Has anyone heard of Xelerity? December 19, 2008
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Tools.trackback
I just received the following interesting e-mail and was wondering if anyone knew anything about it. I’ve been looking for a tool to share availability with my clients, but this almost sounds too good to be true.
Hello,
There is a new tool on the Internet which allows freelancers to share their availabilities (in terms of dates/volume) with all their know [sic] clients. To access this platform, just go to:
It’s only 2 or 3 euros for six months (payment with a telephone call or credit card).
For the translation buyers, it’s a free service: they can connect to their freelancers ‘agendas, invite others into the system, all this in a known-known basis.
Although not perfect, this is a useful and central tool for the translation community.
Please transfer this message! We will do our best to improve the system in the upcoming months!
Merry Christmas to all of you and your families.
Philippe
Musings from an overworked translator 
I received the same message and I think this is a rip off. If you want to let your clients know if you are available and how busy you are, either ask them to contact you on a regular basis or simply use Twitter. I think Twitter has a lot of disadvantages, and some people may think it is completely useless (that’s what I believed when I saw it for the first time), but I found that it can be very useful if used correctly. Clients can either sign up on Twitter themselves, and then follow your tweets, or they simply subscribe to your RSS feed through your profile. But I would not pay for a service that does little more than send a message to a number of people telling them how busy I am.
I’d hesitate to call the site a ripoff — they’re charging the equivalent of a cup of coffee for six months, and I expect that they’ll keep adding features.
That said, there are lots of ways to collaboratively schedule things, so these guys have some tough competition. Google calendar is one very powerful (and free) example.
What Xelerity appears to have going for it is that they focus on freelance translators, so they ought to be able to offer a lot of cool features that generic services wouldn’t be able to.
I hadn’t heard of it, but I might check it out. I really like discovering and supporting new emerging software. For now, I just use good old e-mail or phone calls, which seem to work fine. I might try Google calendar as well. Most if not all of my clients have generous deadlines and plan ahead, so luckily I am very frequently in the position to accommodate unplanned-for projects if need be.
Why not use the Proz.com Calendar? It is freely available for all Proz users.
@Maxim – Because I am not a paying ProZ member. It really doesn’t offer me any benefits, and I don’t have much respect for it. I find ProZ to be more effort than it’s worth. Bidding is a waste of time. Oh, don’t get me started on my complaints about ProZ… However, their calendar has been tempting me, which is why I am trying to find something similar for my own website. I’m not willing to pay $130 a year to use it though. I prefer to pay the ATA dues instead.
Jill, the calendar seems to be available for all users, including non-paying ones.
@Maxim – Thanks for letting me know! I had no idea. I’ll have to look into it…
I’ve built my own calendar (basically copying proz with the help of some ready-made calendar found on the Web), and made it available through my website (http://www.griffon-traduction.com/disponibilites_en.php). I didn’t think anyone would use it until yesterday, when one of my clients sent me a small project and offered more since I seemed to be available in the coming days.
You need to know some basic html, php and mysql, and be ready to browse through undocumented lines of code, but I’ll gladly share it with anyone interested.
Julien, that is a fabulous calendar. Thanks so much for sharing it! I will definitely be adding it to my site and crediting you for it.