July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Sometimes the process of scheduling meetings takes up more time than the meetings themselves. Atlas launched a mobile scheduling app today that seeks to streamline this process.

The apps for iPhone cut down on all the back-and-forth communication and toggling between tabs that people often resort to when setting up meetings. The goal is to stay out of your inbox as much as possible while scheduling. Atlas integrates with your existing calendar products and presents you with available meeting times. You can send someone the times that work for you and they click on the time that works best for them. Appointment made.

“Scheduling right now is a two-screen nightmare for people on all sides,” said CEO Hunter Gray in an interview with VentureBeat. “We’ve taken email, the mode of communication, and the calendar, the hub of context, and put them together on one screen. Atlas fits nicely between mobile calendars and web scheduling products. It is appointment sharing, rather than calendar sharing. We think we can own that market.”

Gray graduated from Yale University and entered the realm of direct sales. He lead a force of 10,000 people and observed “massive” inefficiencies in scheduling. Salespeople out in the field were always on their mobile devices, but they waited until arriving back at their desk to figure out appointment times because it was too much of a hassle on mobile. By then, the moment had passed and people were less inclined to follow up. Along with cofounder Michel Bayan, he set out to build a better system.

In addition to appointment sharing, other features include group scheduling, where you invite people to an event and everyone checks yes, no, or maybe to find the optimal time. Users can also make themselves available, prompting others to schedule a meeting with them. Atlas has productivity features as well, like assigning tasks and notifications when others complete them.

There is a lot of activity in the mobile productivity space. Sunrise, Fantastical, Tempo, not to mention the mobile presence of companies like Asana and web schedulers like Tungle.me. Despite the competition, the founders are confident that their product addresses many of the pain points that these other applications don’t and that the technology provides a superior, cross-platform method for scheduling. Atlas isn’t trying to change the behavior of people who typically make appointments while sitting at a computer. It is for people who schedule on-the-go and want a more efficient way to do it. The app will operate on a freemium model, with a monthly subscription fee for a pro account with added features.

Atlas participated in Launchpad LA and has raised $700K from angel investors.

Photo Credit: Atlas

Asana, the startup that helps individuals and teams get tasks done, has its eye on the prize: large enterprises.

Asana’s team [above] has found that its workflow management tools are popular with small groups of professionals in companies of all sizes. Asana claims its used by thousands of teams to generate over 55 million tasks, and 85 million messages.

But not every task can be completed by small teams. So today, the company has launched its “organizations” service, which is ideal for companies that require greater visibility across hundreds of teams, and thousands of employees.

The San Francisco-based company is the brainchild of former Facebook employees Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein, and was founded in 2009. Originally geared to consumers, Asana’s adoption has grown rapidly, and its mobile and web-based products are used for both personal and professional tasks.

In a phone interview, Rosenstein said the company’s strategy is an “easier sell” than “wining and dining a CIO.” Asana can demonstrate how several teams within the marketing or sales departments are already using the product, but they aren’t communicating with each other.

Business operations lead Kenny Van Zant explained that unlike most companies who offer a free or premium service, Asana is intended to be flexible. Individual employees or teams of under 30 people can still continue using the free version. But for those that make the switch to the ‘organizations’ product, you can now:

• Create an account with your company email address, and you’re automatically added to the ‘Organization,’ and can view what other teams are up to in your browser. It’s a bit like Facebook verifying students with a “.edu” email. This new feature makes it easy for a new employee to get set up.
• Automatically create and name a new team, and invite anyone from the organization. Each team has control of its membership (similarly to a Facebook event, teams can be hidden, made available on request, or public within an organization).
• View a single, unified inbox and task list if you belong to multiple teams.
• Enable IT to create admin accounts to view user activity, set security and access policies, and centralize billing.

Asana has pulled in $38.5 million in venture financing and doesn’t intend to raise another round anytime soon, according to Rosenstein. The startup has grown to 40 employees.

Top image via Asana / Facebook Page

Handle launched out of stealth mode at TechCrunch Disrupt today to provide a rope out of this pit. Its “priority engine” supposedly raises the bar on productivity with tools that combat inbox overload and help you organize your time wisely.

In today’s world, communication proliferates faster than most of us can manage. CEO and founder Shawn Carolan is a managing director at Menlo Ventures. He struggled every day to keep up with his email, and as a result, he didn’t have the time he wanted to actually go out into the field, meet with entrepreneurs, and survey the marketplace. When he searched for solutions that would help him tackle the information overload, he found none that served his needs.

And thus, Handle was born.

“This is not just about getting your email down to zero,” he said in an interview with VentureBeat. “This is about finding and keeping your priorities straight and spending time on the things that matter. We all have one life to live one day at a time. There is work and there is your personal life, and all of your priorities need to be considered in one place to make decisions. We are creating an operating system for your life.”

Carolan said that most productivity products on the market, like Asana or Basecamp, are project-oriented, whereas Handle focuses on the individual. Before building Handle, the team researched behavioral psychology and built tools in direct response to their findings. In the system, people can create task lists and assign each task a priority ranking. Handle places these priorities in a daily calendar that you can rearrange or reassign as other things come up.

On the email side, it has 13 commands that you can use to “triage” your email. This goes far beyond a “later” button, enabling you to delete, archive, label, unsubscribe, and so on. It can place multiple emails within tasks and clicked into for more information. Once everything is organized, you can settle down to execute them.

“If important work is undone or unplanned for, your subconscious will haunt you,” Carolan said. “This is a source for a lot of stress and when you go home, you can’t focus on your family, relax, or be present. We realized that the only way people end up bring happy and feeling good so when they know they spent big parts of their day on the things they care bait most, and brought these things through to completion the best they can.”

As it stands, most people have a hacked together system for staying organized that involves pulling together information from multiple sources and perhaps using what Carolan described as “blunt tools” to make sense of them. Handle focuses on prioritization, with the core belief that productivity stems from there. There are “elegantly incorporated” features to help with capture, triage, plan, and focus with the ultimate goal of fundamentally improving people’s work habits.

To achieve this goal, Carolan raised $4 million in 2011 led by Menlo Ventures. Today, Handle launched web and iOS applications on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York and is now available in private beta. It is free to start, but the company plans to release a premium version down the road. There are currently 15 employees.

Photo Credit: Sean Ludwig

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

When Google bought Quickoffice last year, it was making a very clear play for  the world of enterprise productivity, where Microsoft has traditionally reigned.

Now, Google’s pushing that effort forward with versions of Quickoffice for Android and the iPhone, which join the iPad version released last year.

With the app, Android and iPhone users can view, edit, and create Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents, which can be then saved – naturally – in Google Drive.

That, of course, is bad news for Microsoft, which is taking its sweet time about releasing versions of its Office suite for Android and iOS. (Though it’s getting close, maybe.)

As a result, Microsoft is leaving the mobile productivity space wide open, giving companies like Google and CloudOn a chance to step in. Who would have thought that mobile productivity suites could be this exciting?

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Asana has been laser-focused on improving task workflow for large teams over the past few years, but so far you could only access it on your computer or iPhone. Today, the company is finally opening up to Android smartphones with the launch of a new app.

Founded by former Facebook employees Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein in 2009, Asana aims to solve the common headaches around project management and task management for companies. As Rosenstein told us last year, the company wants to put a stop to “work about work.”

Asana began work on the Android app during its last Episode, a unique interval of time that it uses to chart its development progress, Rosenstein said. Asana lags far behind other team productivity services, like Yammer and Campfire, when it comes to offering an Android app.

“We wanted to make sure that we’d cracked the nut of building a mobile experience that people love before we released to another market,” wrote Rosenstein in an e-mail to VentureBeat. “Once we’d secured a [greater than] 4.5 star rating in the iTunes App Store and we were hearing rave reviews of our iOS app, we knew it was time.”

“Focusing on a single platform — iOS — has allowed us to be meticulous about our mobile development, from responding rapidly to user feedback to developing what we consider to be the best user experience for mobile collaboration and productivity available today,” he added.

