the portal allows any user to immediately view updates on the project as well as keep track of what has already been done or added. An option for an email alert is also integrated, which allows users to stay on track even if they are not logged into Basecamp.

• Calendar: a basic calendar showing deadlines and project milestone

• Everything: displays an option for extra stuff you want to see by searching for it specifically

• Progress: creates a visual representation of project activities in a timeline fashio

If you only check your Basecamp portal at the end of the day, you will appreciate a feature called Catchup which summarizes the activities of the day into an easy to read format.

User Experience and Final Note

What’s nice is that Basecamp has generous tools for communications to ensure that everyone involved in the project is updated. The little notifications (email alerts, signs that tasks were or were not done) all make the job of a project leader a whole lot easier as well. What could be a mild hiccup of sorts is the software’s deep integration with email, which could bring about a partiality of replying or responding through it instead of through the Basecamp portal. In this scenario, you could have a majority of the team out and about while you are the sole user of the portal. This is because everyone has the option to just be updated through mail instead of actually using and working through the portal itself.

Basecamp generally feels very quick and intuitive as it takes into consideration what people love or prefer to use. It’s a promising tool for any project or undertaking, and if you can get past the one project limitation of the free version then you should find the monthly subscription to be money well worth spent.

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“Fridamania” even entered the movie and fashion scenes as people started appreciating her colorful life and vibrant style.

Mention Frida Kahlo today, and the first image that comes to most people’s minds is her signature bushy eyebrows, impressive stare and a chin that is held high in defiance. Such an image is one of strength, and of a woman who has gone through a lifetime of challenges.

Frida Kahlo’s life is as colorful as her numerous paintings. She was born on July 6, 1907 to a Mexican mother and a European father – a combination that resulted in her unique beauty. Growing up in Mexico, she was the embodiment of her culture’s love for color and festivity as seen through her love of wearing the classic Tehuana costume. Frida loved beauty and sought to live it on a day-to-day basis, both in her manner of dress as well as her gift for painting.

While her talent in painting is exceptional, her works are also deep and compelling stories of her life, her loves, and the painful moments that add a splash of darkness to her vivacity. Her most popular works are her own self-portraits, and it can be said that Frida was very much in touch with herself and painted her feelings and emotions for the world to see, with no worry of criticism nor judgment. Painting was her outlet that allowed her to endure, to see herself from one point in life to another, whether it was a challenge or a triumph.

Painting came to be Frida’s tool for persevering in a world filled with physical and emotional pain. In 1925, at the young age of eighteen, she sustained permanent injuries from a bus accident: injuries that totally changed the course of her life. Her spinal column and pelvis broke in several places. A metal rail pierced her body and went out through her vagina. Her condition was such that doctors did not expect her to live at all, but she did. The nature of her accident meant that she would suffer pains in her spinal column and, worse, the pain of not being able to bear any children.

Instead of giving in, Frida painted her feelings throughout the entire time she was recuperating from the tragic accident. Painting gave her something to do during those long weeks, but also became a means to express what she felt inside, both good and bad.

Frida continued to live life to the fullest, despite her accident. In 1929, she married an artist just like herself: Diego Rivera, a famed Mexican muralist. As many people know, the beautiful Frida was fiercely in love with the stout and unpleasant-looking Diego. However, this was not enough to keep Diego from straying; he had numerous affairs with other women, including Frida’s younger sister Cristina. This pained her deeply, and may have been the cause for her to also engage in affairs of her own. Frida had many lovers soon after, both men and women – including the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, whom she and husband Diego had become close to during his time of exile in Mexico as the couple, too, were Communists.

Frida’s ability to paint and immortalize her emotions into portraits gained a following and she soon rose to fame as an artist. She opened exhibitions in Paris and New York City, became friends with and gained admirers in famous Surrealist painters, with the most notable of all being Pablo Picasso himself. Her beauty and charm won her many admirers and allowed her a warm welcome in numerous high-society gatherings in America. In such formal occasions, Frida was a breath of fresh air, thanks to her somewhat shocking sense of humor and proclivity for swearing and sharing dirty jokes.

