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Posts Tagged ‘Productivity Suite’

EchoSign Integrates With Twitter To Tweet Out “Signed Deals”

EchoSign, the web-based electronic signatures and signature automation service, has launched a nifty Twitter integration to let users “ring the bell” on Twitter the moment a deal is signed and closed. EchoSign will auto-tweet the moment a deal is signed, and will Tweet how quickly a deal was closed.

The startup is also launching a contest to incentivize the use of Twitter when signing deals via EchoSign and will reward the top closer and quickest closer each month with gift cards and prizes. Echosign is used for a variety of transactions, including those in real estate deals, sales contracts and in human resources activities. Of course, its important to note that users may not want to Tweet out their deals to the public for privacy reasons.

EchoSign, launched back in 2006, has reached 1.2 million users and has also helped sign and close more than $200,000,000 worth of contracts in one month.

EchoSign’s electronic signature service lets you append digital signatures to contracts and other business documents, store them in digital form, and manage those documents without printing them out and faxing them. The startup has a freemium model, where the you can use a basic service for free but pay anywhere from $14.95 to $300 per month for a subscription service that includes extra features such as PDF encryption and password protections. EchoSign has gained traction as more businesses adopted SaaS and cloud computing applications. For example, EchoSign has gained significant popularity on Salesforce’s App Exchange. EchoSign is also integrated with web-based productivity suite Zoho.

To date, EchoSign has raised $8.5 million in funding. The startup faces competition from DocuSign and VeriSign.

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Google Steps Up Collaboration For Apps Users With Google Groups Integration

Google recently added a sharing feature to Google Groups with the search giant’s productivity suite, Google Apps to make the two products work more efficiently together. Tonight, Google is going full monty with Groups and launching an enterprise-friendly version of Groups that will integrated with Premier and Education Editions of Google Apps.

Google says that Groups is one of its most widely used applications. Groups is a collaborative application that essentially lets anyone create discussion forums, mailing lists, pages, and more for small and large scale groups. With the Apps version of Groups, employees can create groups for their departments, their teams or their projects. Employees can also use groups as mailing lists to share documents, spreadsheets, presentations, calendars, videos and sites with entire groups. Users can receive communications directly to their email inbox, in a digest format, or in the Groups forum view, and can access all the information in the groups archive, without the intervention of an IT administrator.

On the administrator side, Groups gives users more flexibility to set up groups without relying on admins for support. Admins can also set group policies and manage other group settings. This is key because previously Groups was only able to be controlled by IT admins, whereas now admins can let users create “user-managed” groups which are operable by any employees of an organization using Apps. Additional features include the ability to search group archives, and reply on behalf of a group.

As with most of the features in Google Apps, the collaborative component of Groups is the cornerstone to the announcement. As Rajen Sheth, Senior Product Manager for Google Apps, told me, “Collaboration is key to Google Apps,” and each product within the suite reflects this. Apps has been steadily growing in users, and counts more than 2 million businesses with 20 million users. While it still hasn’t caught up to Microsoft yet it’s certainly in the rear-view mirror.

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Zii Trinity mobile platform packs 1080p punch, looking for OEM love

Ready to start lusting after a new smartphone? If Creative has its way, you’ll soon be enjoying Full HD video on a 3.5 / 4G device, with built-in WiFi, 5 megapixel autofocus camera, accelerated 3D graphics, and mini-HDMI and Composite video outputs. The newly announced 3.1-inch, multitouch-capable Zii Trinity has been designed by Creative subsidiary Ziilabs, and will be licensed out to clients who’ll be able to customize a Zii-optimized Android install and Plaszma interface. As if we haven’t got enough smartphone ecosystems knocking about already, this also marks the introduction of ZiiLife, which aims to be both a content delivery and productivity suite. Powered by the ARM-based ZMS-05 or ZMS-08, the new handset actually seems destined to perform plenty of KIRF and grey market duties, judging by Creative’s “strategic partnerships” with Chinese manufacturers, but that might be no bad thing as, according to Gartner, the grey market is booming right now.

Zii Trinity mobile platform packs 1080p punch, looking for OEM love originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 01 Dec 2009 05:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft’s office of the future features interactive walls and Surface but, sadly, no Clippy

You know, Microsoft Research isn’t just about prototype tablets and the occasional multitouch mouse. No sir, it’s also about designing work environments that are so impractical that you can bet you’ll never see one in real life. For today’s example we have a sort of Microsoft Office: no, not the productivity suite, rather a room that integrates interactive wall displays, Surface, and video conferencing. There is even an assistant / avatar for issuing voice commands, and while this demo has it played by a human being we have hopes that Clippy might be making a comeback. Ready to check it out yourself? Of course you are! The video is after the break.