The Asana Android app functions as you’d expect: You can create, assign, and edit tasks; search your Workspaces within the service; add comments to tasks; and use the company’s Mobile Inbox for managing projects. The app supports Android Gingerbread devices (Android 2.3), but Asana recommends using it on phones with Android 4.0 or higher.

Asana’s service is free for teams up to 30 members, and it starts at $100 a month for larger teams. Given how much money companies typically spend on productivity and communication training, Asana’s fee will likely feel like a drop in the bucket.

So far, Asana hasn’t released an iPad app, and that likely means we’ll be waiting a while for an Android tablet app as well. But Rosenstein tells me that tablet development is definitely in the company’s long-term roadmap, but for now it’s focusing on web and smartphone apps.

“We think that the tablet experience is more than just a “big phone” experience,” Rosenstein wrote. “As you might expect from a company out to design the future of work, an Asana tablet application needs to be built for the tablet UI and use case, and we’re studying the problem around this.”

The San Francisco-based Asana has raised $38.2 million so far from Marc Andreessen, Owen Van Natta, Peter Thiel and others.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

After successfully bringing Microsoft Office to the iPad, iPhone, and Android tablets, CloudOn is today announcing support for Android phones with version 4.0 of its app.

CloudOn also revealed that its free apps have been downloaded more than 3.5 million times. It runs virtualized versions of popular Microsoft Office apps, including Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.

It streams the apps from CloudOn’s servers — so they require an Internet connection, but you won’t have to worry about snagging a Microsoft Office license. CloudOn also integrates with cloud storage providers DropBox, Box, Microsoft Skydrive, and Google Drive. It also offers CloudOn Filespace, an environment for collaborating on documents.

CloudOn’s Android app is similar to its iPhone app, except for a few differences between iOS and Android app design. The Android app features a redesigned Office Ribbon that’s easier to use on a small phone screen. So far, the Android app supports phones from Samsung and Google’s Nexus line.

“Android Market [now Google Play] is generally very fragmented, we’ve taken an approach to cover 75 percent of the market, with an eventual goal of ubiquity,” said Jay Zaveri, CloudOn’s vice president of product, in an interview with VentureBeat.

Palo Ato, Calif.-based CloudOn has raised more than $33 million in funding, most recently in a $16 million second round in June. Investors include The Social+Capital Partnership, Translink Capital, Foundation Capital, and Rembrandt Venture Partners.

A stealth startup called Tomfoolery closed a $1.7 million seed round to make work “awesome.” It does this by developing user-friendly mobile enterprise applications that are as easy and enjoyable to use as many consumer-facing applications.

“In your personal life, social mobile applications are beautiful, their functionality is meaningful, and they let you to make real, human connections,” said CEO Kakul Srivastava in a statement.  “At work, today’s enterprise software makes us feel about as close to our coworkers as strapping spreadsheets to carrier pigeons.”

Startup land is all about fostering company culture, and multiple studies have found that a positive atmosphere in the workplace encourages productivity. Furthermore, the growth of Bring-Your-Own-Device and the distributed workforce has created a growing need for mobile applications that let employees work on the go. Tomfoolery designs its application with these principles in mind.

The founders have impressive backgrounds in management and consumer technology. CEO Kakul Srivastava is a former VP at Yahoo and worked as the General Manager at Flickr. Her cofounder, Sol Lipman, is a former VP of mobile at AOL and previously founded startups Rally Up, 12seconds.tv, and Sticky Inc. With Tomfoolery, they combined forces and applied their expertise to the enterprise world.

“Anyone with a smartphone and a job should care about the quality of apps they use in the workplace,” said Srivastava in a Q&A. “Tomfoolery is focused on enabling the spirit of fun and play that’s the hallmark of great team culture. Work doesn’t have to feel tough, or hard, or serious. In the best teams, work is awesome, it’s something fun and creative — and you can’t wait to get started when you wake up in the morning.”

There are many competitors in the social enterprise space, most notably Asana, Endesk, Jive, Yammer, Workday, Podio, and Chatter. Tomfoolery is distinguished by its mobile-first focus.

Investors include big names like Ash Patel of Morado Venture Partners, Sam Pullara from Sutter Hill Ventures, Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang through AME Cloud Ventures, Andresseen Horowitz, YouSendIt CEO Brad Garlinghouse, and Tech Stars NY cofounder David Tisch.

Tomfoolery is still in stealth mode. The team of six is based in San Francisco.

This is the time of year when we all look toward the future rather than the past and decide how we want to grow and change in the year to come. Whether you have a formal list of resolutions or just a general taking-stock moment, you probably do have a couple of big goals for 2013.

Me, I’ve decided that in 2013, I want to dress more professionally, write more in-depth long-form pieces, crochet blankets for Project Linus instead of playing Pocket Frogs during my winding-down-before-bed-time, and pray the rosary every day. And I’m counting on a couple of different apps, sites, and services to help me make it happen.

For your own goal-fulfillment needs and wants, here’s a great list of apps, websites, and cool services to help you become healthier, wealthier, and wiser in the new year.

Eating better

Farmigo for better food ingredients

Farmigo is a cool new service that will get local, farm-fresh produce and dairy products to you and a group of your friends and neighbors. Your group has to be at least 30 people strong, so think about pooling together with co-workers, PTA members, or any faith-based community members in your life.

Urban Remedy for juice cleanses

Urban Remedy won’t just cure your New Year’s Day hangover. This juice-as-a-service subscription will keep you healthy, energized, and fit throughout the year, no shopping or chopping required.

Fresh Dish and Hello Fresh for home cooking

Fresh Dish and Hello Fresh both meet the same need: our desire to cook at home and eat with our loved ones. These startups will help you by delivering fresh ingredients and recipes to your door. Each meal takes 30 minutes or less to prepare, plus you don’t have to do all the shopping and prep work.

Better relationships

Pair for your current relationship

Pair is your go-to app for building a stronger, sweeter bond with someone you already love (or double-plus-like). It will help you stay connected by sharing intimate moments and just-between-us messages throughout the day.

Seekly to find new romance

Seekly is a video speed dating app perfect for helping you find someone to spend your time — or even your life — with. Created by two professional, busy women, the site focuses on taking the creepy, time-wasting elements out of online dating.

At the Pool to make new friends

At the Pool isn’t about dating; rather, this startup wants to help the terminally shy among us to get out into the world and make new friends who share some of our interests.

Improving health and fitness

Noom for weight loss coaching

Noom is your personal fitness coach. This app will help you set goals, identify tasks, and track your progress.

Lumoback for better posture

Lumoback‘s premise is simple: We’re happier and healthier when we sit up straight. Its teensy, Band-Aid-like hardware and mobile app will keep your spine straight and better aligned. You mom would’ve loved this about 20 years ago.

Yog for jogging with buddies

Yog connects joggers and runners around the world in real time. Schedule the time and place for your jaunt, and get others to join you virtually. Yog provides audio and visual cues to connect you to your workout partners.

Striiv for step-by-step fitness

Striiv is an iPhone app that gives your fitness plans a big dose of metrics. This social pedometer tracks the steps you take and the calories you burn, then it can sync that data with your Facebook friends and other Striiv users to keep you competitive.

Learning new skills

Treehouse and Codecademy for coding

If you want to learn more about the web in 2013, look no further than Codecademy and Treehouse. Each of these services will teach you how to code. Codecademy does it for free from an interactive text entry box in the browser. Treehouse charges you and gives you a full library of video instruction from top-shelf teachers.

MindSnacks for languages

For learning other kinds of languages, there’s MindSnacks, a startup making iPad games for educational purposes. The bite-sized lessons come in cute packages with real educational value; it’s more than just a brush-up or crash course.

Coursera for college-level learning

Coursera isn’t some skeevy online degree mill. This startup offers “massive open online courses” in partnership with some of the top U.S. universities. You can study genetics with a Duke scientist, data computation from a Johns Hopkins data scientist, or world history from a Princeton professor.

Udemy for your downtime

Got a few minutes to kill? Want to do something more productive than Angry Birds? Try Udemy. Its iPad app will help you turn those few idle moments into learning opportunities.

