After contributing to the destruction of productivity at work by helping Facebook through its early days, Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein are launching a new service aimed to make people and businesses productive once again. The company, Asana, announced details today on its funding. However, details on the service itself are still vague.
Here's what we know: The company just raised a $9 million venture round lead by Benchmark Capital with additional funding from Andreessen Horowitz. Marc Andreessen is an advisor and will not be on the board. Benchmark's Matt Cohler, formerly at Facebook himself, will be.
The rest is borderline hand waving. I talked with Moskovitz and Rosenstein this morning about their vision, which anyone who's ever worked can relate to. The product that embodies this vision, though, we don't know much about.
Rosenstein told me, "We started Asana to change the way people manage information, and speed up work by an order of magnitude." They're going to help individuals and teams become, "vastly more productive," he said.
We want more, of course. Rosenstein: "We're not trying to be stealthy, but it's tricky to describe."
Try, please? Here's a bit more: Asana will improve work by solving problems of information transparency. With Asana's hosted service, status meetings will be unnecessary. Organizing yourself and communicating what you're doing should be the same act. We'll fix the explosion of information that knowledge workers need to manage. It will be a software solution to a human problem.
Asana is answering the question, "How would you design productivity for the Web from the ground up?" The founders believe they have hit upon the necessary data and interaction model to improve all of our jobs. You can read more on the Asana blog, if you dare.
We'll believe it when we see it, won't we?
Rosenstein did say the Asana team is using the product internally. He also said that Asana will be a Web app, but that they're trying to provide software-type speed and responsiveness from it. Good.
The product is being built on a new programming system, called Lunacript. The platform itself will be open to users, so they can code in their own business processes. However, all apps will be hosted by Asana, not federated, as Google Wave allows.
When I get a demo, I'll report back. Until then, I don't hear anything that leads me to believe that Google Apps, Microsoft Office, and Lotus Notes have much to worry about. I would very much like to be proven wrong.
Bonus fact: I asked Moskovitz how he felt about Jurassic Park actor Joseph Mazzello being cast to play him in "The Social Network" movie about Facebook. "We are both scared of velociraptors," he said. "That's about all I know."
If you're a regular user of the revision comparison feature in Google Docs, you'll likely enjoy new service Compare My Docs. It comes from the same folks who created TextFlow, the Adobe AIR-based app that spot differences across multiple copies of a Word document or rich text file.
Compare My Docs does many of the same things as TextFlow, including being able to compare up to six versions of the same document to see what's been changed. The big difference though, is that it runs right in your browser and requires no sign-up whatsoever.
Just like TextFlow, Compare My Docs color codes any changes it finds between the different revisions of a document and gives you a quick and easy way to accept, reject, or set aside a change. This means you can cruise through a document and keep the changes or revisions you like, while keeping an active log of what you don't.
When finished, you'll have a new version that has all of those changes, which can be saved either as a Word doc or rich text file back on your hard drive. Although unlike what you can do in TextFlow, with Compare My Docs there's no way to publish the finished product to the Web or save it in parent company Nordic River's servers for safe keeping; something that seems meant to entice users to try out TextFlow instead.
Compare My Docs looks a lot like TextFlow, in fact it basically is, but runs in your browser instead of as an Adobe AIR app.
(Credit: CNET)The service does manage to suffer from some of the limitations in the core technology behind both it and TextFlow, including having photos and charts being stripped out. This means you'll have to add them back in after you've run a few documents through its editor.
Along with Compare My Docs, Nordic River is also finally releasing an API for TextFlow, which will let developers make use of the service's comparison technology in their apps or Web services. This could help make up for some of the service's shortcomings, while augmenting the versioning tools currently offered by some online services. File hosting in particular comes to mind, since places like DropBox and Box.net offer versioning, and version rollback, but in order to see the differences you have to save, then open up each file and look for differences. Those places could now very quickly build tools that let users compare multiple versions of a saved Word or text file from right within the app.
Nordic River says that TextFlow in its Adobe AIR form will remain, but that the site is closing up to new users in a few weeks until it readies a new interface. In the meantime the company will continue its free and paid services to those who have already signed up.
Correction 8:57 a.m. on November 3: This story initially misstated that users could not make edits to the text within the tool. This was due to the functionality not being present in the pre-release version of the site used for review.
Google on Monday will begin giving users a new way to use their existing mobile phone number with parts of its Google Voice service.