[Thanks, Chris]

Continue reading Microsoft’s office of the future features interactive walls and Surface but, sadly, no Clippy

Filed under: Displays

Microsoft’s office of the future features interactive walls and Surface but, sadly, no Clippy originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 07 Oct 2009 20:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Huddle Launches iPhone App, Microsoft Office Plug-In And Web Conferencing Tool

Collaboration applications are becoming increasingly popular in the enterprise space. Startup Huddle.net has been steadily accumulating innovative features to its business-friendly collaboration platform and quickly adding big name companies, including Samsung and Panasonic, as clients. Huddle is a network of secure online workspaces where you can share files, collaborate on ideas, manage projects and organize virtual meetings. Today, Huddle is adding several more useful features to its platform—web conferencing, integration with Microsoft Office, and a much-awaited iPhone app.

Huddle’s web conferencing feature, which is similar to web-ex, lets users set up meetings, schedule recurring events, and share their desktop and content with other members of their workspace. Huddle has also sent up a partnership with InterCall, one of the world’s largest conference call providers, to handle phone conferencing. Huddle’s web conferencing tool is integrated with Outlook or Google calendar and users receive free conferencing minutes as a part of their monthly package and can also access low-cost international service plans.

Huddle is also letting Microsoft office users seamlessly move between the productivity suite and the collaboration platform by launching a Microsoft Office plug-in that lets you save desktop files to Huddle save their desktop files directly into Huddle’s cloud-based storage, view and edit files, add new versions, request approvals and send notifications without opening a browser window. You’ll be able to access any edited Word documents that you’ve tweaked in the desktop app directly from Huddle. And this feature is enhanced by Huddle’s previous ability to use a Zoho-powered editor to work on Word and Excel files together directly in the browser. As a Microsoft BizSpark partner (we just announced Yammer’s BizSpark news a few weeks ago), Huddle is going to be developing a plug-in for SharePoint and and other Microsoft products in the near future. Currently, the MS Office plug-in works for the 2007 version but will be retrofitted to work with Microsoft Office 2010 next year.

There was some speculation earlier this month about the fact that Huddle doesn’t have a mobile presence. But Huddle’s new iPhone app lets users have full access to document sharing, project tasks, discussions and whiteboards, as well as a complete view of the user’s personalized dashboard. Huddle can be also accessed on other cell phones by using third party applications such as Clustr.

Huddle has also developed partnerships and integrations with LinkedIn and Ning to be included as apps on both social network. And the startup has a similar deal with Facebook, which allows you full access to all of Huddle’s tools within the social network.

And Huddle is affordable—there’s a free, ad-supported version available from the Huddle web site (which includes 1 workspace and 1GB of storage); three premium levels (which have increased workspace and storage) and an enterprise version with multiple managers, customization, advanced security, training, and increased support services. And Huddle allows for unlimited numbers of users for each account.

Andy McLoughlin, Huddle’s co-founder and director of strategic development, tells methat while 55 percent of Huddle’s users (McLoughlin says total users amount in the “Hundreds of thousands”) are based in the U.S., Huddle is making a big play for the U.S. in the coming year, opening up offices in San Francisco and other areas. Considering that many of Huddle’s big-name clients are based in the U.S. such as Edelman and Disney, this is a smart move. Because of the startup’s multiple services, Huddle faces competition from a variety of startups and tech giants including, Lotus, Box.net, and WebEx. And of course, Huddle faces competition from Google Apps and the launch of Google Wave. But despite the competition in the “Enterprise 2.0″ space, Huddle has been steadily gaining traction and should be able to give even Google a run for its money.

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Web-Based Productivity Suite Zoho Launches Forum Tool Zoho Discussions

Web-based productivity suite Zoho is launching a brand new product today called Zoho Discussions. Zoho lets any business, individual or organization create public or private support forums where employees or customers can share comments around a particular discussion topic. We have a special offer for TechCrunch readers; the first 25 readers (who are paid Zoho users) to email techcrunch@zohodiscussions.com will be able to use the product for free for up to 6 months.