Fixing your style

Fourth & Grand for gentlemen’s fashion & styling

One of my husband’s resolutions is to dress better in the new year. As a SOMA-dwelling tech founder, he’s surrounded by hoodies and jeans. So how to up the professionalism a notch, especially when styling outfits is a foreign language? Try L.A.-based subscription startup Fourth & Grand. They’ll send outfits and accessories and give you detailed advice on how to wear them.

Le Tote for ladies’ clothes

For the ladies, Le Tote helps you mix it up, sartorially speaking, without adding more clutter to your closet. This “Netflix for clothes” will outfit your new, infinite closet with outfits and accessories. It’s like living with a stylish roommate who has no personal budget and is exactly your size.

Birchbox for shine & polish

If personal grooming is high on your to-do list for 2013, try Birchbox, the startup that sends you sample-size beauty and lifestyle products and tips on how to use them. Gents, they’ve got manly boxes for you, too. You can try everything and buy what really works for you.

Dollar Shave Club for ‘f*cking great’ razors

We San Francisco women know why shaving is a New Year’s resolution-level goal: Between the pervasive chill and the pervasive leggings, we’d never do it if we didn’t force ourselves to. And a shiny, new box of razors from Dollar Shave Club just might be the motivation you need to get the job done.

Productive and professional

Asana and 24me to get things done

If you’re looking forward to a 2013 in which you get things done like a mofo, look to these two apps: Asana, a task-management godsend, and 24me, which will automate your entire life. Both of these apps eliminate work-about-work: meetings to plan meetings, hours spent making to-do lists and checklists. Instead, they help you focus on actually completing tasks and getting on with the fun parts of your life.

LinkedIn to stay connected & informed

LinkedIn had itself a big old redesign orgy this year. The result: An iPad app that’s both beautiful and useful, a suite of mobile apps that will help you stay in-the-know, and a new look and feel for its website that focuses on news in your industry. Spend a few minutes a day with LinkedIn, and you’ll probably look smarter, more connected, and more confident in the workplace.

Nutmeg to spice up your finances

Nutmeg is a simple solution for getting your financial life on track. This app will help you build and manage your personal investment portfolio, all while keeping your personal and financial goals in focus.

Pathbrite to kickstart your new career

Is 2013 the year you finally land your dream job? If a change would do you good, check out Pathbrite, which switches out your boring old resume for an interactive portfolio of your accomplishments. Show off a lifetime of education, special projects, promotions, and advances in a gorgeous micro-website you can show your potential employers.

Image credits: All via Flickr, creepyed, Edsel L, Shutter Daddy, kharied, besighyawn, evocateur, kristaguenin

Additional reporting by Christina Farr.

This sponsored post is produced by StackSocial.

If there’s one application that can speed up how you use your Mac, it’s LaunchBar. From quickly opening other applications to quickly searching for things on the web and more, LaunchBar is a must-have app to make you more productive with your Mac.

Right now VentureBeat has an offer that’ll save you 25% on LaunchBar. You can get this time-saving app at a cost of just $26 for a limited time at the VB Store!

Access files, folders, applications, contacts, calendars, your pictures, music, movies, the web, and essentially everything you need on your computer or on the Internet – with just a few keystrokes.

• Browsing: Navigate folders, contacts, bookmarks, recent items, libraries or any other kind of hierarchy with the arrow keys to reveal related information.
• Abbreviation Search: LaunchBar’s powerful, blazing fast adaptive abbreviation search technology allows you to find items just by typing short acronyms of their name.
• Keyboard Shortcuts: Invoke LaunchBar quickly with a system wide hotkey, or just by tapping a modifier key.
• Clipboard History: Preserve the data of your most recent Copy operations, and use the copied objects again later.
• ClipMerge: Combine subsequent Copy operations into one single clipboard object just by pressing ⌘C twice.
• Instant Send: The most efficient way to send files or text selections to LaunchBar, and then hand them over to applications, folders, email contacts, search templates, services and more.

We are so confident that LaunchBar will truly level up your productivity, that we are offering a 30 day refund policy – no questions asked.

Words legitimately can’t describe how much this program will increase your productivity. With over 1,000 features the ways in which your productivity can benefit from this app are nearly endless. So save some money today and save time going forward – head over to the VB Store page to pick up LaunchBar for just $25!

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Even though Microsoft still hasn’t gotten its act together when it comes to bringing Microsoft Office to mobile devices, that’s not stopping CloudOn, a company that has developed apps to create, edit, and share Offices files on tablets.

Today, with the launch of CloudOn 3.0, the company is bringing the power of Microsoft Office to your pocket with support for the iPhone. Additionally, CloudOn has added support for Microsoft SkyDrive (on top of cloud storage options from Box, Google Drive, and Dropbox), and optimization for the Nexus 7 and iPad Mini.

“The iPhone really gives us the true delivery of mobile productivity,” said Milind Gadekar, CloudOn’s founder and chief executive, in an interview with VentureBeat. “Each of the devices we support provides specific functions, the iPhone is more around reviewing and annotating, with some editing.”

Just like all of CloudOn’s previous apps, the iPhone app lets you run virtualized versions of Microsoft Office programs. The apps aren’t running on your phone — instead they’re being streamed from CloudOn’s servers.

Obviously, you won’t be able to see the full Office interface on the iPhone — CloudOn customized the Ribbon for the phone’s smaller screen by highlighting features like font size and enabling tracked changes. While a handful of Office document viewers already exist for the iPhone, CloudOn lets you make minor edits and supports other productivity software like Adobe Reader.

CloudOn now has more than 2 million registered users, and engagement is “literally doubling every quarter” in terms of active users, time spent, and files edited, Gadekar said.

In my brief time with the app, I found it worked just as well as CloudOn’s iPad offering. While the optimized interface takes some getting used to, I was able to open and edit Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files easily. And most importantly, it’s fast.

Palo Ato, Calif.-based CloudOn has raised more than $33 million in funding, most recently in a $16 million second round in June. Investors include The Social+Capital Partnership, Translink Capital, Foundation Capital, and Rembrandt Venture Partners.

The company is in the process of building a mobile web client that would let other platforms, including Windows 8, access CloudOn’s service. Gadekar notes that, even though he’s been in touch with Microsoft, he isn’t sure how Microsoft views CloudOn. At the very least, Microsoft may view the proliferation of even more Office clients favorably. But with the impending release of official Office iOS apps, CloudOn may have a bumpy road ahead.

Is it a friend’s birthday? 24me will retrieve the data directly from Facebook and offer you the option to post on her Facebook wall or buy her a gift card directly from the app. Is your electricity bill due today? The app will automatically add this task to your to-do list and link to your service provider so you can pay with one click.

24me was founded by Liat Mordechay Hertanu and her husband Gilad. “We found ourselves wasting our precious time on managing daily life routines,” she says. “There are great to-do list apps, but those are only digital replacements for a pen and a paper. 24me is a personal assistant in the form of a to-do list.”

In addition to the entries that appear automatically on the task list, you can add items manually or using voice recognition. The application uses some simple text recognition to create action buttons for each task in your list. Enter ”Call Ciara,” and 24me integrates with the Ciara’s contact number and inserts a call button next to the action. Once you click on it, 24me calls that person.

If the task is physical, e.g. “Pick up the laundry,” 24me adds a button linking to TaskRabbit, where you can pay a physical personal assistant to collect it for you. Finally, you can share tasks if you need to; for example, you can compile a shopping list with a family member.

24me integrates with a number of service providers like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast and banks such as Bank of America, Chase, and Wells Fargo. After linking to these services, tasks will be added when you have a bill to pay or your bank balance drops below a certain amount.

The app is currently free and the business model will probably involve charging services providers some kind if fee at a later stage. But for now the founders are concentrating to getting as many users as possible.

24me is available for iPhone. An Android version is in the works. The app currently only supports service providers in the U.S.

When are you most productive? Depending on your personality, you might not need alone time — you might need a team.

Humans are social animals. We aren’t designed to live and work alone. Now that the average worker’s job is to sit in front of a computer — often with no supervision — it’s no surprise that we are only productive three days each week. Having worked mostly alone, on my computer, I found that the majority of my time is spent unproductively.