Busy as she was, this lifestyle likely hid the anguish she felt for not being able to bear children and for suffering a miscarriage in 1932 as a result of her accident. This is best seen in her painting entitled Henry Ford Hospital, from the same year as the miscarriage, which depicts a bleeding Frida lying on a bed. From this work onwards, her self-portraits became more macabre, thereby earning her a reputation for being one of the few, original visual artists of her time. Another work entitled My Birth was a portrayal of her anguish, with her bloodied head posing at the entryway of her vagina. Rivera, in his autobiography, described how she “exalted the feminine qualities of endurance of truth, reality, cruelty, and suffering. Never before had a woman put such agonized poetry on canvas as Frida did at this time…”

If one were to look beyond the many cats, monkeys, dogs, birds and even plants that accompany her self-portraits and other paintings, these recurring details are but a replacement for the children that she could not have nor depict as her own in portraits. An even closer look at these would be telling of her yearning to assume a part in the life cycle.

Her most popular painting entitled The Two Fridas became a representation of the time when she and Diego divorced, with dark-skinned Mexican Frida celebrating the love she felt for Diego alongside pale-skinned European Frida hurting from an exposed and broken heart.

A faint silver lining in her tumultuous life came in her remarriage to Diego only a year after their divorce. But by this time in the 1940s, she had undergone close to 35 operations and needed to sustain the burden of having to wear a steel corset to support her ailing spinal column. This was very taxing, and months were spent in bed in attempts to restore her worsening health. Still, she painted on and drew enough strength to make a masterpiece entitled Tree of Hope, again depicting two Fridas but, this time, the Mexican one standing guard for the injured Frida who is shown lying down on a gurney. Though her health continued to deteriorate to the point that she was hospitalized for a year and had to have her leg amputated, she still found ways to keep her spirit afloat through painting.

In her final days, thoughts of death preoccupied her as she came to terms with her impending departure from this world. Paintings done by Frida at this time reflected her depression through a number of grim images. Her husband, Diego, recounts her day of passing on July 13, 1954 as the most tragic one in his entire life, having lost the love of his life.

Kahlo’s artworks appeal to many. She is considered one of the brilliant female multicultural artists, amidst the flaws and obscurities of her life and works. We may celebrate her creativity, originality and color but we also may celebrate the fact that a woman can now be remembered as both a fine artist and a person grounded in the realities of the human condition.

With her passing comes a gift to women: a collection of paintings that are meant to show the triumphs and tribulations of life, the realness of human frailty through physical and emotional anguish, and most importantly, the importance of persevering through pain that sought to put one down. Frida Kahlo was and will always be a woman to be admired for her talent, strength and absolute uniqueness.

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Many people consider Marie Curie the best known and most inspirational woman of science. Her amazing contributions to the field were backed by a life that was a perfect example of dedication to personal passions motivated by the desire to help humankind.

Born in Warsaw, Poland in 1867, Maria Salomea Sklodowska was the youngest of five children. The Sklodowska family, who once lived a comfortable life, lost most of their property and finances due to the uprisings that overwhelmed Poland a few years before she was born. Maria’s family not only struggled to make ends meet but also had to deal with tragedies early on in their family life. In 1878, her mother died from tuberculosis when Maria was just ten years old. This came three years after the family dealt with their first tragedy, which was the death of Zofia (Maria’s oldest sibling) due to typhus.

These two deaths in their family prompted Maria to turn agnostic, despite growing up with a devoutly Catholic mother.

Maria was only sixteen years old when she received her first significant academic accolade: a gold medal upon her graduation in 1883. She took the year off soon after to stay with relatives in the countryside so that she could heal from a collapse, which many pinpoint was due to depression.

In those times, women were not permitted to study in regular institutions of higher learning. So, together with her sister Bronislawa, she instead opted to go with the underground Flying University, which was the only Polish institution that accepted female students.

As money was still tight, Maria took a job first as a tutor and then as a governess for a family of a distant relative, the Zorawskis. There, she fell in love with Kazimierz Zorawski, the son who would later become a renowned mathematician. As she was poor, the parents of Kazimierz rejected the relationship.

In the early 1890s, Maria focused her efforts on earning enough funds to pay for further education in Paris, to where her sister had moved. She also busied herself by learning from a tutor and self-studying. It was also during this time that she embarked on her life-long training in science, beginning in a chemical laboratory in Warsaw.