No, it's not a full number port, which the company still says is coming and will eventually allow things like call screening, conference calling, or listening into a call before picking up--all with your existing number. Instead, Google is taking advantage of conditional call forwarding to let users send unanswered calls to Google's voice-mail service in place of the one provided by a user's carrier.
Once sent to Google, those voice messages are transcribed, then made available for playback and review online, or as an SMS message. Users can also take advantage of Google Voice's customized greeting service to give callers a different voice-mail greeting depending on what number they're calling from.
Google Voice users can now choose to use their own number, or take one of Google's.
(Credit: Google/CNET)In order to use the new service, a one-time setup is required, which has both new and existing Google Voice users walk through a wizard that asks for their mobile number and what carrier they're on. It then offers up the special numeric code they have to dial to enable conditional forwarding from their handset to Google Voice.
For users who have a Google Voice number in the same account as their existing mobile phone number, it will be business as usual; Google Voice's voice-mail section will denote which number it was from. Google Voice's senior product manager, Vincent Paquet, explained to me that this system has been designed so users don't have to make any tough choices about which number they want to use. It will also allow users to sign up to Google Voice without having to register a new number.
Smartphone users with visual voice-mail services (such as the iPhone) may find that these extra features aren't enough to warrant making the switch. However, users with older handsets are likely to find Google's offer enticing since it enables them to manage voice-mails both from their phone and on the Web.
The deal is made even sweeter by the fact that all major U.S. carriers are on board, Paquet says. This may come as a surprise to some, considering that just last month, Google, Apple, and AT&T clashed quite publicly over the rejection of Google's Voice application from Apple's App Store in July. But with this new service, Google is merely playing by each carrier's rules, using a feature that's long been available as a way for users to pass on calls they cannot take. There's also some serious potential for carriers to generate extra income in SMS fees for transcribed voice-mail messages that users would have otherwise spent just a minute or so listening to from their phones.
Google Voice remains in private beta, although earlier this month Google began putting invites into the in-boxes of its users, allowing them to invite their friends.
Since I spend so much of my time writing on the Web, I've come across some tools that have helped me become more efficient. Of course, there are lots of resources available to bloggers, so I should note that I don't expect this roundup to be the "be-all, end-all" of blogger helpers.
Everyone has at least a couple tools they find extremely helpful. Share your favorites in the comments below. And if you're a Firefox user, consider trying out these 15 add-ons, designed specifically for bloggers.
Get more productive
After the Deadline If you want to make sure that your blog post is properly edited, using After the Deadline might be your best bet. The app, which can also be downloaded as a WordPress plug-in, analyzes your blog posts to ensure that your spelling and grammar are correct.
I first came across After the Deadline when it was acquired by Automattic. Since then, I've been quite impressed by the service. It's almost invariably accurate and useful. After the Deadline is available as a WordPress plug-in so it automatically analyzes your posts, but the site also provides a "demonstration module" for those who don't use WordPress.
After the Deadline is for anyone looking to improve their writing.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Copyscape If you're concerned that there are sites on the Web stealing your content, Copyscape is worth checking out. The service allows you to input a URL into the search field. Once you do so, it finds sites that may be copying your pages for their own gain. From there, it provides a links to those sites, so you can see what exactly is being copied.
If you're concerned that your content is being used for purposes you don't approve of, Copyscape is a site worth checking out.
Find out if someone is copying your site with Copyscape.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)
Communication organization tool Gist is opening up to everyone on Tuesday, and has come a long way since we profiled its private beta offering back in January. It can still plug into your Gmail, Outlook and LinkedIn accounts and help organize things like personal information, appointments and past correspondence. But since then it's added other sources like Salesforce, Facebook, and Twitter. In fact, the company says it's Twitter's third largest API partner, pulling in all of its users' contacts' tweets in real time.
All of this information is funneled into Gist's dashboard, which now lets you tag contacts to make groups of people you regularly follow. It also lets you filter how much of a contact's timeline you want to see from the last 24 hours, all the way to the last three months. This can help cut down on some of the noise as well as give you a broader overview of what they've been up to, something you can tweak further by turning on and off what kinds of content sources you want to see.
Despite removing the private registration, Gist will remain in beta and free of charge, although a paid subscription service is on the horizon. This will be aimed less at casual users looking to track information about friends and more for business users who want to get quick (or detailed) news flybys of contacts and clients before an important meeting--kind of like what a good personal assistant would offer.
