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."
Google Docs has long let users share documents between one another, but folders--a feature Google begrudgingly added to Docs back in mid-2007, have largely been left out of the picture.
That changed on Monday, as users are now able to share entire folders of documents, spreadsheets, and presentations with other people.
The benefit here is that the permissions settings for a shared folder controls the individual file permissions of all the documents inside of it, meaning that you don't have to go through and change each document's viewing permissions one at a time. It's also an easy way to start working on a document, then share it with a select group of individuals without having to remember to invite them in the first place.
Users can now share entire folders with groups of other users.
(Credit: CNET)Google says this was one of the most requested features from its users, as voted on at its product ideas voting page. Google has also used this feedback for guidance in upgrading its Docs file uploader to accept multiple files at once.
Just as users are able to do in Gmail, the Docs uploader now lets users pick multiple files from their hard drive, then see how far along each upload is. The new process makes it much easier for new users to move entire folders into Google's cloud, which could be handy if--or, rather, when--Google decides to open up Docs to more file types.
Docs users can now upload multiple files at once, making it much easier to simply dump an entire folder from a hard drive into Google's cloud.
(Credit: CNET)
Online collaboration service Huddle announced the addition of Web conferencing, an iPhone app, and a Microsoft Office plug-in to its service on Wednesday.
The company's new Web conferencing feature is fully integrated into Huddle. Users will now be able to schedule recurring meetings. They can also share content with outside participants by providing viewing privileges to a member's desktop. A limited number of minutes will be made available, depending on the user's plan. Unlimited conferencing can be purchased separately.
For now, Huddle's Web-conferencing feature is only available to its high-paying Enterprise plan-holders. It plans to roll it out to other paid members over the next few weeks.
On the desktop side, Huddle offered up a new plug-in for Microsoft Office users. The feature will provide access to Huddle files from within Microsoft's office productivity suite. It also lets users save local files directly to Huddle. Users will have the ability to view and edit files, request task approval from other team members, or send notifications. Huddle's Office plug-in is currently in beta testing. The company hopes to make it available by early October.
Finally, Huddle announced a new iPhone app, giving users the ability to access documents, project tasks, and discussions within the group. It's available now for free in Apple's App Store.
Huddle competes in an extremely crowded space. Several companies, including Clarizen and OfficeZilla, provide similar services. Huddle attempts to carve out a niche in the market by making the service affordable. Users interested in Huddle can start using it for free, provided they need just one workspace and no more than 1GB of storage. Plans go up from there to $200 per month for larger organizations.
Philadelphia-based collaboration tool WizeHive is getting a handful of useful updates today.
The service, which is aimed at helping both groups and individuals manage projects and juggle tasks, is evolving into something designed to replace desktop productivity software with features like an integrated word processor, file previewer, and storage with versioning controls that let users roll back to an older version of any file.
Starting today, WizeHive users can create and collaborate on Zoho documents from within WizeHive, and without having to open a Zoho account. Whatever they save is also stored along with the rest of their files and projects back on WizeHive.
Users can now upload up to 50 files at a time, up to 100 MB a pop.
(Credit: CNET)Along with the editor, WizeHive users can also store and share larger files on the service, and more of them at a time. The new cap per file is 100 MB, up from 10. The new uploader also lets users upload up to 50 files at a time, up from single file uploads.
Coming next month will be a way to view previews of certain types of files from within WizeHive. Currently you have to download a file, then open it up in a local application--something that really doesn't work if you're on a computer without the proper software installed. This can also be problematic if you're on a limited connection such as cellular data. Storage services like Box.net have been doing this for a while, and it can be a big time saver.
WizeHive continues to be a free service through its "beta" period. After that, users will have to pay $39 a month, along with an extra few dollars for additional storage and users in a group. See also Seattle-based Liquid Planner, which offers fuzzy due dates on tasks.
Waiting to get your grubby mitts on Google Wave? You'll have to wait just a little bit longer.