In the latter part of 1891, Maria left for France and lived with her sister before securing quarters of her own near the University of Paris, which was where she pursued studies in mathematics, chemistry, and physics. Maria, who then became known as Marie (as is the French counterpart of her name), struggled for resources and had occasional fainting spells from lack of sustenance. Still, she kept to her studies during the day and earned a little during the evenings through tutoring work. Finally, in 1893, she obtained a physics degree and began working for Professor Gabriel Lippmann in his industrial laboratory. At this time, she pursued another degree at the same university a mere year after.

Marie’s scientific career benefited from opportunities to engage in experimentation and research through commissioned work from both the private and public spheres. It was also during these early years that she met and fell in love with Pierre Curie, a fellow physicist and instructor at the School of Physics and Chemistry in France.

Pierre proposed marriage and Marie only agreed after a visit to Poland. She went back to Poland with the intent to pursue her work in the academe in her native country but it yielded no success simply because she was female. Pierre and Marie were married on July 26, 1895, and apart from their passion for science, they spent ample time on shared pursuits, such as trips abroad and long bicycle rides together. The Curies were blessed with two daughters, Irene and Eve. The couple frequently collaborated on scientific pursuits together in their makeshift laboratory and, among their other accomplishments, are credited for the discovery of element radioactivity, and the new elements “polonium” (named after her native Poland) and “radium” (Latin for “ray”). The husband-and-wife team published 32 scientific papers from 1898 to 1902, which included one that identified that tumor cells are quickly destroyed with radium exposure.

Pierre tragically died on April 19, 1906 in a road accident, which left Marie devastated. But despite yet another loss, she still forged ahead with her academic and scientific pursuits. In the same year, she accepted, on behalf of her husband, a professorial chair at the University of Paris, making her the first female professor of the esteemed university.

Marie Curie became the first female faculty member at Ecole Normale Superieure in 1900. She obtained her doctorate degree in 1903 from the University of Paris.

She received two Nobel Prizes – in 1903 for physics, and in 1911 for chemistry. She is the first female recipient of the Nobel Prize, the first person and only woman to have prizes in two fields, and the only person to ever win in multiple sciences.

She also received the following awards: the Davy Medal (1903), Matteucci Medal (1904), Actonian Prize (1907) and the Elliot Cresson Medal (1909).

Being a female in Marie Curie’s lifetime and chosen field often meant inequality. She was initially supposed to be kept out of the Nobel Prize honor until her husband found out and issued a complaint. She was not permitted to speak at a radioactivity lecture at the Royal Institution in London because she was a woman. She was forced to be very thorough in outlining her significant contributions to papers she pushed, as not doing so could result in repercussions in the acknowledgment of her work and originality. Marie was bypassed for an election to the French Academy of Sciences in 1911 in favor of Edouard Branly, the inventor who assisted in the creation of the wireless telegraph.

Her personal life was also challenging due to her success as a female scientist. The media did not spare her; using her lack of religion and foreign status as excuses to criticize her and creating false stories that she was Jewish. A relationship she had developed with physicist Paul Langevin in 1910 to 1911 was branded a scandal due to Langevin being a man whose wedding was on the rocks, and quite possibly because she was five years his senior. A mob had formed in front of her home, accusing her of being a Jewish home-wrecking foreigner. Marie, together with her daughters, had no choice but to seek refuge in a friend’s home.

Despite the attention from the scientific community and the world, Marie usually preferred to stay out of the limelight unless she had to generate funds to further her research. She (and also Pierre) did not patent their important discoveries so that research on these by other scientists could continue freely. She was known to the donate money she had received from her work in science to friends, family members, and the needy.

During World War 1, she designed and created mobile x-ray machines that helped front-line medical officers treat the wounded, using her own supply of radium. An estimated one million soldiers benefitted from her invention. She trained more than 200 women to become medical aides.

Marie even went as far as trying to donate her Nobel gold to the war effort, which was declined by the government. Unfazed, she instead purchased war bonds and used her Nobel Prize money to do so. Despite these humanitarian efforts, Marie Curie never received any recognition from the French government.

Marie Curie spent her post-war years touring various countries to deliver lectures and raise funds for various research efforts on radium. She had travelled to the United States, Brazil, Spain, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia. She became a member and fellow of many important research institutes and international commissions.

On July 4, 1934, Marie Curie died from aplastic anemia in Sancellemoz Sanatorium. Her cause of death was believed to be due to her long-spanning exposure to radiation. Her remains, and those of her husband Pierre, were relocated to the Pantheon in Paris as a way of honoring their achievements in the field of science.

