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There are a whole bunch of challenges to be faced if you are thinking of working from home or are already remote working. Though you save on the commute to work you still have to deal with the psychological journey from the bedroom to your home office and if you live in an urban cul-de-sac it is unlikely that Prêt a Manager or a Starbucks have procured next door’s garage for you to pop to for lunch. So, to help the work at home pioneers, we have come up with some online comforts and new gadgets to make your home feel more like the epicenter of your personal corporate universe.

1. No one likes talking to themselves. Fire, hire or hold that “one to one” virtually using Voice Over Internet with www.skype.com together with the machismo new JABRA Dog Tag Bluetooth Headset.




2. As you predicted working at home your personal wealth will soar. While it is growing keep an eye on your Finance and Expenses over the internet with the powerful www.xero.com.



3. Pretend you oversee the sales arm of a large global firm. Email a bunch of people you don’t know with angelic ease using www.mailchimp.com.



4. The desk drawer and the gopher kid only exist in the movies from the 80’s. Share your documents and the office memo with the rest of the team online and in technicolor with www.sambajam.com.



5. No time to grab lunch? let lunch grab you, order food over the internet with www.tescodirect.com.



6. Missing the timpani from the office lift, let background music lift your spirits when the house is too quiet with www.spotify.com.



7. No office can be complete without a designer executive chassis. This one is the Ferrari of Office Chairs for a low carbon drive, The Charta Chair.



8. The world's sleekest desk you can eat your cereal off it. The Computer Desk by Milk.



9. So reflective you can gaze incessantly at your own corporate reflection. The only feedback you need is yours with the Ultra slim Sony TV with 3D Glasses.



10. So you don’t have forty stories, your home office is in a bungalow or a flat in a two story converted semi. Doesn’t mean you need to feel left out. Get big brother to watch your new pimped out home office with security from Vitamindinc when your away.

The summer is coming to a close. We were lucky to have Mat join the team in July on a industrial placement. He was highly regarded by the team and although he is now returning to France to continue his studies we will be keeping in touch. Mat kindly left us with an overview of his experience working at Sambastream. To learn about his experiences visit our career page.

We are looking forward to catching up again soon Mat! Good luck with the final year. On behalf of all the team.

I just realised I never followed up on our trip to the US so thought it was about time I rectified that. Well as I mentioned on our blog while we were out there, going to the US was eye opening. The approachability of people out there, and the insights and the way they operate, puts the UK Entrepreneurship scene to a lot of shame!

One example of how approachable US Entrepreneurs are compared to the UK, is Gist.com founder T.A. McCann. Two days before we were due to fly out to Seattle, Clarence sent me a link to their site to show an interview they did showing their product. I'd never heard of them, but I thought the product looked cool, and when we saw they were in Seattle we thought why not get in touch? Within 10 minutes of emailing them, T.A. had emailed us back and we had a meeting arranged for the following Monday.

And just in case you thought he had nothing better to do than meet start-ups he'd never heard of from the UK, when we turned up, he was in the middle of a team meeting and had just received $6.75mil. in VC funding a couple of weeks before! This is a busy guy, and we really appreciated him taking the time to meet up with us, talk about what we were doing and give us some extremely useful advice.

T.A. wasn't a one off on our trip either. People out there really appreciate the importance of openness, helping each other out with good advice, and its something dearly missing from the UK start-up scene. In later blogs I'll mention so of the other great people we met on our trip.

As for Gist.com, he signed us up for the private Beta they're running, and its Great! Now that I have to start the very nerve-racking task of cold calling companies to get our product out there, I've found Gist is the perfect tool to give you all the information you need to do that! Once you send someone an email, they automatically get put into your list of contacts and when you click on their name, it aggregates - automatically - all the information about them on the web such as their Twitter account, Google searches, websites...it does what I would have to manually take 30-60 minutes to do properly so I can at least know a little about who I'm calling before I pick up the phone.

Make sure you definitely check out Gist.com, its getting some great buzz and is a truley useful tool for anyone that lives by networking. Maybe T.A. founded Gist.com for that reason, he obviously believes in the power of making new connections and his tool is all about helping people do just that!

In an effort to provide more value to our customers, we will be publishing a series of white papers to share the years of experiance we have accumulated around Document Management, Online Collaboration and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

The first white paper - An Introduction to Document Management, is a nice introduction for those who have little or no knowledge in this area on what it is, and how it helps organisations.

To view this paper, and all the others we will be publishing - just click on the 'White Papers' link above or go here.

If you have any suggestions for white papers you would like to see, please leave a comment below and we'll try our best to provide a useful white paper that addresses core topics and issues people have in the above areas.

Our Service

At SambaStream we live and breath Content Management and Collaboration technology. Our team has a wealth of experience across a number of sectors and types of projects. SambaStream Professional Services are available to assist clients in the planning and delivery of Web Solutions for Content Management, Content Publishing and Collaboration.

For those of you who have been following our blog, you may have wondered what happened to us. Well the short answer is nothing, we're still here, and still moving forwards at a fantastic pace!

Firstly, since we last posted a blog, you may have noticed our site has got a lot better looking and finally has some details on what we're planning to launch later this summer, SambaJam.

SambaJam is a product of all the knowledge and experience we've accumulated working with big and small clients who are itching for web 2.0 collaboration in their organisations, but struggling to find a complete solution that fits their needs. Well SambaJam is quite literally going to be the most advanced collaboration platform out there when we finally launch our Beta later this summer, and because we've built it with businesses and large organisations in mind, it will fit into any small or large organisation simply and securely. Watch this space for more info on what SambaJam will be, and make sure you sign up for our private beta (see form left) today so we can invite you to get a first look at SambaJam and most importantly get your key feedback in before the final version.

Secondly, we have just bought on another member to our team, Mathieu, a very competent and enthusiastic developer from France. He will be a great help to getting SambaJam completed with all the extra features and ideas we keep coming up with during the development. More from him soon...

So rest assured, we're still here and we're more alive than ever! Over the next few months we'll be visiting the US for a trip to the valley, getting SambaJam launched and hopefully with your support, show the world how online collaboration should be done!

I hope you have all had a good weekend! On Saturday we celebrated David's 28th Birthday at Konaki Greek Traverna (this place is good) and Zebrano.

On Sunday we welcomed our first developer to the Sambastream fold, Zhijun! After our first round of applications and interviews we were dazzled by his enthusiasm and java profficiency. Zhijun turned around an impressive GWT demo within a couple of days. Welcome to team!

Last night we all got a chance to take a (short) break from our start-up to celebrate Ale's 28^th birthday. The party was in Guanabara in Holborn, the kind of place you'd expect a start-up called SambaStream to hang out, and probably where we'll be again in 2 weeks for my birthday! Anyway, happy birthday to Ale!

We have had a large number of responses to our adverts for developers. It is great to see so many smart, qualified and enthusiastic applicants! We hope all our applicants will have patience as the team carefully reviews the questionnaires and cv's that have been submitted. Once complete we will start interviewing the lucky group that matches the roles we have available to start February.

Thank you to all who have shown interest! We will be in touch soon.

Working at SambaStream

We like working with the best, motivated, creative and skilled people. We are looking for high calibre Java developers. We have full-time positions available for an experienced Java developer and placements available to talented students.

Please click here to apply.

Thank you,

The SambaTeam