While about 6,000 developers got their hands on Wave Monday, a post on the Google Wave developer blog says the company isn't planning to open it up to everyday users until September 30th. At that time, some 100,000 users will be let into the program. To be a part of that first run, users will have had to have signed up to use the service on Google's invite page.
Along with a hard date on the semi-public beta test, Google also highlighted a few developer creations using Wave's API. One of them, called Waves in WordPress, lets bloggers quickly embed an entire Wave conversation into a blog post, which lets readers view and interact with it. Similar tools that let you do that with other social and blogging can be expected as Wave's API matures.
First introduced at the Google I/O Conference back in late May, Wave is Google's re-imagining of Web e-mail, and a sibling of Gmail--the company's current Web mail product. It blends live chat and e-mail in one service, and is one of Google's most experimental creations yet. Google says it still has some more work to do on the project before it's ready for beta testers to start drumming on it, including how fast and stable it is.
Related: Debating the power of Google's Wave
Flash gaming site Kongregate has a new service launching on Wednesday called the Collabs that lets musicians and artists share their work in the hopes of getting it used in upcoming Flash games. Content creators upload their works directly to Kongregate where it goes into a directory that's curated by several of the site's power users.
The Collabs are not just for developers though. Kongregate users can listen to music and view animations, as well as rate them the same way they're able to do with the service's games. In a phone interview, Kongregate's CEO Jim Greer told me that he wants it to be a place for users to explore and discover new designers and musical artists before they go mainstream. Their input also has the power to get some of the ideas turned into games that they can later play, or sound creations that can go into their favorite games, since the highest rated submissions win cash and the chance to get free home game studio tools.
The new sounds section lets music creators share their work with potential developer clients who can preview a track and maybe license it, or hire them to work on game music.
(Credit: CNET)Casual users who have a game design idea will also soon be able to publish it directly to the art Collabs using built-in tools from Aviary. Using special versions of Raven and Phoenix (Aviary's vector and image editors), which run right on the page, users will be able to create new art that can be sent directly to the Collabs. This functionality won't be live on Wednesday, but Greer says it will be there in a week or two.
To handle all the licensing, each item can be set to one of three creative commons licenses--both for acceptable use and acceptable modification. There is no integrated purchasing system though. Instead, each submitter can be directly contacted by those who are interested in their creations or services. There's also Kongregate's "hook up" forum for developers to hire talent or find testers, or for people looking for work to match up with their skills.
Kongregate continues to grow since launching three years ago. Greer says the site is now adding around 1,000 new games a month, which are entertaining more than 7.5 million monthly unique users. That audience is doubling every six months. The site is still driven by ad revenues, although has recently built in a micropayments system which developers can include in their games. This new system will hopefully generate more Flash game development, which should augment those numbers even more.
User created art, as shown off in Kongregate's Collabos.
(Credit: CNET)
Fuzzy scheduling tool Liquid Planner is expanding its reach into the collaborative task management market with a neat new feature called project portals. These are group pages that offer some of the same basic collaboration features you get with the core product, however they can be branded and shared with anyone else who is not a paying Liquid Planner customer.
Any project you're working on in Liquid Planner can now become "portalized." These pages serve as a central place to access shared files and lets outside users keep track on a project's status and ongoing tasks without the coordinator having to go out of their way to keep the other parties updated.
Every portal page includes a built in group microblog, that like Yammer, is a place for team members to provide small status updates on what they're working on. All the other users within that group can then track and respond to those updates, replacing big group e-mails and putting things like edit requests and approvals in the project's workspace.
Most importantly, portals have been designed to serve as a simplified heads-up display. For someone who hasn't used the product before, this makes it far more approachable. There are quite a few knobs and buttons, which give the service an incredible amount of power, but can be overwhelming to someone who isn't familiar with the product. This simply focuses on the basics of progress, tasks, files, and communication.
