Popular to-do list application Any.Do has raised $3.5 million in new funding to continue helping people get things done no matter the device.

San Fransico-based Any.Do competes closely with apps like Wunderlist, Clear, and Remember the Milk. All four of these will have a great opportunity to pounce for users of Astrid, which was recently acquired by Yahoo and will likely shut down in the next few months.

While I’m a frequent user of Wunderlist, I also love Any.Do’s design and feature set. It’s free to use, simple, inputs tasks with your voice, and syncs across syncs iOS, Android, and Chrome apps. A web app is “coming soon.”

“In the past few months we’ve seen a lot of activity in the personal productivity space, and we are thrilled to have such an amazing group of people who believe in our vision and want to help us turn it into a reality,” Any.DO founder and CEO Omer Perchik said in a statement. “We are looking forward to continue simplifying people’s lives by bringing beautiful design and deep data analysis to the core apps that people use each and every day.”

The funding round was led by Genesis Partners with the participation of existing investors including Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Joe Lonsdale, Blumberg Capital, Joe Greenstein, and others. Prior to today’s round, Any.Do had raised $1 million in funding.

Recently, Onavo Insights said Any.Do is the most popular to-do list on iOS as of March. Check out the stats below.

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.

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.

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?

Asana, the white-hot task management app from a team of web wunderkinds, is going into business in earnest with its new product launch today.

Formerly free, the Asana product will now come in paid versions with fancy features for larger teams. Asana workgroups, as teams using the product collaboratively are called, had been limited to 30 people. Now, they can be much larger, from 50 people to hundreds, based on a sliding monthly subscription scale.

Asana is also bringing priority support, cross-workgroup collaboration features, and advanced permissions settings to the paid versions of the product.

The software in question was created by former Facebookers Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein. This will be their first crack at selling a product to enterprise-level clients rather than making web-based freebies for the masses, but they’ve been developing the application since their Facebook days. In fact, Rosenstein said during a call with Moscovitz and VentureBeat yesterday, Facebook still uses an older version of the software that became Asana.

“Trying to get everyone on the same page is really, really hard,” said Rosenstein. While a project manager at Google and also during his Facebook tenure, Rosenstein said, he had a lot of frustration over coordination on goals and projects. “We spent a huge amount of time not doing work, but doing ‘work about work.’”

Some of the biggest names in the web startup ecosystem are using Asana — Airbnb, Twitter, and Foursquare, just to name a few. With his company taking off like a rocket, not just throughout the startup ghetto but also in mainstream industries, Rosenstein said he task-management software an unappealing pursuit. “The idea of people accomplishing their goals — it’s hard to imagine anything sexier than that,” he said.

Nevertheless, when we think of software built for businesses, we think of painful, bloated, difficult, and ugly programs that are force-fed to us by middle managers.

“Everyone has the same reaction: ‘I’m being forced to use this. This is crap. This is annoying.’ They end up running back to email and Google Docs,” Rosenstein told us. “That other stuff isn’t getting used in practice.”

Still, there’s a glut of project management software on the market, due in no small part to the fact that it’s such a lucrative niche, “A lot of people are realizing this is an exciting opportunity,” said Rosenstein. “The leader is likely to be the next $100 billion company.”

What Asana is doing differently, the team explained in our call, is making the design friendlier and the technology more elegant than any other comparable product “so you can sync your thoughts with the computer incredibly fast,” said Rosenstein. “It’s actually faster than Notepad.”

Second, the team is focusing on flexibility, making a product that’s simple enough to be used in a huge range of tasks across an organization, from CRM in the customer service department to bug-tracking in IT to traditional project management.

The flexibility is key, because it’s Asana’s not-so-secret plan for infiltrating organizations with tens of thousands of members and earning those enterprise-grade monthly checks. You see, rather than pitching Asana to executives, the startup is hoping the product will get picked up by smaller team managers within the organization, slowly trickling up little by little until it gains a cult following throughout the company.