Marie Curie’s tireless and groundbreaking scientific work, conducted from within a prejudiced and patriarchic culture has made her a woman to look up to. Her achievements have shaped society, saved millions of lives, and became the entry points for even more groundbreaking work in the fields of science and medicine.

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Behind Africa’s original mass-market internet service provider is female entrepreneur Njeri Rionge, popularly known as “the serial entrepreneur”.

Rionge grew up in Nairobi and had what she calls a normal upbringing. Her father was the head architect for the city council of Nairobi and her mother was a farmer. She was the first-born child in their family of five. Later in life, she married Canadian, John Hogan, and had a daughter, Waruiru. She now divides her time between Canada and Kenya.

Soon after finishing high school, Rionge had her first taste of the world of entrepreneurship, selling yogurt during school break times, setting up shop literally in the back of a friend’s car. Her other job at that time was as a hairdresser. She soon discovered her mainly wealthy clients wanted more access to luxury goods. Seeing this opportunity, Rionge wasted no time and took economy courier trips to London to buy branded clothing, flew back to Kenya and sold her wares to her clients for a tidy profit. Through it all, she completed several vocational certificate courses that she credits to be instrumental in developing the resourcefulness required in her chosen field of entrepreneurship.

The decade of the nineties saw the boom in personal computers and the slow-growing reach of the internet, which was at that time still restricted to the use of the wealthy and important people in business. Still, towards the tail end of the nineties, Rionge saw a good opportunity to provide internet access to the Kenyan masses. She then started Wananchi Online in 2000, which eventually became extremely popular as an affordable and accessible internet service provider. The name, meaning ‘citizen’ in Swahili, was chosen to deliberately align the company with its objective of providing internet access to regular Kenyan citizens.

There were many challenges to starting up Wananachi Online. Rionge describes the experience of her first big startup as a ‘roller coaster ride’. It was the general assumption in Kenya, and the rest of Africa at that time, that the internet was a service only for the elite – a notion that Rionge had to challenge in order to break through. At that time, many of Kenya’s movers and shakers still had no concept of the opportunities the internet offered. Also, she had strong resistance from essential factors such as the government, industry regulators and existing competition. Still, she dealt with the blows brought by each, and won in the end.

Changing the status quo was made easier with training courses on computer use for politicians (who had to give the nod) and the encouragement for the information technology sector to further develop. The challenge of the limited telecoms infrastructure in Kenya, Telkom Kenya (which was also owned and monopolized by the government), was resolved in a painstaking manner by Rionge and her partner. At one time, they spent over two hours inside the office in order to fill out forms that totaled six hundred pages and photocopied their credentials six hundred times just to secure two hundred phone lines for their venture.

Despite the challenges and setbacks, Rionge’s perseverance not only gave Kenya the gift of affordable access to the internet but also allowed her to expand Wananchi Online into something bigger: the Wananchi Group, which became the leading provider of broadband internet, cable television and internet-based mobile services in East Africa.

True to form, Rionge busied herself with other things apart from Wananachi, even while it was still being developed. Other ventures that she went on to establish include the following: a business consultancy (Ignite Consulting), a healthcare consultancy (Ignite Lifestyle), one of the most popular digital marketing companies in Kenya (Insite), and the leading startup incubator in Kenya (Business Lounge).

Rionge’s passion for startups means that she operates on a formula of building organizations and then handing them over to others to operate before moving on to the next. A desire for further education in the world of entrepreneurship has prompted her to continually invest in building a space for many entrepreneurs in Business Lounge, where they can gather to develop ideas, brainstorm, network and finally turn promising ideas into robust enterprises. She has now also turned her name, Njeri Rionge, into a brand that services budding entrepreneurs by providing them with coaching services and giving motivational talks.

Njeri Rionge takes no break from her role as a serial entrepreneur. She has lived in seven countries, excluding Kenya, and is well travelled – with countries such as Italy, Canada, Greece, London, Spain and the United States being particularly impactful to her as a businesswoman with a gift for identifying innovations. Her driving force is to develop Africa into the “next big economic miracle”, and has stated in many interviews about her desire to do her part in helping the continent reach its full potential.

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Social media management requires the ability to stay organized and on top of things. This is why applications that help you do both are greatly appreciated, provided they have the features you need. As one of the more popular social media management tools, Hootsuite has definitely gained a respectable following. But is it the one for you?