Project Portals can be branded to match a company or client's look and feel, and give both parties a quick eye on all the details of an on-going project.
(Credit: Liquid Planner)Liquid Planner is letting its users create as many project portals as they want, but unpaid users who have been invited don't get access to all of the service's planning and tracking features. For instance, these users cannot track time, or see the full detail and structure of a project the same way they could if they were a subscriber.
Next up for Liquid Planner is a mobile client. In a phone interview last week, CEO and co-founder Charles Seybold told me the first device to get a native Liquid Planner app will be Apple's iPhone. It's the platform that's most requested by the service's users--the majority of which are in IT. Seybold says the mobile client will bring live notifications, let project members edit task lists, and track project activity. The iPhone version of Liquid Planner won't be here until later this year though. After that, Seybold says other platforms should follow.
There are few, if any, horizontal platforms that offer users the capability to e-mail, create, and edit documents and pictures, and collaborate across all three major desktop computing platforms as well as almost every major smartphone platform. Glide 3.0 has just updated, introducing changes aimed at parental control and creating a child-friendly environment.
Glide's circular interface with pie-chart divisions makes navigating a more interesting task.
(Credit: Glide)The new e-mail filter lets parents intercept all messages sent to a child's in-box. Parents can then approve or deny the e-mails so children can only see preapproved messages, filtering out pornographic spam, phishing attempts, and other junk. Parents need to create a secondary e-mail account in Glide that they can control access rights too, similar to how Glide allows rights controls for attachments if you're familiar with that system.
From there, parents will be able to access the child's e-mail from a drop-down menu on the upper right corner of the e-mail interface. When the parent enters the child's account, they can approve each e-mail individually or as a group by clicking on the e-mail and clicking Approve or Delete. Since all e-mails sent to the child default as unapproved until given a green light, parents don't have to worry about children seeing unauthorized e-mails.
Both children and adult can take advantage of the new drawing and coloring tool. It works a bit like MS Paint, except with Glide's collaborative tools built in, and a much more interesting interface. Colors appear as crayons in a box, and users can choose from preselected backgrounds, a blank canvas, or images in their own libraries to drawn on. Standard drawing tools are included, such as a freehand pen, line tools, typographic text, and shapes. Glide Draw also offers zooming and undo/redo. The tools can be accessed from the Draw text link at the bottom of Glide's main interface.
Existing features in Glide have also gotten a power boost. E-mail import and export capabilities have been overhauled. An Import button will copy the body text of an e-mail into a Glide Write document, while the new Export button creates a PDF, DOC, DOCX, or RTF out of the body text. Attachments can also be one-clicked to a destination folder, and Glide Writer and the Glide e-mail interfaces have seen a design redo.
Interestingly, the Glide Application suite has been integrated into Glide e-mail, so that the word processor, presentations application, photo editor, and collaborative tools are available to all e-mail recipients. Even if you're not a Glide user, the tools will be available to you. This includes automatic group discussions and online meetings. Utilizing Glide Desktop Applications (download for Windows, Mac, Linux, or Solaris) participants can synchronize the files that they're discussing.
Webkit-based browsers Safari and Chrome also earned full support in the Glide OS improvements.
Its stunning cross-platform usability and its equally impressive granular rights-granting for file-sharing and attachments aside, performance improvements appear to not have been part of the most recent Glide OS update. It's not the fastest loading Web application, but users looking for something that will function anywhere on almost any desktop or handheld should check it out.
Soonr is releasing the third version of its service Wednesday with a redesigned Web site and updated iPhone application that brings more of its desktop functionality to mobile users.
On the desktop side, the site has been rearranged to put all of Soonr's collaborative features in one place. Things like past file edits, user comments, and permissions control are now in the same place. And you can quickly create a project and start adding files to it on your own, or with collaborators who will be alerted each time there's a new file, user comment, or a change.