So I measured my productivity, using a nifty little app called RescueTime. RescueTime sits in the background of your computer and measures the amount of time you spend on your computer and on each Website. It lets you see exactly how much time you spent hard at work on your Excel spreadsheet and exactly how much time you wasted watching episodes of The League (holy shit, go watch The League).

Nothing makes me more embarassed than seeing the amount of hours I spend wasted on Reddit and Facebook chat.

38% productive. That means that almost 19 hours of my time last week were wasted — disappeared, never to be seen again.

I figured, “This is stupid, why am I wasting this time doing nothing? When I have a boss or someone of authority watching me, I always get my work done. How can I simulate the authority figure?”

Naturally, I believe that an authority figure should have real authority. And I am a big fan of Slap Bets. Put those together — and I realized I needed someone to make me work, with permission to slap me in the whenever I cheated.

So I went on Craigslist, put up an advertisement, and waited to see if anyone would bite.

Title:(domestic gigs) Slap me if I get off task…

Hey!

I’m looking for someone who can work next to me at a defined location (my house or a mission cafe) and will make sure to watch what is happening on my screen. When I am wasting time, you’ll have to yell at me or if need be, slap me.

You can do your own work at the same time. Looking for help asap, in mission, near 16th mission BART.

Compensation: $8 / hour, and you can do your own work from your computer at the same time.

Within minutes, my inbox began blowing up. I received 20 emails in less than an hour from people who loved the idea. I read through them, found one that stood out, and hired her to meet me at a cafe the day after.

The next day, at 9am, I found Kara sitting and waiting for me. Pulling up a seat, I gave her the basic instructions: She would monitor me for the next few hours and make sure that I was staying on task. I gave her a list of action items that I needed to accomplish and made her promise to force me to stay on task.

Yep, a few times she definitely had to slap me. See the video below. (San Francisco: the city of weirdos. It’s got such a collection of nerds, hipsters, millionaires, crack addicts, etc. that no one even notices when a random blogger gets repeatedly slapped in the face at a coffee shop.)

The results were astounding. Below, you’ll see my graph of average productivity during the experiment.

My average productivity runs around 35-40% on most days. When Kara sat next to me, my productivity skyrocketed to 98%

98%!!!

But not only did my productivity skyrocket, the quality of the work I did skyrocketed as well. Kara forced me to complete my first guest post, The Sex Scandal Technique. She also helped me push through an application for a secret project that I applied to — an application that won, out of hundreds of applicants.

An Analysis: Why Hiring a Slapper works

Without a doubt, this experiment was a success. My biggest takeaway from the experiment is this: If you add a social element to the work that you do, you will become more productive

Honestly, the fear of the slap wasn’t the productivity driver. That just made it fun. The real reason why Kara made me more productive is because she added a social element to writing. When I was drafting the outline, I asked for her feedback. When I couldn’t think of the right way to phrase a sentence, she was there to help. Instead of it being a chore, Kara made it fun to write.

Here are the major reasons why hiring someone on Craigslist to watch me work improved my productivity and quality.

1) Someone else, besides me, knew exactly what I want to accomplish that day. In many jobs, you might have a team or a manager who knows what you are supposed to do. My work, however, doesn’t give me the benefit of a boss that plans my todo list. Kara became my makeshift boss, knowing what I needed to get done, and forcing me to do it.

2) Kara pushed me through the cheese monster. I take the phrase “Cheese Monster” from ZeFrank’s awesome video – he defines the cheese monster as the “feeling in your stomach, when you get a ball of energy that tells you to get up and go to the refrigerator and get a cheese sandwich…but the cheese monster will never be satisfied by cheddar but only the cheese of accomplishment.” In those moments where I hit a rough spot and wanted to take a walk or check Facebook, Kara proved to be the most valuable. She made me push through the difficult parts.

3) I finally had someone to bounce ideas off of. Kara helped polish my sentences, and told me if my ideas made sense. That sort of clarity is priceless.

I found that speaking out loud and trying to explain your work to someone else actually helped me to understand what I was trying to say, what I was trying to do. Even when Kara didn’t know the best way, she would ask me questions—and that helped shape my path.

4) The Slap Challenge added a playful, silly element to working. It gave me a nonconventional reminder of what I was supposed to be doing — and it ended up being something I didn’t want to happen again.

5) Having another pair of eyes to go over my content drastically improved the quality of my work. I knew Kara would be reading it, immediately, so I wanted to make sure that the logic was clear, and there were no spelling or grammar mistakes.

If you can turn your to-do list into a game — especially a social one, a fun one — it won’t be work anymore. It will be fun. All it takes is building a system.

If you’ve ever done something similar — created a game to finish a task, hired someone to help you get things done, etc, let me know in the comments.

A version of this story originally appeared on Maneesh’s blog.

Maneesh Sethi writes Hack the System, a website that teaches readers how to travel the world for free, get into the most exclusive parties, lose 23 lbs in 28 days, and achieve their wildest goals — all by taking that first step. Since 2007, he’s lived in nine countries, learned five languages, and has helped hundreds of people break free of their jobs and travel the world. You can follow him on Twitter.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Siasto, the tiny startup that competes with Huddle, Podio, Asana, and Microsoft Sharepoint, is making a name for itself as the disruptive newcomer on the scene.

On Siasto, sign up for free, and you can immediately get to work adding tasks, uploading your documents, and inviting your colleagues or friends to join your “team.” An administrator can invite people to work on a project team, or can delete a project altogether.

What’s unique and impossible to ignore about the technology is the tight integration with Google Docs. Users can open and edit a Google Doc from their mobile device or desktop browser within Siasto, meaning they’ll have access to a real-time collaborative text editor. The Google integration is ubiquitous in the design — for instance, your Google + image is auto-uploaded to your profile.

Siasto cofounder, Nic Pantucci

The idea stemmed from the success of Taskforce, the founders’ last product. Taskforce, a Gmail integrated task manager, received thousands of sign-ups and requests for integrations into other popular collaboration software services.

“We didn’t like any of them and so decided to build our own,” said founder Nic Pantucci (pictured left). Co-founder Courtland Allen was one of the first developers to ever build on the Facebook platform.

Unlike its competition, Siasto has already secured valuable partnerships with all the major players: Google Apps, Gmail, Google Drive, GCal, Box, and Dropbox.

In September, the company announced an integration with Box. At the time, Box’s Aaron Levie praised Siasto for its slick user interface and the ability to drill down into a project in a single click.

The San Francisco-based startup with only two employees is certainly punching above its weight. It has brought in several large enterprises as customers, including Thompson Reuters, the British National Health Service (NHS), and Accenture. According to its cofounders, the collaboration space is heating up, and in less than six months, there are thousands of teams already using its software.

Siasto is making a push into the enterprise, but it has not forgotten about its small-business roots. To appeal to students and small businesses, the company has also announced a new “freemium” pricing structure. Up to three people can use the tool for free for 10 projects and get one gigabyte of free storage space. Starting today, Siasto is charging on a per-user basis (rather than a per-project basis), which it views as a fairer option for smaller teams.

The company says its greatest challenge will be to overcome the stiff competition in the space but is convinced that its tool is easier to use than the alternatives. “Many of Siasto’s users were using competitor products previously but switched their allegiances once they started using Siasto,” said Pantucci.

Siasto claims that it is already profitable after launching in April, 2012. The company has raised a small seed round from Y Combinator and a series of angel investors.

This post, brought to us by the Young Entrepreneur Council, was written by Nick Reese, a founding partner of Microbrand Media, which specializes in digital strategy and affiliate marketing. 

A common motivation for entrepreneurship is the craving for freedom that is supposed to come with being your own boss. People envision setting their own hours, delegating work to a competent staff, and smiling benignly at the books while the money flows in without a hitch.

Unfortunately, even the most talented people with the most marketable ideas often wind up being slaves to their new businesses instead. If you’re working for the business instead of the business working for you, you desperately need a system.

What’s a system, and why do I need one?

A system breaks down your businesses processes and sets verifiable checkpoints with expected outcomes for each task. A comprehensive system is much more than a simple how-to document; it’s more like an organic collaboration of ideas and validations, constantly updated by every member of the team to find the minimal number of steps necessary to maximize return on investment.

