Showing posts with label SocialCast. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SocialCast. Show all posts

Monday, July 23, 2012

Asana's Inbox: Work Email

English: Low-resolution image of the Asana logo.
English: Low-resolution image of the Asana logo. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Announcing Inbox: A Step Towards A Post-Email World
Email is a 40-year-old technology designed to send electronic letters, yet we rely on it to communicate and coordinate nearly everything about our work. ..... Because anyone can add anything to our email inbox, it robs us of our sense of control. ..... Redundant meetings, tedious summary reports, endless streams of status updates, all replaced by the flow of Asana’s shared task list, with all the related thinking and documents right with each task. .... the biggest “work about work” time-sink of all: using email to stay on top of everything that has changed. .... Months later, if a new teammate wants to know how a decision was made, they can just search for that task, without needing to bug you to forward them the email chain. ..... Add yourself as a follower to exactly the set of tasks that you care about. If someone adds you to a thread and it’s no longer relevant, drop off in one click. ..... every read message is archived by default, making “inbox zero” the path of least resistance. ..... Since turning on Inbox for ourselves, we’ve seen over half our email disappear. Many of us have gone from checking email multiple times an hour to a couple times a day. ..... Business is ready to evolve to a post-email world. We believe Asana is the first credible post-email application.
Death to email! And meetings, too. Asana’s new inbox takes aim at “work about work”
fake-work .... 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.” ..... 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. ..... “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.” ..... “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… ..... “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.” ..... would transition him from a manager to a leader — inspiring, interacting, and doing the higher-order things that he really does enjoy.”
Asana tries to end email frustration with Inbox
a huge productivity suck: email .... Users subscribe to and unsubscribe from the feeds as they want to see them ..... betting that social networking tools transformed for the enterprise will not fill the bill. It claims big customers, including Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter, use the service to minimize extraneous meetings and to cut down on distractions. ..... “We don’t really see things like Yammer, SocialCast and Chatter as competitors but we also don’t see them as particularly useful. They just took something popular in the consumer space and ported them over, but research shows many people don’t see the value in them. We’re about a work graph, not the social graph,” Rosenstein said ..... Asana’s service is free for up to 30 users ..... a central column of new information flowing through, showing you all the activity happening with you and your colleagues ..... So if Peter Ha marked a task you assigned him as complete, you’ll know that he’s finished editing a guest post.
With New “Inbox” Feature, Asana Is Looking More Like That Email Slayer We’re All Longing For
Asana’s answer to email puts ‘inbox zero’ within easy reach
a few email chains, a handful of phone calls, one to two hours of meetings, and a dozen text messages later, you have a better but painful idea of what’s happening. The evolving state of the office and the increasing popularity of remote workers as well as the many, disparate pieces of technology we all use has complicated the matter intensely.
Asana’s Inbox a step towards ridding offices of “work about work”
"Each email is an isolated random string of text without any context" ..... All keystrokes happen in real-time on everybody's computer screen, just like in a Google Doc. ..... In fact, Facebook still manages internal operations using a custom version of Asana that Moskovitz and Rosenstein built while at the company. ..... Asana's Inbox looks like your Facebook News Feed, except without all the pictures, and without all the stuff that isn't deliberately shared with you. Inbox contains updates to tasks, comments, due date changes, and other status updates people would normally reserve for email...... So Asana has built a new communication client with tons of metadata, file storage, and organization tools, but the place most people are increasingly checking for work-related messages is on a smartphone. ..... "Mobile is the weakest part of the experience right now," Rosenstein admitted. "It's our top priority." Asana also isn't yet an email replacement because it's catered to team communication. Random one-to-one emails with cat picture attachments between friends don't yet have much of a place on the service, but Rosenstein says that the long term goal is to kill email entirely. "Email isn't going away tomorrow," he said. "It was originally designed to mimic the way the post office sends messages. We've only gotten by because it's the lowest possible denominator."
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Monday, June 27, 2011

FoodSpotting API

Image representing Foodspotting as depicted in...Image via CrunchBaseFoodSpotting's Dish As Starting Point
Twitter ---> Instagram ---> FoodSpotting

I was just reading this and it occurred to me that the solution to my number one gripe about FoodSpotting lies in the app releasing an API: social is for other independent developers to do.
Inc.: 30 Under 30: Alexa Andrzejewksi, Soraya Darabi, and Ted Grubb, Founders of Foodspotting: To learn about bootstrapping her book project, she joined Women 2.0 and started aggressively networking, talking about her plan to catalog restaurant dishes. Tech start-up veteran programmer Ted Grubb met her at a happy hour at Adaptive Path, where Andrzejewski was a consultant, and advised she steer her 20th-Century project into the smartphone era...... When he couldn’t find Andrzejewski a qualified technical co-founder, Grubb decided to learn iPhone programming himself, and he created a prototype Foodspotting app while in a decidedly un-2.0 setting: a tent in the wilderness. ...... New York media darling Soraya Darabi .... scored $3 million in angel funding. ...... "I know that I'm working more than—or as much as—I have in other jobs, but it doesn't feel like work, and that's the huge emotional difference for me" ....... on the forefront of the local, mobile, social app space ...... an international hit, with global "super spotters" staging "eat-ups" in hundreds of cities globally. ...... When it debuted in the iTunes app store, Foodspotting was one of just six apps in the location-based category. "The space has heated up a ton since last July—today it's a crowded space, actually—but back when we were raising money it was new to everybody," Andrzejewski says...... Despite initial investor skepticism, and nine months of bootstrapping, the trio was able to raise $3 million in funding from BlueRun Ventures. That's allowed the company to expand to ten employees: two in New York City, and eight in an open-air-cafĂ©-inspired office in San Francisco's SoMa neighborhood. To stay connected bi-coastally, Skype and SocialCast are open constantly on everyone's computers...... "And just as many funny things happen on Skype as in the office."
The API might also be the solution to the aspect that might most excite me about FoodSpotting personally: SMS enabled spotting of dishes around the world. Food is like music: you could discover endlessly. It is not possible to spot all the dishes that got made around the world just today, no matter how much crowdsourcing you do, and dishes morph. Recipes are alive, just like language stays alive. Good cooks improvise like jazz musicians.

Jessica Mah, Mark Zuckerberg
Jessica Mah: The Most Promising 19 Year Old Tech Entrepreneur In America

Dropbox, FoodSpotting, GroupMe, Hipmunk, inDinero, Instagram, and Quora are some of the names on the list that stand out.

The Color Social Graph Might Work Better For Books, Movies, Music