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

6wunderkinder, the company behind the popular Wunderlist to-do app, has just launched a sequel to that fantastic app that works across iPhone, Android, Web, Windows, and Mac platforms and features a refreshed design.

Although there are some other great to-do list apps out there, namely Clear, Any.Do, Astrid, and Remember the Milk, Wunderlist has been own of my personal favorites because it works well across every device I own. But it’s always had a few missing features. Notably, the app didn’t have recurring tasks, which are useful when you have a task you need to do daily or weekly, and doesn’t have calendar syncing with services like Google.

Christian Reber, founder and CEO of 6wunderkinder, told me via email that his team worked on the new Wunderlist apps on all platforms for six months and completely rebuilt them from scratch. The app performance will probably be the most substantial change users will notice.

“The most substantial changes are all technical,” Reber said. “Anyone who builds native apps, knows how much work it is to build just one app. We’ve done that with five — and we are launching all at the same time. This has been a huge and tough challenge, and I’m so happy we’ve made just in time for Christmas.”

Reber believes experienced Wunderlist users will appreciate the changes and thinks it could attract new people to the fold.

“The biggest changes for the users are at first: new beautiful and rock-solid apps,” Reber said. “Everyone who used Wunderlist 1 on a regular basis, will notice a massive change in quality. We’ve also put in new features, starting with ‘our users’ most wanted,’ like Reminders, Subtasks, and Recurring Tasks. But the most important difference for all users will be the Activity Center. It helps users to stay connected while working collaboratively on lists and tasks. It tells you what everyone is working on. It may seem small, but if you use it with others, you quickly notice that you haven’t felt like this before about a similar product.”

While Wunderlist 2 does not feature calendar syncing (the only thing I want now!), Reber says it is “on our product roadmap for early 2013.” The company will also work to push out apps for various tablets and other platforms in 2013.

On the pricing front, Wunderlist will remain a free service. But Reber said the company will introduce paid premium accounts in 2013 with a yearly or monthly subscription fee. Exact pricing and feature will come in early 2013.

Check out the video below for more on Wunderlist 2:

Photo via 6wunderkinder

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.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Is there such a thing as being too organized? A new to-do app called Clear aims to cut down on the amount of time you spend managing to-do lists so that you can actually, well, do things. The app is being demoed for the first time Thursday at the Macworld/iWorld expo in San Francisco.

There is no shortage of feature-filled to-do apps in the App Store. Apple even launched its own in October called Reminders, which lets you add location-based alerts to items. Many of the current apps are based on or inspired by Getting Things Done (GTD), a 10-year-old organizational book-turned-movement that lays-out a specific way of tracking and managing tasks.

“It has become the Bible for productivity nerds, and the dominant religion in the world of to-do apps,” Clear-creator Phill Ryu said of GTD. “We just think it’s all bullshit. The system is so elaborate and feature-filled that it demands you start investing a lot of work just to make sense of it all.

“GTD has turned into some perverse form of procrastination.”

Ryu’s solution is a back-to-basics graphic and fun (yep, fun) to-do list app. Clear is a color-coded list inspired by that old standby, paper and pencil. Items are organized by urgency for a look reminiscent of the Department of Homeland Security’s old threat level advisory system. Pinch and expand to add a new task, pinch in to bounce back to the master list of lists. Swipe right to mark something as done. Swipe left to delete. That’s it in a nutshell. Make a list and move on.

The app is the first project from Impending, a new design studio started by veteran app developers Ryu and David Lanham. Ryu and Lanham first met online Ryu was 16 and Lanham worked at Iconfactory. Most recently, they worked together at another app studio, Tap Tap Tap, which is responsible for big hits such as Camera+ and The Heist for iPhone, and has sold more than 10 million apps.

But Ryu and Lanham wanted to start their own shop where they could pursue their unique design philosophy.

“I think the important thing is to never take anything for granted and question everything — all the known interface design conventions, the clichés and rules of the genre.” said Ryu. “These are formulas, and to us formulas are just a fancy way of describing the rut you’re stuck in.”

The product of this approach is Clear, a collaboration with Realmac Software and Milen Dzhumerov, but other “top secret” projects are already in the pipeline. The Clear app won’t be available in the App Store until mid-February, but the duo has a video of the app in action (watch it below). Impending plans to make Clear free to download and try, but you can pay to add pro features.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Is there a business in making mobile to-do lists more collaborative and less headache-inducing? Startup Any.do formally launches Thursday with a free Android application proffering shareable, voice-operated to-do lists, and $1 million in seed funding to find out.

The startup, founded in 2010, first released a simple to-do list application for Android called Taskos to test the mobile task management waters and determine what mobile users wanted in a lightweight to-do list app.

Taskos became an accidental hit and attracted 1.3 million users, who now create hundreds of thousands of tasks each day. The startup claims that it’s the most popular app of its kind on Android — and that’s what got investors salivating.

“We have a killer team … we’re tackling a huge market … and we came with proof,” Any.do CEO Omer Perchik told VentureBeat. “The combination of the three got us [the] funding.”

Any.do managed to get Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Genesis Partners, Blumberg Capital, Joe Lonsdale at Palantir and Aydin Senkut at Felicis Ventures, which is an investor in VentureBeat, to participate in its first round of funding.

Now, Any.do for Android, a free mobile app hitting the Android Market Thursday, will be the company’s key product moving forward. It comes with three particularly drool-worthy features — shareable tasks, contextual autocomplete and a simple but elegant interface — that set it apart from similarly-purposed applications, including Apple’s new Reminders application for iOS 5.

You can also interface with Any.do using your voice, drag-and-drop tasks, sync with a Google account and choose themes to personalize the experience.

A similar application for iPhone is said to be several months away from release.

“We invested in Any.do because of the strong team and their vision to take the productivity space beyond the task list,” Dror Berman, managing partner of Innovation Endeavors, said of the firm’s interest in the to-do list app maker. “Any.do’s core technology understands people’s intent, and leverages the mobile phone to not just make a list, but to actually get things done — anytime, anywhere.”

How Any.do will profit with its nifty little application is anyone’s guess. Perchik says the startup has a few business tricks up its sleeve, but he isn’t ready to reveal those plans just yet.

As for Taskos, the startup will eventually let users port over their tasks and lists to Any.do, but its ultimate fate remains uncertain.

Ten-person Any.do is based in Israel and has an office in Palo Alto.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Task management service Remember the Milk has just unveiled a method to let users add tasks with the iPhone 4S’s Siri virtual assistant — a first for a third-party service.

Siri currently works with data from Yelp and the knowledge engine Wolfram Alpha, but developers are eagerly anticipating the chance to make their own services Siri compatible.

RTM is apparently using a simple workaround to take advantage of Siri: It involves creating a new CalDav calendar on your iPhone 4S and making it your default reminders calendar. So now when you ask Siri to make a reminder for a certain point in time, it will get added to Remember the Milk instead of showing up in the iPhone’s “Reminders” app. That means you’ll have to rely on the RTM app to keep track of your reminders, instead of Apple’s built-in app.

By making Siri work with RTM, you’re also disabling iOS 5′s normal reminder notifications. I tried creating a RTM event using Siri and it successfully made its way to the service, but my iPhone didn’t remind me on time because I don’t have the RTM app installed. For heavy Remember the Milk users, this shouldn’t be a problem, but I think the company would do well to remind users of the way it changes the iPhone’s built-in reminder service, as well as the fact that an RTM app is necessary.