To put the value of systems in perspective, imagine you’re opening a brand-new cupcake shop. You are known for making the best cupcakes in town, but you’re only one person. To grow your business, you’re going to need more people to help you run it. These people may not have your talent for making cupcakes, so you’ll have to build a system to help your employees run the business for you. Without smart systems in place, your business won’t grow to the levels you want.

Follow these steps to create bulletproof business systems that boost profits while freeing up time and expenses:

1. Let go of having to do absolutely everything. For most startup entrepreneurs, the business is their baby and they want to be to be hands-on every step of the way, but this is a common growth limiter. Making your business successful means letting go of control over every detail and making employees accountable for doing their jobs.
2. Adopt automated processes whenever possible. If you can implement simple systems for your most essential business processes (cleaning, ordering, etc), you can step away knowing that most of these systems will go according to plan. You can confidently delegate repetitive tasks to employees, freeing yourself to work on the areas of the business that generate additional cash flow. Any processes that you can’t fully automate should be batched, including email campaigns, social media campaigns, monthly ordering, and more.
3. Draft thorough step-by-step manuals. A good process will include training materials, which may be how-to procedures, templates, worksheets, sample orders, bills, or other documents, spreadsheets, a workflow chart or software, an FAQ page, and any other information needed to perform the task at hand. Checklists are especially handy to ensure consistency and quality. Each task can be broken into steps and checked off when complete. This may sound intimidating, but a simple shared spreadsheet online will do the job — and allow you to delegate tasks going forward.
4. Hire employees you can trust. For complex situations, implement an open-ended decision process that I like to call line-of-sight decision making. Line-of-sight decision making is where you, as a business owner, realize that no system will cover every possible scenario, so you trust your team to solve most problems they will encounter. If you run out of flour at the cupcake shop, let your team decide the best medium for solving the problem. In real life, most problems aren’t as simple as this example, but it illustrates why hiring and effectively managing A-list players is key — because you shouldn’t have to tell people where to get flour.
5. Create a two-way training process. To ensure that your employees do things your way and think the way you do, it’s important that they are well trained. Make sure they understand every aspect of their job, including why things are done. Also, empower members of the team to propose changes, reject inefficiencies, reduce redundancies, and build and refine successful processes.
6. Track each system’s efficiency. Most successful systems should also have a simple feedback loop built in. This feedback loop will make it easy to see when things are going as planned and when they aren’t. Reviewing feedback can be as simple as a weekly or monthly check-ins with team members or as complex as financial modeling based on performance data. As the business grows, these feedback loops will allow the system to become more and more focused.
7. Leave room for error, and expect it. In a business, sometimes — well, often — things don’t go according to plan, so your systems need to be flexible enough to account for that. These unexpected events are a great time for you to trust in yourself and your team to figure things out. From there, notice what went wrong and fix it in your system so you don’t make the same mistakes again.

The best part is that you, the business owner, can concentrate on what you do best — whatever it is that made your dream a reality in the first place. Surround yourself with rock stars, give them the tools necessary to do their jobs, and get out of the way. Ideally, everyone in the chain will know what to do – and will do it.

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only nonprofit organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, the YEC recently launched #StartupLab, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses via live video chats, an expert content library and email lessons.

Image via Vladitto/Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

We’ve known since February that Microsoft was preparing new touch-enabled Office apps for Windows RT, but now it seems those tablet-focused Office apps won’t have as many features as their desktop siblings.

Microsoft will reportedly remove key features from Office 2013 RT, including VBA scripting, macros, and third-party plug-ins, a source tells The Verge. The move is meant to make the apps more reliable and less of a strain on battery life — which are especially important considerations for Windows RT, since it’s the version of Windows 8 meant for tablets running ARM processors.

Additionally, the Verge says Microsoft will ship a preview version of Office 2013 RT with Windows RT devices, which will likely allow you to view and lightly edit Office documents and will be upgradeable to the full version of Office in early 2013. This isn’t too surprising, since PC makers have been shipping Office preview versions in their computers since the release of Windows XP (and possibly earlier).

Microsoft isn’t commenting on the report, but if it’s true, the company could see flack from serious Office users over removing features like VBA scripting. It would be difficult for businesses to adopt Windows RT devices when they don’t know if their Office documents will be fully compatible with the new platform.

And if it lacks key Office features, Windows RT runs the risk of being more of a casual computing platform, rather than the lean and mean productivity platform Microsoft is pitching.

If you really want to get Justin Rosenstein going, ask him what he hates about work.

The bearded engineer (pictured) used to work at Facebook; he left in 2008 to co-found Asana, a startup that aims to put a stop to “work about work.” Today, the company is launching Asana Inbox, which strikes another blow against bloated software and useless communication that define the average Dilbert-esque office space.

You know the kind of fake-work we’re talking about here. It’s everything that takes up your time but doesn’t actually accomplish anything: status update meetings, one-on-ones with your manager where the first question is, “So, what have you been working on lately?” And those endless email chains that you neither want nor need to read but on which you are included anyhow because… Because.

Rosenstein pretty much thinks all that crap is, well, crap. And his mission is to create a Utopia where email doesn’t exist.

“People spend an enormous amount of time in their inboxes, compulsively checking,” he said in an interview yesterday at Asana’s San Francisco HQ. “And it’s slow, distracting, and inefficient. It’s almost a counterproductivity tool.”

What Asana brings to the table today is somewhere between a checklist and a briefing. It’s not bloated project management software (the kind your boss might institute and which you’d never voluntarily use). Rather, it has a super simple but deadly efficient interface that lets you skim and skate through your morning’s round of tasks and projects with ease and speed.

We’re generally rather blasé about apps in general, but Asana Inbox is hot. Hot like an assassin who is killing every namby-pamby piece of B.S. in your corporate life and letting you get back to being a creative genius.

Slaying tasks with lightning speed has its psychological benefits, too.

“It’s incredibly satisfying,” Rosenstein said. “You have a very real sense of clarity on what you’ve done, what everyone else is working on, how to get to your milestones, how far away you are from accomplishing your project… It makes you calmer and faster, and it emboldens you to take on even more ambitious projects in the future.”

Here’s what the new product looks like:

Basically, when you open Asana Inbox, you’ll see a string of updates on tasks you’re working on. Because there are no chains of copied texts or subject lines that you have to click through, the scanability factor is incredibly high.

Once you’ve read an update, it gets archived. Gone. Boom. You can choose to flag it, but by default, it gets out of your way.

“It’s really optimized for speed… to get you in and out as much as possible,” said Rosenstein. “The amount of time and energy and stress people spend getting to inbox zero… we’ve created a world where inbox zero is the path of least resistance… Getting to inbox zero is now really easy and natural for me.”

You can use Asana Inbox as your default for getting tasks done regardless of whether or not your colleagues (either inside your company or at another company) are using Asana; they can update Asana tasks from their own email inboxes. That is, until they decide to make the switch, something Rosenstein anticipates if only because he’s seen it happen so many times already with his software, which just recently became a paid product.

“We’ve already seen this sort of viral adoption,” he told us. “It can start with just one person, and then they invite one more person and a few more people to the project. Different departments that don’t even know each other start using Asana, and then it comes to IT’s attention.

“A lot of that comes from our background in the consumer world: You create a great product that’s well designed, and people share it with each other.”

Asana has been highly optimized for organic growth, in other words — and it has been so designed by former Facebookers, masters of consumer products, virality, and massive growth.

Still, slaying email is bound to be an uphill battle; we asked Rosenstein if it wasn’t a bit optimistic to expect huge companies with armies of middle managers to throw over the familiar for the unfamiliar, no matter how efficient.

“Email isn’t going away tomorrow… but it wasn’t designed for the coordination of complex tasks,” he said. “It’s the lowest common denominator, you can do anything poorly in email… We’ve really outgrown the limits of what that technology can support.

“We know a post-email world is coming. Asana is the first credible post-email application.”

Finally, we ask, what will all the managers do when Asana and other post-email apps take away the busywork of work?