And as that happens, Asana will build out more features, for example, to allow the IT department’s workgroup to accept bug reports from the customer service workgroup.

Of course, in the heady highlands of the enterprise, Asana will be facing the usual competitors — Basecamp, Yammer, Google Docs, and email — but also custom-built software and legacy systems. We’ll see if the startup’s cult status and web-genius cachet pay off.

Asana officially launched in November 2011 and currently has “tens of thousands of teams” using the product. Altogether, Asana users have created 10 million tasks and have completed about 4 million tasks.

Image courtesy of Seanika, Shutterstock

SalesForce and other services like it have been around for several years to manage contacts, calendars, task, and invoicing. But, most services are aimed at business executives and startup companies, not smaller businesses. Jobber’s goal is to bring business management and customer relationship management tools to “field-services” providers, like handymen, painters, and landscapers.

“We provide field service business owners with a powerful modernization tool that is enabling growth and providing a competitive advantage,” co-founder and chief executive Sam Pillar said in a statement, “We’re making our customers happier business owners.”

Jobber realized that many small businesses in the field-services industry use either old software or pen and paper to manage their business, so it set out to bring these companies up to date. Jobber’s product includes a CRM tool, task management, job tracking, sceduling, invoicing, and QuickBooks integration for accounting, all of which are targeted specifically at small businesses. The company puts a lot of emphasis on easy to use software that anyone can start using with minimal training. The entire service is web-based, is available for all the major mobile platforms, and costs $30 per month.

The company said it is steadily growing its customer base and trying to go after the 75 percent of companies, according to a Gartner survey, that don’t use software to manage their business.

Service Auto Pilot and Click Software are among Jobber’s closest competitors, though Jobber told VentureBeat in a statement that its competition is ”split between web and desktop based software. The desktop offerings are dated, ill-supported and lack innovation but still have a relatively strong following despite their lack of sophistication.”

The company’s funding was led by Vancouver venture capitalists, entrepreneurs Boris Wertz, Vik Khanna, and Pankaj Agarwal, and venture capital firm Point Nine Capital. Jobber will use the seed funding to expand its team, develop new features, and improve its user experience.

Jobber is based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and was founded in 2010 by two freelance programers, Sam Pillar and Forrest Zeisler.

Lawn mower image via Shutterstock

“Clio provides small and medium law firms help to run their firms, doing everything from billing to staying on top of clients’ activity,” Clio chief executive Jack Newton told VentureBeat in an interview, “Clio allows lawyers to securely community with their clients with having to compromise the security of the message.”

Clio aims to manage entire law firms and individual practices with project management tools, secure file storage, task management tools, and billing systems. The service also puts a lot of focus on secure collaboration, meaning when lawyers and their clients need to share information they can do so with a secure connection that can’t be easily hacked. By using the cloud, Clio not only keeps project management costs low for lawyers, but it can also offer file storage systems and internal networks that are more secure than small law firms could afford to implement themselves.

“We’ve been very proactive on educating our clients about security and implementing best in class security measures so our clients can rest assured their data safe,” said Newton.

Clio plans to use the funding to further market its services to reach more law firms and individual law practices. It will also focus on global expansion into Europe and Australia.

“We’ll be investing in sales and marketing to get the word out about Clio and investing heavily in product development,” Newton told VentureBeat.

Clio was founded in 2007 and is based in Vancouver, Canada with 50 employees. The company has raised $7 million dollars overall from Acton Capital Partners, Point Nine Capital, and private investors.

Gavel with cash image via Shutterstock

Moskovitz (pictured) worked on Facebook when it was still a side project running out of a dorm room. Rosenstein was one of the company’s engineering managers and was responsible for such recognizable features as Facebook’s Like button.

While both co-founders were employed at Facebook, they helped design the company’s internal collaborative task-tracker. But, as Rosenstein noted in a recent blog post, “In general, good tools for staying in sync just haven’t been built and made available to the world.”

Asana, the new company the duo started working on in 2009, bills itself as “a modern way to work together.” The site launched today.