Previously: Gist hopes to solve your e-mail overload woes
Gist gives you a quick look back at your correspondence with someone, as well as incoming news and social feeds from them.
(Credit: CNET)
If you're contemplating switching to another e-mail provider, but have been too lazy to do a feature comparison of the competition, there's a new tool that might be of assistance. Aptly named E-mail Service Guide takes more than 100 hosted e-mail providers, and lets you comparison shop by feature.
This is handled gracefully with a search tool that lets you plug in which options you want, like whether the service has POP3 and IMAP (Internet Mail Access Protocol) support, or customer service by phone or e-mail so you can talk to an actual human if something goes wrong.
It can also tell you how much each service will cost, by breaking down its price according to how many months you're planning to use it. This includes things from the fine print like sign-up fees or required contracts, all of which can be simply sorted by column.
Looking for the e-mail provider with the biggest attachment size? This tool lets you sort to see which one is the tops.
(Credit: CNET)Since the tool is focused on premium services, missing are consumer-grade options like the vanilla version of Gmail, Windows Live Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail. Instead you have providers like Zimbra, GoDaddy, and Rackspace--many of which have service license agreements, multi-user seating, and more generous attachment size limits.
See also: Wikipedia's chart of Web mail providers
Twitter's usefulness can most often be measured during times of disaster, when the quick spread of important information can really make a difference. And guess what--that works for traffic jams too. CommuTweet is proof of that, with a new service that lets those who are unfortunate enough to get stuck in traffic, or a long-delayed bus or train line to share that information with others.
The service revolves around the use of a specially formatted tweet that can be localized to whatever state you're in, and what kind of transportation you plan on riding. To get things narrowed down to this level, users have to construct their outgoing messages in a special format. This starts with a #CommuTweet hash tag, followed by the abbreviated name of the state, followed by a one letter short code that tells other users what part of the transit system is down or backed up, be it bus, subway, ferry and rail. When completed, this leaves users with around 125 letters to type any additional information about what's gone wrong.
(Credit:
CNET)
To access all of this information, users can either view and sort it from CommuTweet's site, or through Twitter's search tool. However, the benefit of using CommuTweet is that you can log-in using your Twitter credentials and get it to automatically add the hash tag and location to your outgoing messages--that is as long as they're done from its composition tool. It can also post the message just to CommuTweet and not your public timeline, as well as filter the tweets you see from others to just your state and your preferred form of transportation.
Using CommuTweet I was able to set up my commute parameters in about a minute. The problem, at least for California, is that it's a big state with many different transportation mediums. In most cases I'm better served simply subscribing to the news feeds of the public transit services I use, or logging into their sites to see if there are any alerts. That's where this tool really impressed me though--it's already subscribed to these feeds. As long as the transportation service has a Twitter feed it'll show up on CommuTweet. This solves one of the biggest problems with these crowd-sourced solutions, which is seeding any lapse of user-created data with a constant stream of information from the source.
See also TrafficTweet, which lets users tweet traffic alerts for specific cities. It also has a mobile app which can add exact location and show you where jams are happening, which CommuTweet cannot currently do.
Related: Who owns transit data?
(via KillerStartups)
I've been using the SmarterFox Firefox add-on (Windows | Mac) for awhile now. It's by far one of the most varied productivity add-ons for Firefox that I've seen. Its clever tricks to speed up searching, browsing, downloading, and even copy and paste are good news for just about anyone whose job description contains the word "Web."
I've put together a SmarterFox slideshow to walk you through the substantial features. Without giving away too much, SmarterFox facilitates faster search through multiple channels, including the Firefox Awesome Bar, the context menu, and Wikipedia enhancements. It also helps launch Web sites faster, and has a novel way of dealing with pagination for sites with multipage articles, and for shopping sites displaying pages of results. Check out the gallery to see exactly how these features work.
I'm a heavy e-mailer on my iPhone, and one of the things that really bugs me about the built-in mail client is that it falls just short of being ready for business use. For instance, it lacks the option to flag messages, have different signatures for different accounts, or simply turn on and off an out-of-office auto-responder. But what really irks me on a daily basis is the search tool that got added in OS 3.0. Don't get me wrong, this was a really important thing to add--but there's a big problem with it: it's limited to the subject line and who the sender or recipient was.