Rosenstein gives Asana, the startup, as an example. More than half the internal emails sent back and forth have been eliminated since the company started using its own Inbox. As a result of the new task management tool, he said, “Our meetings are not status meetings. They’re about talking about intellectually meaty design problems or product ideas. It’s stimulating, and it leaves the coordination to the robots.”

And for the average middle manager or executive, Rosenstein said the new tools “would empower him, it would transition him from a manager to a leader — inspiring, interacting, and doing the higher-order things that he really does enjoy.”

And that freeing-up of our hands to allow for the better, more efficient functioning of our minds — isn’t that what technology is meant for in the first place?

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Clearly I’m not the only one excited by CloudOn and its goal of making tablets more productive with software like Microsoft Office. The company announced today that it has raised $16 million in a second round of funding led by The Social+Capital Partnership.

CloudOn offers apps for the iPad and Android tablets that give you access to fully-featured versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, as well as Adobe Reader. The apps connect to cloud storage services like DropBox and Box, allowing you to easily save and access your existing files, and forgoing the need to deal with the iPad and Android’s confusing file systems.

Not surprisingly, CloudOn says it will use the funding to scale its operations — which could mean more productivity apps making their way to the service. The company is also working on expanding group productivity features within its apps, and it’s also working on bringing its software to smartphones and PCs.

With its ability to run complex software remotely, and its integration with cloud storage, CloudOn is essentially attempting to create a virtual desktop computer. In many ways, it’s preferable to a traditional computer, since you don’t have to worry about managing files or installing software.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based CloudOn is also adding Mamoon Hamid, general partner at Social+Capital, to its board of directors. This latest round of funding also saw participation from Translink Capital and existing investors Foundation Capital and Rembrandt Venture Partners.

Design is determining the winners in everything mobile. The most successful players are focusing on one thing: How to make products, services, and devices as compelling and delightful as possible – visually, and experientially. MobileBeat 2012, July 10-11 in San Francisco , is assembling the most elite minds to debate how UI/UX is transforming every aspect of the mobile economy, and where the opportunities lie. Register here.

Outsource, outsource, outsource

Everything may be a priority, but you are not equally brilliant at everything. Eliminate the unnecessary tasks and outsource your weaknesses so your time and focus is directed to where you’ll make the biggest impact for the business.

Kelly Azevedo, @krazevedo, She’s Got Systems

Focus on one thing at a time

It may seem like a no-brainer, but multitasking can actually cut back on your productivity. Instead of juggling multiple projects at once, schedule out blocks of time — or even entire days — during which you only focus on one task or one project.

Steph Auteri, @stephauteri, Word Nerd Pro

Take on what’s time-sensitive

Do time-sensitive tasks, then divide into projects. Look at all of your to-dos and first identify which ones are time-sensitive — the ones that need to be done that day or that week. Do those tasks at the start of each day, then pick one big project per day to tackle once the time-sensitive items are done.

Stephanie Kaplan, @stephaniekaplan, Her Campus Media

Figure out your prime time

Identify when you are the most productive and focus on the tasks that are the highest priority to complete during that time. To do so, eliminate distractions — such as calls and email — and instead use the time you are at your mental best to accomplish your most important tasks.

Doug Bend, @DougBend, The Law Office of Doug Bend

Get an outside perspective

It’s easy to get overwhelmed and too emotionally involved in everything that is happening to make clear decisions. Engage someone else — such as a business partner, mentor, coach or friend — to help ask you the right questions and sort out what’s really most important now. An outside perspective can open you up to new possibilities.

Elizabeth Saunders, @RealLifeE, Real Life E

Go into bunker mode

In the event that you find your plate filled with all high-priority tasks, you must remove all external distractions. This includes other people, emails, phone calls, and all social media sites. Now that it’s just you and your work, focus all of your energy on one task at a time until it’s complete, and then move on to the next one. Once all priorities are cleared, you may rejoin society!

Anthony Saladino, @cabinetkings, Kitchen Cabinet Kings

Don’t dwell

You’ll never get everything done, so don’t dwell on it. Split your time between what’s urgent and what’s important. If you handle all the things that pop up as soon as they come to you, you’ll never move forward as a business. Make an even split between handling urgent issues and working on long-term solutions. As you grow, you can hire people to handle more urgent matters.

Nick Friedman, @NickFriedman1, College Hunks Hauling Junk

Not everything is a priority

It’s important to stay focused on what really matters. Spend some time on upfront planning to determine the most critical tasks that you need to take on. It’s usually much better to concentrate on one or two priorities and do them really well, instead of being spread so thin that you have mediocre output.

Ben Rubenstein, @yodle, Yodle

Break out the rankings

Written lists are still my best tool for productivity. When I feel like I have too much on my plate, I do a brain dump, then I give each item a numbered ranking based on priority. If I owe deliverables to others, I make sure to ask them when they need them by so that I can rank them appropriately.

Allie Siarto, @allieo, Loudpixel

Define roles and divide work

Make sure everyone on the team has distinct roles defined, and divide work accordingly. Everyone on a proactive team will want to do everything, and clearly defined roles make it clear who should do what.

David Gardner, @david_gardner, ColorJar

There’s a tool for that

Pivotal Tracker is a free tool that allows you to track task lists. It forces you to prioritize your to-do list. If you keep the list current, you will always know what the next most important task is.

Aaron Schwartz, @ModifyWatches, Modify Watches

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only nonprofit organization composed of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. The YEC promotes entrepreneurship as a solution to unemployment and underemployment and provides entrepreneurs with access to tools, mentorship, and resources that support each stage of their business’s development and growth.

Overworked man image via ShutterStock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The race is on to bring true productivity software like Microsoft Office to tablets. OnLive debuted its Desktop app earlier this year, which lets you command a virtual Windows desktop from the iPad or Android tablets, and now a smaller competitor has emerged with its own spin on bringing Office to the iPad: CloudOn.

The Palo Alto-based company is releasing version 2.0 of its free iPad app today, which lets you create, edit, and share files from Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Unlike OnLive Desktop, the CloudOn app doesn’t distract you with a full Windows desktop but instead offers access directly to software you need. And to make up for the iPad’s confusing file system, you can access files saved on cloud storage services Box and Dropbox.

I met up with CloudOn CEO and founder Milind Gadekar in a trendy San Francisco restaurant last week, and he gave me the full skinny on his vision. Like me, Gadekar believes that tablets are currently best suited for consuming information, but they still lag behind when it comes to getting real work done. With CloudOn and its accompanying cloud storage services, he’s helping to turn the iPad into a virtual desktop computer. And unlike OnLive, which had to rework its service recently to run Windows Server 2008, he says that there aren’t any issues with CloudOn’s Windows licensing.

Gadekar demonstrated his app running on a new iPad over Verizon’s LTE 4G network. He was able to open and edit files from Dropbox without issue, and the experience seemed only slightly slower than a typical PC. The CloudOn app lets you use all of the advanced features of Microsoft Office as well, including track changes in Word, and pivot tables in Excel.

The CloudOn 2.0 app also includes Adobe Reader, so you can use the app to view PDFs, as well as an image viewer for practically any file type.

Gadekar tells me that he initially targeted netbooks with CloudOn, as those tiny computers often shipped without expensive software like Microsoft Office. But as the netbook category fizzled, he was perfectly positioned to bring the technology to the iPad.

I suspect we’ll see many more companies trying to solve the productivity problem on tablets, but with CloudOn and OnLive Desktop, we’re off to a very interesting start. CloudOn, in particular, is an IT worker’s dream since it doesn’t give users a desktop to potentially screw up (or be confused by). And since it can tap Box for file storage, the app can also take advantage of the extra security that service features.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Hookflash, an iPad app maker looking to make workplace communication streamlined and more productive, has pivoted to focus on connecting you with your LinkedIn contacts. The company is releasing its inaugural app in March, and it will help you communicate with your LinkedIn connections for free.

LinkedIn is definitely a powerful tool to connect with business professionals and potential clients, but communicating with your connections isn’t always effective. Let’s face it, do you keep on top of your LinkedIn inbox as much as your other social networks? Probably not. Hookflash realized that LinkedIn contacts can be very valuable, but not exactly easy to talk to, so it created an app to fix the problem.