Hootsuite in a Nutshell

Hootsuite is a web-based application with the selling feature of allowing you to control your social media streams all from a single dashboard. Some of the features that you can do straight off this dashboard include:

• Writing, sending, scheduling and tracking multiple posts from multiple accounts

• Adding team members and assigning work flows

• Monitoring social media performance and analytics

• Directly replying to different posts and accounts

What To Love About Hootsuite

1. Single dashboard management. If you manage a lot of accounts, it is so much easier to attend to social media tasks through one dashboard instead of through multiple open windows in your browser.
2. Works with the most popular social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, WordPress, ping.fm, Instagram, Vimeo, and more.
3. Allows you to work, collaborate and manage a team. Tasks can be assigned, marked as done, and more so you can be sure that everyone is on top of their responsibilities.
4. Has a social media monitoring function. It tracks what people say about your brand so you can read everything they say through a search term-based feed of public mentions. It does not have extended features when it comes to this function, but the fact that it also offers this is already a big plus.
5. Allows you to store ‘draft tweets’ of commonly asked queries so you can pull this up and use it to respond to multiple customers who ask the same thing.
6. Works with all browsers and extends functionality on smartphones, tablets and phablets through the mobile app.
7. Sends automatic, weekly analytics reports to your email so you are updated on your accounts’ performances. These emails include graphs that show key metrics (for ex. clicks per day, most popular links, geographical information, etc.) that business owners will definitely find handy.

The Bottom Line

Perhaps one of the things that make Hootsuite a crowd favourite is the fact that, despite some hiccups, its free version is permanent and working. Even if you do not have the means to buy a paid plan, the free one will not bog you down with any required upgrades. Given all of these, it can be safe to say that Hootsuite remains an attractive option for individuals or small businesses that need a cost effective solution to managing social media. For those who are tasked with managing enterprises, the paid version – with its wider spread of features such as detailed analytics may be the road to take. Whichever option you choose, for as long as its features align with your needs and budget then you will surely find Hootsuite to be an indispensable tool for strengthening your social media presence.

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LastPass have found a great solution – the program allows you to automatically log in to a site or account without having your information compromised.

LastPass is a password manager program that consolidates your passwords and login information in a secure way. Its main selling point is the automatic login feature to any site that you have already visited and have already entered your corresponding information.

LastPass aims to simplify things for you by making download and installation easy and with the barest minimum of steps. It has versions for most browsers, so all you have to do is to choose the one that’s right for you. You use your email address to create an account, as well as a password for it. This account password that logs you in to LastPass is where the program gets its name from, referring to it as the “last password” you will ever have to remember.

Once the program is installed, your next step is to go to your needed sites and enter the log in details of each through the LastPass prompt. As you go along, you save Profiles for each type of activity (ex. Online shopping) which makes it easier to organize your Internet activities.

If you are concerned about security of having all your passwords in one cloud in this app, you can opt for an additional layer of security when signing to your Lastpass account. Yubico, Duo:Security or Toopher are some of the other multifactor authentication options that Lastpass supports. Lastpass also follows the best security practices. They have local-only decryption, which means that sensitive data is decrypted and encrypted on your device and is not shared with Lastpass.

LastPass has some great features that are quite attractive to most users, such as:

• Single account log-in for your devices (for premium account), with automatic syncing of new information

• Smooth browser integration. LastPass also gives you the choice to use its universal installer (for major browsers) or just plug-ins for the specific ones

• Clean interface. The program’s interface is well designed; navigation is simple so you can access your information easily. A button pops up every time you enter new login information and this gets stored in the Vault.

• Great credit card organization features. LastPass allows you to make individual profiles for all your credit cards, complete with family member names and billing and shipping addresses.

• Digital file backup. You can make notes for each type of password and attach documents or images to these notes. Notes are then digitally backed up so you have a safe copy stored in case you need it.
• Account sharing. You have the option to let other people log in to your account if you need them to, if they are also LastPass users. This “guest pass” can be for select passwords and can be voided later on if you wish.

Verdict

LastPass is very easy to use and certainly makes logging in to your accounts highly convenient. If you truly want to maximize the program’s features, you will need to fork out for the Premium account. However, one appeasing thing about this is that Premium is only $24 a year, or 2 dollars a month. If you find this to be within your budget, then you will have found a great solution to those multiple, easily forgettable passwords.

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