That level of search is certainly a good start, but it doesn't compare to newly-released app ReMail (download), which can index an entire e-mail account and do full-text search within all your messages. You want to find a word or phrase in an e-mail body? It can do that, and it's fast. Better yet, it doubles as its own e-mail app, so you can open up and read messages; copy parts to stick in new messages; or forward, reply, and delete--all without leaving the interface.
ReMail searches inside of mail messages. Here it's picking out the word "nice" from a handful of messages, including different ones from the same thread.
(Credit: CNET)Of course having the same account in both ReMail and the mail app means that it takes some extra storage on your phone, but what's surprising is how little it uses. A 140MB Gmail in-box I sucked in for my test account squeezed down to just 25MB. It works like that for one main reason--the app doesn't download attachments until you open them. Though the nice thing is that after it's been opened, it stays cached on the device so you can open it again.
Former Gmail engineer Gabor Cselle, who makes the app, is pushing ReMail as a tool for commuters. One thing that makes ReMail especially well-suited for that is that you can access your entire in-box--even offline. That's compared to the iPhone's built-in Mail app, which has to hit the servers to continue a search if what you're looking for falls outside of what it has recently saved on the device. This can also be a boon when traveling internationally, since you can access and search your account without being connected to, or having to sync up with any servers.
As fantastic as the app is, there are a few annoying bits that will keep it from fully replacing the Mail app, including the fact that it's currently limited to one account at a time. You can go in and switch it with another account, but then your old index gets deleted. Another pain point is that it doesn't work with Microsoft Exchange, just Gmail and IMAP. That's fine for casual users, but business users won't be able to get all that full-text search goodness on their work accounts, which for me, would have been one of the big draws. Cselle told me that Exchange and other account types, like POP, would be added later down the line, but for now he just wanted to get it out there.
Other small annoyances include no landscape view, and a slider you have to toggle every time you want to copy text from a message. I didn't mind this at first, but it's a real drag when you realize you want to copy something halfway down a message and have to go all the way back up to the top to turn that mode on.
For $4.99, this is a very, very solid way to search through e-mail. Though like many other innovative applications that have come along to try to improve on what Apple's done, it runs the risk of being made obsolete by the very product it's trying to fix. I wouldn't put it past Apple to have full-text e-mail search as part of its next major OS update--if not sooner, considering it's already such a big part of its desktop application counterpart. Though if you're willing to invest in this app in the meantime, you'll never have to trudge through e-mails again.
The good:
• Fast, highly-customizable search
• Autocompletion of search terms
• Saved search terms
• Built-in e-mail functions that let you create news messages right inside the app
• Local cache of data for offline reading
The bad:
• Limited support for e-mail services
• Possible obsolescence by an Apple software update
• No landscape view
• Copy and paste toggle is clunky
• Can take a very long time to do the first in-box download, and you have to leave the app running while it's happening
• App can crash when doing long downloads or when opening up attachments
New features in Google's Reader product make it easier for users to share, manage, and discover content. Reader users can now pick certain sites they want to share to. It's very much like the drop-down sharing tool we have here at CNET, although Google is giving users the option to pick which ones they want to see from the drop down, as well as add their own. This may seem like an extra step, but for people who are really going to use the feature, it cuts down on both how fast the menu appears, and how much of your screen it takes up--two things Google obsesses about.
Google has also implemented a more granular system for clicking the "mark all as read" button, which would originally just restart your read count back to zero. The new system lets you pick to mark everything as read for items older than a day, week, or month. This means you can go without using the service while you're on vacation, and still begin catching up on items without disturbing the flow, and feel of using it on a daily basis.
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Reader now pulls up your friend's personal feeds, as long as they've filled out their Google profiles.
(Credit: CNET)Though what may be more important than both these features, is the way Google Reader now finds feeds from people you're friends with on the service, and lets you subscribe to them one at a time. Previously it just showed you what items they were sharing.
When I tried this new system out on my CNET colleague Rafe Needleman, one of his feeds was FriendFeed, which meant I only needed to subscribe to that one since all of his other feeds were wrapped up into it. I could also just grab his personal blog, Twitter account, or Delicious bookmarks. One thing to note though, is that Google is using its own profiles system to do this, which means you'll only see these extra feeds if that user has filled out their profiles there.
These changes have not been carried over to the mobile version of Reader, however mobile Reader users can now choose to open up directly to their feeds list, which has quick links to items from friends and items they've shared. It's likely some, like the new "mark as read" and sharing options will be added soon.