“The value of your communications device or technology is directly proportional to how easy it makes it to communicate with the people in your network and maintain your directory of contacts. LinkedIn is the best service in the world at doing that for you, so we integrated LinkedIn as a directory instead of building our own,” Hookflash chief executive and co-founder Trent Johnsen told VentureBeat. “Hookflash leverages the social aspects of LinkedIn and enables instant voice, video, or text communications with anyone in LinkedIn directory via the iPad — which is increasingly becoming the work tool of choice.”

The app will let you place voice and video calls and send text messages to any of your LinkedIn contacts for free. And it will display LinkedIn profile and activity feed information for each contact in the app, so you’ll know who you’re talking to and what they’ve been doing.

Unlike its competitor Skype, there is no need to build a list of contacts. When you log in to your LinkedIn account in the app, your information will be synced automatically. The app also pulls information from LinkedIn so your conversations have more context than they would with Skype.

Hookflash is slated to be available in the App Store in March. Until then, you can sign up for early access on the company’s website.

Hookflash debuted last year at DEMO Fall 2011. The company is based in Calgary, Alberta and Palo Alto, California and has raised $1.2M funding from Sora Group.

Copy and paste is so 2011. Or so says Click.to, a new app for Mac and Windows that lets you copy content and send it exactly where you want it to go with one click — no pasting required.

With Click.to, you can send email attachments, publish content to Facebook, save text to Evernote, upload images to Flickr, search products on Amazon — the list goes on and on. You can even create custom actions to send content to nearly any website or computer application.

Say you’re reading an article online and come across a phrase you’d like to tweet. Instead of copying the phrase, navigating to Twitter and pasting the phrase in the new tweet field, all you have to do is copy the words and click on the Twitter button from the Click.to menu that appears. On an even simpler level, you can copy any word or phrase and use Click.to to go directly to Google to look it up.

Every time you copy text, images, or files, Click.to displays a menu of icons for the websites and services where you can send the content. Click.to is very customizable; you can choose which icons pop up, which are icons are hidden in an extended menu and even where on the screen Click.to displays its menu.

Productivity is Click.to’s main goal. It cuts down on the amount of clicks and browsing needed for the most common computer tasks we all do. The app even tracks your number of “Missed Opportunities” — the number of times you copy, click and paste content instead of using Click.to so you can track how click.to increases your productivity.

Click.to was released in July 2011 and since added 17 official partners to its service including Amazon, eBay, Skype and Evernote. The company is in talks with other websites and services for partnership opportunities. Click.to is currently available as a free download for Mac and Windows, with Android and iOS apps set to be available in the next few months.

Think you’re an email ninja? Check yourself before you wreck your (online) self with Tout’s special year-end product, Year in Review, built to help show email users their habits and trends in 2011.

After allowing Tout access to your email, it scans your account (for up to 72 hours, depending on traffic at the time) and subsequently sends a private report to you, complete with charts and infographics. The report features useful statistics like the number of emails you “dealt” with over the past year, the percentage of emails sent as compared to received, and the response rate (both from you to your emails received and from your friends to the emails you sent them).

Why scan your emails? Knowing how often or not people respond to your messages may help improve your efficiency, professionally or personally. Knowing who is spamming you too often may strain a friendship, or help enable improved communication. The list goes on, but using Tout’s Year in Review almost seems like getting a physical for your online communication habits–maybe a bit annoying or overwhelming, but extremely helpful.

The report dives deep into your mail, telling you your busiest email month (mine was December), your busiest day, your busiest hour, your top 10 contacts (this was fun), popular words in your subject lines, emails by day, week, and of course, the highest numbers of emails sent by specific senders (of course, mostly newsletters). Needless to say, the whole experience was fairly terrifying, but kind of addicting at the same time.

Seeing that I had dealt with over 15,000 emails in 2011 really sparked some personal questions regarding time management (let alone quality of life).

The Tout App service launched a few months ago. The app is meant to be an extension to your email and your customer relationship management (CRM) systems (i.e. Salesforce, Highrise) which helps to “coordinate and streamline your emails through templates, tracking, and scheduling.”

By using it, you can better measure analytics on who views and clicks your emails, send out more group emails at a speedier pace, share email templates with your team, and schedule your emails in advance. On top of this, you can connect it to your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts to improve the way you interact with your connections and followers. San Francisco-based Tout refers to their product as EMM (E-mail management) software.

Tout is a free plugin with a freemium model (for teams and high volume users), and they also have an iPhone app available for 99 cents.

Try the Year in Review product to get a better sense of just how productive (or unproductive) you are with your emails (and to see who is bothering you most), and then run screaming to sign up for the beta of unroll.me, which after connecting to your email, helps you unsubscribe from your email newsletters, all at once!

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Salesforce has revealed a new web-based application called Do.com that combines task management with social features to create a smart way to get things done on your own and in groups.

Several other companies have tried and failed to make task management successful (there’s fresh competition from former Facebook staffers with Asana), so it’s telling to see Salesforce, which is known for its enterprise apps, trying to take a stab in this space. This suggests companies continue to believe there’s a huge market in helping people manage online tasks — and that no one has cracked the nut yet.

Do.com captures the laid-back style of an upstart web application with a simple interface and intelligent HTML5 deployment, but it’s also built with Salesforce’s emphasis on reliability, accessibility and security. It was built on top of Heroku’s cloud app platform and programmed in Ruby on Rails, offers an open API for developers, and has received input from some of Salesforce’s brightest team members.

“Even though Do.com is owned by Salesforce, we think of ourselves like a startup,” Salesforce Senior VP Sean Whiteley told VentureBeat. “We’re a separate team of 14 people, we have our own code base and we’re even in a different building.”

Do.com is an anomaly inside of the Salesforce family for another reason — it’s the first non-enterprise offering the company has ever released. Unlike Chatter, Salesforce’s enterprise social networking product, Do.com app is meant to be used by small businesses and small groups who need to collaborate. By having several people see uncompleted tasks and projects, there’s more pressure to get the work done in a timely fashion.

Because Do.com was programmed using HTML5, it runs in any browser and works just fine on the Flash-less Apple iPad as well as Android tablets like Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. For smartphones, the Do.com team has created a native iPhone app, but it does not yet have an Android app. The team expects an Android app to be ready some time next year.

Do.com is based on popular social productivity app Manymoon, an app Salesforce.com acquired back in February. Outside of emulating Manymoon’s interface, Do.com also followed its predecessor by including a Gmail gadget that makes it easy to assign tasks through e-mail. For example, send a short e-mail to task@do.com and it will automatically detect your address and add an entry. Outside of Gmail functions, Do.com has been programmed to work with Google Apps, Salesforce and Dropbox to make tasks jive with tools your team already knows.

“The goal was to create an app that fits into the applications you already use,” Whiteley said.

Do.com has been in private beta testing thus far, but now the team wants to open its beta to more participants. It has extended an invitation for the first 200 VentureBeat readers that sign up using a select link to give it a spin. Go to the link https://www.do.com/users/sign_up and enter the code “DONKISCHESPOZ” to take part. Those who get in will also get 5 invites of their own so they can bring other people into the app.

“It’s meant to be used with other people,” Whiteley said. “Many times it’s more about fostering a conversation instead of just checking things off a list.”

Do.com will be more widely available in the coming months after it launches publicly. The app is available in several app stores, including the Apple App Store, Android Marketplace, Chrome Web Store, Salesforce AppExchange and LinkedIn Applications. It is currently free, but it will add premium paid features next year. Whiteley said elements like changing the way it looks, adding new fields and deeper administration tools are being explored as potential premium features.

More photos of Do.com’s interface on iPad, in browser and on the iPhone can be viewed below:

CloudBeat 2011 takes place November 30 – December 1 at Hotel Sofitel in Redwood City, CA. Unlike any other cloud events, we’ll be focusing on 12 case studies where we’ll dissect the most disruptive instances of enterprise adoption of the cloud. These case studies will highlight the core components of the cloud revolution: security, collaboration, analytics, mobile usage, increased productivity, and integration. Join over 500 executives for two days packed with actionable lessons and networking opportunities as we define the key processes and architectures that companies must put in place in order to survive and prosper. Register here. Tickets are limited!