Asana uses a collection of tools to help teams collaborate on tasks, track their progress and communicate in real time about their work.

This brief demo video explains more about Asana’s specific tools and features:

“We began our private beta a year ago, and today thousands of people in hundreds of organizations are relying on Asana to organize their teams and their tasks, and to do some truly great things,” wrote Asana staffer Kenny Van Zant on the startup’s blog.

The service will be free for teams of up to 30 members and includes mobile applications for smartphones and tablets.

“Working together in concert more smoothly not only helps us move more quickly; it changes the nature of what we can undertake,” said Rosenstein. “When we have the confidence that we can orchestrate the group effort required to realize them, we dare bigger dreams.”

During 2009, the Asana team raised $10.2 million in two rounds of funding.

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.

Storenvy brings in $1.5M for online shopping community: The creator of a social shopping network has raised a seed funding round led by Spark Capital and First Round Capital with participation from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Charles River Ventures and a group of angels. The San Francisco-based company, whose best-selling products include t-shirts and sunglasses, lets users create an online store for free, with no programming skills necessary.

Cohuman grabs $600K to help teams work better together: The San Francisco-based startup has raised a second round of angel funding for its project management software, TechCrunch reports. The web-based software company, which generates revenue through a freemium model, prioritizes tasks for users based on factors like due dates and involved coworkers.

On Deck gets $15M to help small business owners get loans: The provider of small business loan financing has raised a third round of funding led by SAP Ventures. The alternative lending company has developed a tech platform to assess small businesses and has delivered more than $100M in loans to thousands of businesses to date.

Snapdeal scores $12M to deliver daily deals in India: The company has raised a funding round led by Nexus Venture Partners to offer discounts from local merchants online, peHUB reports. The Groupon competitor is based in India and claims to be the largest daily deals site in the country.

Using the service is easy: Simply add “issue@issueburner.com” as a recipient to any email where you’re asking someone to do something. The issue is then added to both of your IssueBurner task lists, and you can collaborate on it until its resolved. If your colleague isn’t already on IssueBurner, the task will be waiting for them when they sign up. With this method, a simple email that you would have sent anyway instantly becomes a trackable issue.

You can also assign issues to yourself by forwarding emails to IssueBurner, and the service will even tie attached files to the task. Tasks can be managed from IssueBurner’s website, and the service also has a mobile-optimized site available.

For group collaboration, you can create a group on IssueBurner’s site, and add people to it. Groups get a unique email address, which will create tasks for group members when it’s included in email messages.

The Webyog team tells me that it sees the service as something comparable to group issue or helpdesk  management services like LightHouse or Zendesk. IssueBurner is currently free while it’s in beta testing, and it expects to implement a combination of free and paid accounts once it’s officially released.

Webyog was founded in 2005, is self-funded, and has been profitable since its first year. The company makes money from MySQL database management tools like SQLyog and MONyog. It also developed CloudMagic, a browser plugin that brings fast search to Gmail.

Check out a video demonstration of IssueBurner below:

The startup ActionFlow aims to make it easier to run a business by offering company owners and managers inexpensive business-process templates to define, automate, and simplify tasks most businesses encounter.

Some companies pay expensive consultants to offer business-process advice, but not everyone can afford that luxury. ActionFlow offers over 50 different business processes for $49 each, which companies can tweak to suit their needs.

After logging into the site, users can find processes related to strategy, marketing, sales, customer service, human resources, social media, finance, and more. According to the company, each task includes instructions, responsibilities, due dates, checklists, attachments, links and comments. The site also allows users to create their own business-process templates, and make them available for review and purchase by other users.

ActionFlow competes with task-management services like Remember the Milk, and project management offerings like 37signals’ Basecamp. None of its competitors offer business processes for sale, however, and the larger project-management services are generally too expensive to compete on the same level.

The Oeiras, Portugal-based company was founded in 2009, and currently has 8 employees. The company is privately funded by its founder, Antonio Lucena de Faria, who has invested $318,000 in seed capital.

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/980795693