Fried is the founder of 37Signals, a Chicago firm that sells Web software for project management and collaboration under the names Basecamp and Backpack.

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Asana is used for a wide variety of applications, such as project management, software bug tracking, human resources application tracking or a light-weight CRM system.

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Networking giant Cisco is short for San Francisco and enterprise software maker Oracle was the name of a CIA project the founders previously worked on.

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After my graduation I started working for a software consultancy firm where I learned a lot of stuff, from programming to project management.

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James Gosling, the Sun Microsystems engineer who devised Java, has a project called "Jackpot, " aimed at creating a common translator for the many software languages now in use.

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The International Finance Corporation, a member of the World Bank, is using GreenPrint in a pilot project, sending feedback to the company to help fine-tune the software for the corporation's needs.

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So, enter the Cambridge Project for Existential Risk, a joint initiative between a philosopher, a scientist and a software entrepreneur, wants to create a multi-disciplinary research center dedicated to the study and mitigation of risks around the spread of robotic technology.

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While in Japan visiting customers, I met a brilliant project leader for a Japanese engineering firm who told me about how she has eliminated project-related emails by using their project management software.

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