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

A new video created by Microsoft shows how the company imagines technology will progress in the future, with mobile devices and interactive touch screens playing an even bigger role in our lives.

The 6-minute video, titled “Productivity Future Vision (2011),” is a sequel to a similarly themed video from 2009 with the same title. Each video shows hows technology adds value and real-time information to help us communicate, pursue projects and do business. Not only are the videos insightful but they’re just plain cool.

The new video includes several ideas we’ve seen recently, such as small touch-screen phones that relay incredible amount of information two ways, a Siri-like helper that’s activated by voice and touch screens on things like refrigerators and office-focused displays.

Many different concepts are on display as the video shifts from person to person, and the scenes connect in one world-spanning story. For example, a heart drawn by a mother at the beginning of the video is later seen on the interactive kitchen wall by her husband and daughter four minutes later.

Not only do these touch-screen devices help keep families in constant communication through text, voice and video, but they also make big contributions to business and education. A girl is seen doing her homework on a tablet-like device, while two businessmen work on an engineering project with the computer helping along with several steps.

As emphasized by Microsoft’s latest Windows Phone devices launched yesterday, we’re nowhere near the vision that Microsoft has laid out for us. But based on how far smart devices have come since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, it’s not hard to believe we could see these type of interactive machines and productivity apps in the next 10 years.

Watch the amazing full video below:

Palo Alto-based CloudOn’s marketing materials say the company is “creating a mobile, enterprise, cloud-based workspace” to help workers with productivity and collaboration. Presumably, the company is developing applications for smartphones and tablets with an emphasis on the business and enterprise market.

Outside of its modest website and its profiles on Facebook and Twitter, little is known about the company and its projects. A call left with the company asking for further details was not immediately returned.

CloudOn is led by CEO Milind Gadekar, who previously worked at Cisco for five years as director of marketing. The team also includes co-founder and vice president of research and development Meir Morgenstern, who was a system architecture manager at Cisco for five years, and co-founder and CTO Shuki Binyamin, who led a video and design consulting company for almost five years.

The new $7.7 million in funding comes from Rembrandt Venture Partners and Foundation Capital. Back in October 2010, the company raised $1.8 million in equity and debt funding when it was known as AppToU. Foundation Capital also participated in that funding round.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Astrid, an Android app that aims to reshape task management, announced today that it has received seed funding from Google Ventures and Nexus Partners.

And to top off the good news, the company, an alum of startup incubator AngelPad, also said that iPhone and Web versions are on the way as well.

In an interview with VentureBeat last week, Astrid CEO Jon Paris said he’s noticed that many productivity apps aren’t very social. Along with co-founder and CTO Tim Su, Paris said he aimed to fix that with Astrid. The app allows you to share tasks with your friends, which gives them an added bit of societal pressure that’s potentially more compelling than a typical task reminder. And in an interesting twist, Paris also noticed that friends would occasionally help him out with tasks if they saw he was overloaded.

Paris tells me that Astrid has received over 2 million downloads on Android (1.5 million since last July), with 24 million completed tasks. The app competes with services like Remember the Milk (which Astrid used to synchronize with), and Apple’s upcoming Tasks app in iOS 5. Astrid has also recently added location-based reminders (a feature coming up in Apple’s Tasks app) and the ability to synchronize with Google Tasks.

Astrid’s funding was also brought up today during a fireside chat with Google Ventures partner Rich Miner at our MobileBeat 2011 conference in San Francisco.

Manymoon adds some additional functionality to Google Apps, such as the ability to create projects and alerts in Gmail based on information received in an email. It also has similar apps for the Google Chrome Web Store and LinkedIn. Manymoon also includes some tools to share Google Docs with others and browse large amounts of documents. The service is designed to help employees keep track of their work life and tasks and to collaborate with co-workers.

The company’s services won’t be disrupted, and the Manymoon team is going to continue adding features to it as they normally would, according to a post on Manymoon’s site, which gives some additional details about the announcement. That’s a contrast to Salesforce’s last acquisition, Etacts, which ended up shutting down its service just after it was acquired.

The acquisition is part of Salesforce’s latest attempt to branch out from its traditional customer relationship management (CRM) software. The company launched an enterprise-style Facebook service called Chatter.com yesterday. Salesforce also invested $4 million in Seesmic, a client for reading status updates from Facebook, Twitter and other social services. Now Salesforce has a slight reach into another cloud service with Manymoon’s presence on Google Apps. Manymoon didn’t say whether its features would end up on Salesforce’s CRM software — just that it would continue working on its current products.

Salesforce recently dropped $212 million to buy Heroku, which develops and deploys web-based applications that rely on the programming language Ruby on Rails. It made that announcement at Dreamforce in December. Salesforce also acquired email contact manager Etacts for an undisclosed sum shortly after Dreamforce in December.

The financial details of the Manymoon deal weren’t disclosed, but Kara Swisher’s BoomTown blog said the price was somewhere between $25 million and $35 million. Manymoon has raised a small amount of seed funding from Harrison Metal, who was also an investor in Heroku.

Democrasoft is one of 65 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2010 event taking place this week. These companies do pay a fee to present, but our coverage of them remains objective.

Democrasoft, a Santa Rosa-based collaboration startup, aims to bring a bit of voter input into online community building and project management. It’s a service that lets groups, both large and small, organize conversations and pick ideas to promote. The company’s main product, Collaborize, is designed for organizations that need some ground-up input like schools, clubs and associations. The company has been beta testing it with more socially minded partners like TechSoup Global.

In it, members of a community can pick topics that they want to have input around. They can ask questions or post ideas to the larger group and then ask for opinions around those ideas.

Once an idea has gathered enough traction in the community, members can call for a vote and invite others to participate. Group leaders can measure reactions immediately to new ideas and groups can either be public or private.

Collaborize costs anywhere from around $30 a month for up to 100 users, then $100 for up to 1,000 users, then $200 a month for 5,000 active users. There are specially arranged deals for groups with larger numbers of members.

It’s easy to identify a startup’s founder — she’s the first one in the office, the last to leave and the only one not taking a paycheck.

We founders are used to the abuse. And it’s ridiculous to expect employees to take the same amount. But still, this is a startup. Isn’t it appropriate to expect more than the standard 40 hours/week from employees?

This topic came up recently on Answers OnStartups in this question from one of our members: If you have a developer who works 40 hours/week and does a good job, how can you (and should you) motivate him to work 60, as was clearly stated when he was hired?

Even among hard-working, nose-to-the-grindstone, bootstrapped entrepreneurs, most people found it despicable to expect an employee to take on such a workload. Among the thoughts:

• Are you going to pay him 50 percent more for working 50 percent more hours?
• You’re going to burn people out.
• You won’t get that much more productivity, but you will piss people off.
• In the USA it’s not clear that unpaid overtime is even legal for software developers because they are not “exempt employees” (like management).

The most common theme was what might seem the obvious one: Focus on results, not hours. While a manager may feel they’re getting more out of an employee by keeping them there for extended hours, they could be cheating themselves out of productivity.

Ask yourself what actually matters in the long run. Is it that a certain butt is in a certain chair at a certain hour or would you prefer version 1.0 gets released on time? Would you rather an employee punches a card or he writes code with minimal bugs? Do you want someone who has no life or someone who brings fresh ideas to the office?

It’s true that startups require super-human amount of output. And, yes, sometimes it’s necessary to work an extra-long week or fix a server that’s down on Sunday at 3am. Employees should be expected to create more results than the average person, perhaps even more than they would be expected to create at more established companies. Part of the joy and pain of a startup is the infinite amount of work to do and the intense environment.

But hand-in-hand with that is responsibility and pride of ownership. The founders shouldn’t be the only ones who feel personally connected to a startup.

When you mandate hours instead of simply having large expectations, you’re not just setting up incorrect incentives, you’re also insulting your employees, their loyalty and their love of you and your company.

They already want to work too hard. They already want to devote themselves to the cause. And they already feel like they own a piece of the company’s future. By converting that zeal into a shop where hours mean more than results, you’ll kill that enthusiasm quicker than any burnout can.