However, many of the biggest changes remain on the mobile application, which the company says should fulfill most of the top requests users had when it originally came out. These include:
- A full-screen document viewer that can be pinched to zoom in and out of large, complex files like spreadsheets.
Streaming video. If you're opening up a supported video file it will play right on your phone.
Contact list integration, so you can send files to people on your phone's contact list, even if they're not a Soonr contact.
You can send and receive eFaxes from your phone if you have an eFax account set up.
The option to create and move around folders, so you can reorganize everything you have saved on the service when you're out of the office. You can even upload files from your phone.
The updated dashboard divides up projects and site activity into different tabs.
(Credit: Soonr)To help sort through everything the service now has a search engine that indexes not just the names of your files, but what's inside them. This works on both the mobile and desktop versions on supported file types; So if you remember a small snippet of a Word document, it will be able to pull it up out of hundreds, or thousands in your account.
One thing that's not coming with this version is the capability to make edits to files from your phone. Creator Martin Frid-Nielsen tells me it's on the road map, and is on track for a future release, but it's not quite ready yet. It's definitely the one thing that keeps this service from being a true replacement for the Web version, since any changes or fixes to your work must be done when you're back on a real machine.
See also: Box.net updates its search to go inside your files
In the 1990s, Lotus Notes gained notoriety, in part, for the nifty collaboration features it brought to corporate e-mail. IBM's CEO at the time, Lou Gerstner, was so impressed that he paid a premium to consummate what began as a hostile tender to buy Lotus in 1995.
Notes went on to become an unqualified commercial success with some 145 million users around the world who use the product. Still, Lotus hasn't quite secured for itself the reputation of offering the must-have enterprise collaboration technology in the age of the Internet.
What with the proliferation of competing Web-based technologies targeting that market, it will be tough for any one company to claim that moniker for itself. But Big Blue will stake its claim with its upcoming entry--courtesy of its Lotus division in Cambridge, Mass.--with a cloud computing angle.
The work comes out of a project that got under way at Lotus last fall to develop an Internet-based collaboration and social-networking service. In Web 2.0 parlance, the idea was to meld social networking with business-collaboration tools in a way to make it easier for corporate users to use and share information. The project was to culminate in finding a way for users to tap the Web to access applications such as instant messaging or document sharing.
So it is that IBM on Wednesday will announce a service called LotusLive Engage, what it bills as an integrated social networking and collaboration cloud service. You can go up on the Web site today and take a tour, but this is a teaser test run. Although the official announcement will take place at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Conference, which opens in San Francisco, LotusLive Engage becomes commercially available on April 7.
Brendan Crotty, program manager of LotusLive said the project, initially geared at the small to mid-size business market, benefited from often frank feedback by beta testers who told IBM what they liked and disliked about the interface. In the hour-long demo I had Tuesday afternoon, it appeared that IBM's designers had taken those comments to heart. The console layout was lapidary and intuitive. Enterprise users who previously worked with products like Notes or Microsoft Exchange shouldn't have any trouble figuring out what does what.
LotusLive Engage's communications and collaboration tools work both within and beyond the corporate firewall so that employees can interact with clients, partners, or suppliers. IBM's phrase to describe what's going on is "extranet collaboration." The short list of the features include profile and contact management, online meetings, file sharing, instant messaging, and project management capabilities.
Any information warehoused on LotusLive services will live in a cloud managed by IBM. Pricing will range from $10 to $45 per user.
I don't think the question is so much whether the product's bells and whistles will spark the same keen interest evinced by the corporate world when Lotus Notes debuted. Cloud computing may be the buzzword du jour, but let's take a breath. Fact is that enterprise customers are still in the tire-kicking phase. There remain myriad questions within IT about security and the guarantee of up time for companies which rely upon the cloud.
But the fact that this is coming out of IBM helps account for the approximately 30,000 businesses that were involved in the pilot program leading up to Wednesday's announcement. Let's make no mistake about it: here's one case where size really does matter.
