VentureBeat

Jeffrey McManus, a former Yahoo developer, has unveiled a product called Approver, a new way to collaborate on projects online.

It lets you create a document and solicit feedback from numerous people, keeping the document intact and in once place while others approve or suggest edits.

Approver offers a system of alerts, showing the sender if a recipent has gotten the request for collaboration, and whether it has been approved or edited. A recipient of the request gets an email, with a link. This takes them to a document, and they can respond by checking an “approve” box, or supply suggestions with an edit box. It uses Word-like revision tracking features — with highlights in red so you can easily see suggested changes.

Here is a a tour, just released. We tested it a couple of weeks ago.

For certain projects, Approver has more convenience than email correspondence, which can confuse by producing multiple copies of attachments. And it avoids use of expensive work-flow software, or the default openness of the publishing format offered by wiki software.

In many cases, it may replace conference calls, meetings and email. It’s free to create one document, and you can send it for an unlimited number of approvals. Significantly, McManus started charging people immediately for use of more than one document, in order to cover costs from the beginning, he said. How revolutionary. It costs $5.95 a month to create more than one document, or $39.95 year.

McManus says he’s been bugged for years by the lack of something aiding collaborate work-flow that that most people engage in daily. “I kept running into the same problem, over and over again,” he told us. “I’d send a Powerpoint out to some people. One person would grunt. Other people wouldn’t say anything. I was left asking, ‘Did they get it? Did they care? Did they not have enough time? Whatever…” Sometimes, many people responded, and his email box was polluted with similar me-too comments.

Approver is designed for soliciting feedback, typically for an editing process that may take a week or two. The idea is to publish it later. “With a wiki, some people are hesitant about using it; they don’t want to see their errors broadcast around the Internet,” he said.

This is a bootstrapped company; he has raised no money. He is based in San Francisco, and has one other person helping him in New York.

Updated

3Jam has launched a new way to texting friends in groups, and we think it’s going to do well. Multi-person texting simply isn’t possible yet, and with 80 million people with texting in the U.S. and growing, 3Jam may be hitting a sweet spot.

And texting is the technology of the future. Among college students, there’s a 75 percent usage rate. (For the uninitiated, when we say texting, we’re refering to the short messages people send on their mobile phone, known as SMS, or Short Message Service).

Texting is a little awkward. You type on a small screen, and you’re only able to message one person at a time — until now. 3Jam is solves that problem. It lets you message more than one person — in fact, as many people as you want. Now, if you are running late to that concert, you don’t have to send a message three times to your friends to notify them individually. You just send it once.

We tinkered with 3Jam over the past couple of weeks, and it works well. On our Treo, it took a while to get used to, because the Treo messaging interface is different from most phones. But 3Jam has since released a special application for Treos, which makes things a lot easier. So for Treo or regular phone, it works smoothly.

Here’s how it works. On most phones, you type in: “text (friend #1’s name) (friend #2’s name)” This creates the group. Then you type in a message, and send it to “43526,” which is 3Jam’s short-code number. It is that easy. The message goes to those friends, as well as to your own phone.

Once your friends get the message, they can hit “reply” and send a message to the group too. 3Jam assigns a random number, say 54880, to the group, so that anyone in the group can message the group at that number through the day without having to retype the names.

The Treo app makes it even easier. It requires a download. But then it saves time. Under a “To” tab, you can pull down a menu to select the contacts you want to send to, and send the message to them.

(You can also go to 3Jam.com for directions on how it all works, though the Treo App will soon be available exclusively through Andrew Carton’s blog Treonauts until DEMO. Update: Specific link to Andrew’s post is here, and download itself is here.)

We talked with Andy Jagoe, chief exec of the small start-up. The idea for 3Jam arose when he tried emailing some people for after-work drinks. He found email only worked when people were sitting at their desk. He wanted to reach them all on their phones, where they were likely to be as they rushed for the door at the end of the day. Enlai Chu is the other co-founder.

3jam began testing a private version of this last year. He has since added a few key people to his team, including Thad White, from Yahoo’s mobile product team, and Tom Purcell, who was the first business exec at Danger, and who helped that company launch with T-Mobile.

The 3Jam service will go live officially on Sept 25, when the company launches at DEMO

White brought some “aha” insights from Yahoo, Jagoe explains. About half of all Yahoo’s traffic comes from messaging, either email or instant messaging. And a full one-third of the email traffic is to more than one person or to “reply all,” Jagoe says. If you enable multi-party texting, the thinking goes, you’ve got an immediate, huge market. There are 200 million people in the U.S. with mobile phones, and 40 percent of them are texting, but none of them are able to do multi-party texting.

From 3Jam’s trials, Jagoe says users are reporting they are using their phone more. Jagoe says multi-party messaging could mean a 30 percent increase in overall text messaging.

One user sent more 656 messages in a 4-week period, and some said they’d pay for the capability, Jagoe said.

(Update: We should have mentioned how 3Jam plans to make money. 3Jam wants revenue share from telecom carriers. Regarding pricing, no matter how many people are in the group, a reply counts as only one text message on their phone bill. Meaning, that if you send a group text message to four people, you don’t pay for four text messages, you pay for only one.)

We first mentioned 3jam back in May. At the time, the Menlo Park start-up had pulled in $500,000 of what was a $1 million venture capital commitment from New Enterprise Associates.