I had the opportunity to test out Zoho Discussions and it’s both remarkably easy for anyone to set up and filled with useful features. With the new product you can create a platform for discussion forums, similar to Google Groups. The differentiating factor is that your forums can be customized and branded to adopt the look and feel of your site. Zoho even lets you pick out a domain name that coincides with your site. Plus, Zoho Discussions can be integrated with many of Zoho’s other productivity applications.

Similar to any forum, Zoho Discussion lets users create threads based on a particular topic. In terms of features, Zoho has focused in creating plenty of social tools to make the discussions more interactive and engaging. For example, users can vote on comments within a forum, indicating whether they “Like” a particular comment or forum. Aside from posting in the forums, users can interact in real-time through the built-in chat feature. Within the forum, users can create a profile, follow other users, bookmark particular threads and send private messages to administrators and users.

On the administrator side, you can make announcements, make particular threads more “sticky,” assign different users as moderators, remove inappropriate content and more. Plus, users and moderators can embed images and most types of files into threads as well. Like all of Zoho’s products, Zoho Discussion has a freemium model, with additional features like more storage, number of forums, number of moderators priced at $25 and $75 per month.

Zoho’s Evangelist, Raju Vegesna, told me that Zoho Discussions is designed to fulfill two kinds of purposes. The first is to serve as way for businesses to host a discussion forum to communicate with customers. The second purpose of the product is to be an internal platform for discussion within a business, in which case the product will be private.

This product seems to be representative of Zoho’s strategy to continue to innovate and iterate by launching new products and add-ons to its existing offerings. It’s almost reminiscent of Salesforce.com’s strategy. Over the past two years, Zohos has added support for Sharepoint, mobile, Google and Yahoo IDs and group sharing. Perhaps Zoho knows that it will have to fight a battle to keep users from flocking to Google Apps and soon Microsoft’s Web-based version of Microsoft 2010. But Zoho’s strategy may be sound—the startup has reached 2 million users in just 4 years.

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EchoSign Reaches One Million Users For E-Signatures

EchoSign, the web-based electronic signatures and signature automation service, has surpassed one million users. The startup, which launched back in 2006, has also helped sign and close more than $200,000,000 worth of contracts in one month.

EchoSign’s electronic signature service lets you append digital signatures to contracts and other business documents, store them in digital form, and manage those documents without printing them out and faxing them. The startup has a freemium model, where the you can use a basic service for free but pay anywhere from $14.95 to $300 per month for a subscription service that includes extra features such as PDF encryption and password protections.

EchoSign’s CEO and co-founder Jason Lemkin says that the electronic signature movement experienced momentum as more businesses adopted SaaS and cloud computing applications. For example, EchoSign has gained significant popularity on Salesforce’s App Exchange. EchoSign is also integrated with web-based productivity suite Zoho.

To date, EchoSign has raised $8.5 million in funding. The startup faces competition from DocuSign and VeriSign.

EchoSign: The Way the Web Signs from FromEchoSign on Vimeo.

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TUAW and Marketcircle team up for a Daylite / Daylite touch giveaway

Filed under: Software, iPhone, iPod touch

The Labor Day weekend here in the US always heralds the unofficial end of summer, which means it’s time to stop playing and to start getting back to productive work. Marketcircle, the makers of the Daylite Productivity Suite and the companion Daylite Touch app for iPhone and iPod touch, has combined forces with TUAW to help you get out of your summer sloth!

Whether you’re a student or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, the Daylite Productivity Suite (click here for a TUAW review) is a powerful tool for keeping track of your calendar, your contacts, projects, emails, and just about everything else in your life. Coupled with Daylite touch for mobile access, you’ll get your priorities straight in no time at all.

Marketcircle and TUAW want to give away copies of the Daylite Productivity Suite to two lucky TUAW readers, each with a companion one-year license for Daylite touch. To enter the giveaway, just leave a comment below describing your top organizational priority. Here’s the requisite legal jargon:

• Open to legal US residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia, and to legal residents of Canada (excluding Quebec), who are 18 and older.
• To enter leave a comment below describing your top organizational priority.
• The comment must be left before September 7, 2009, 11:59PM Eastern Daylight Time.
• You may enter only once.
• Two winners will be selected in a random drawing.
• Prize: One copy each of Daylite Productivity Suite and a one-year license for Daylite touch.
• Click Here for complete Official Rules.

As always, keep visiting TUAW for more exciting giveaways!

TUAWTUAW and Marketcircle team up for a Daylite / Daylite touch giveaway originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 04 Sep 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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