You’re paying your developer $150,000 a year plus change. Why let them get distracted by dry cleaning or grocery shopping?
While the very biggest companies like Google and Facebook have figured out that they need to import barbers, car washes and gourmet food onto their campuses to keep their talent focused, smaller companies don’t have the scale for these luxuries.
That’s the reason why Exec, the task-management service from Justin.tv founder Justin Kan, is opening corporate accounts today. Companies will be able to set up an account and allot a certain amount of money every month for employees to delegate errands they don’t want to do. If they don’t use the credits, then they will just roll over into the next month.
Exec is a task-management service that gets people to run errands on-demand like getting keys copied or cleaning for $25 an hour. Unlike other services, it doesn’t make users manage a bidding process and vet offers.
“If you want to have someone do a gig, there are usually a lot of steps involved,” Kan said. “I’m trading mental energy to save physical effort. I want money to replace mental energy and physical effort. I want this to require as little thought as possible.”
Kan said he’s launching corporate accounts because so many startups had asked him to do it. Stripe, a mobile payments processing startup, used Exec to get beer and 50 chairs from Ikea down to their office for a developer meetup. Greplin, a personal search company from Y Combinator, also uses Exec to get food for the office from Trader Joe’s.
Right now, Kan is focused on preserving user experience over growing too fast. He says 91 percent of the app’s reviews are five-star ratings and 98 percent are either four- or five-star ratings. Exec is only available in San Francisco at the moment.
“For an app like this, the first time that it doesn’t work for you is the last time you’ll use it,” he says. He’s hired lots of workers and sent through a multi-step training process to make sure supply outpaces demand for now (just like Uber had to do when it first launched).
There are plenty of companies trying to create new forms of group texting or social networking. There are far fewer who are trying to offer a messaging service that crosses the web, email and mobile devices in a seamless way. Facebook is perhaps the most obvious example, but its utility is social — you might not want to use it for work, or for organizing your kids’ little league game, or for communicating with the parents of a class you’re teaching.
Enter SendHub, a startup in this year’s Y Combinator class, that has already started to get some serious traction by focusing on professionals. The company offers a clean interface for creating and organizing groups of people, and communicating back and forth with them over their desired format.
The result is that it has been growing fast. When Sarah Perez covered SendHub in February, the company was sending 30,000 messages a month. Now, it’s sending around that amount per week. Check out the graph below. The numbers are still small, but they’re in the right direction. YC partner Paul Graham says that its growth looks like AirBnB’s in the early days.
What types of users are causing this growth? A few big partnerships are helping, including one with Teach For America and another with the Florida Department of Education, cofounders Garrett Johnson and Ash Rust tell me. But some people are using it for social purposes as well, including a group of cross-fit trainers who coordinate times to work out. And there’s a variety of folks who veer into Facebook Messaging territory by communicating with each other to keep social activities like beer crawls together.
How does the app work? You’ll need to go to the website, sign up with Facebook or Google or a new user account, then enter the information of the people you want to share with. You can do it manually, or import CSV docs from Gmail, Outlook and other email clients. You’ll also get a new local phone number (the company uses Twilio’s voice messaging platform on the backend).
Then you can start writing messages and texting them out to people. Other users can also join using a keyword you choose. So a local business could invite existing customers via uploading its CSV file of them and asking new users to text in to sign up (which is how most people are joining). You get a unique new phone number, and you’re asked to either add contacts manually or via a bulk importer.
Users who receive the texts are also sent a link to go back and rate the message or block the sender. So if a local business starts spamming too many deals, they’ll be able to get feedback quickly.
But why did the growth take off? The founder joined YC with a product in hand, but they tell me they got a bunch of design help that has made the site easier to use for people. Other cofounders with specific technical skills have also helped them with scaling their services for new waves of users. And, they also got encouraged to focus on every single user who called in. Right now, they’re sleeping shifts so they can respond to any issues 24 hours a day.
Where to next? “Email and social will be our primary focus in the short term, Rust says, but we expect voice will be an important frontier for us to develop.”
“We did a basic integration and we’re seeing over 3,000 calls a month. IM is attractive, but it’s not requested nearly as much.”
These types of messaging apps are inherently viral, but sometimes have trouble making money as a result of too much success (see: GroupMe, Beluga). SendHub provides a set of premium features instead. If you want to go above 1,000 messages a month, you’ll need to pay at least $10 a month. If you want more than three groups, larger API requests, the ability to bring your own number, phone support, or a branded profile page, you’ll need to buy more expensive options.
The team still has a couple things to work out. In testing it out, the bulk importer had some trouble uploading my contact list. And the interface has some oddities, like an error message telling you that you need to type in a ten digit telephone number, which appears as you’re typing your number in. But all in all it feels right, and the engagement numbers seem to indicate that many more users will, too.
The time of infographic supremacy has perhaps fallen, as everyone and their mother seems to have taken to them like a fad. Because of this, TNW has all but banned infographics from our blog, since most of the time they end up being too heavily branded, self-promotional and poorly designed.
Still, in our hearts, we haven’t forgotten that infographics are one of the most compelling ways to share information. This is why we have exceptions.
In the case of ResumUP, a recruiting company with the slogan “Go Visual – Get Visible”, data visualization still has so much promise. The site has just updated its approach to visualizing your resume based on a full look at your Facebook profile, including…wait for it…a psycho-social analysis.
The set up is quick and painless (so long as you’re okay with sharing your data), and you’ll quickly be presented with a rather beautiful, data-driven resume that’ll show off your skills in an impressive light. The only downside to the site (that I’ve seen so far) is that they push users to invite friends. If you can get over that bump in the road, the results are worth it.
In the event that you like to hide your data from Facebook, you also have the option to edit the information ResumUP has gathered. Once your resume is complete, you can share on Facebook, Twitter, etc, or you can opt to export everything as a PDF or PNG with very little branding added.
Overall, the site has a ton of promise. I’d love to see more features in the future, like embeddable graphics and various layouts, but for the most part, what ResumUP offers now is surprisingly fresh.
While there’s no shortage of apps that let you take pictures and share them with a bunch of people, the ones that focus on food seem to be creating a niche for themselves. Recently, we wrote about how Foodspotting decided to relaunch as a discovery app to take on Yelp reviews.
It’s a smart move for them, but the pictures you take of food that you make at home still needs a home. That home could very well be a beautifully designed app for iOS and Android called DishPal.
What makes DishPal different is that it lets you elegantly share the dishes around you in groups or by using hashtags in addition to the typical stream of photos you’d find on Instagram.
Nom Nom Nom
DishPal lets you sign up using your Facebook account and once you get started you’ll notice that the app’s design is clean and as you tap through photos it uses really nice transition effects that feel really smooth. The power of the app isn’t just taking pictures of food, it’s really all about sharing groups of things like you would on sites like Pinterest.
One of the really cool features of DishPal is called “Party” where anyone can set up a themed group that invites others to share pictures of similar food. For example, you can set up a “Chocolate” party and everyone on the service who has taken a picture of amazing dishes with chocolate can add them to the party. It’s a great way to find new dishes and meet people:
In addition to these groupings which require you to participate, the DishPal app smartly uses hashtags as a way to automatically group photos together. Doing this for a photo sharing app for food makes absolute sense and makes discovery of great dishes even easier:
While some of the users on the platform are sharing their recipes upon request, it doesn’t seem like the community has taken to the idea of doing this with every photo they post. Of course you can still take photos of food from restaurants but I think that the more powerful play for DishPal would be to make itself the “homemade version” of Foodspotting.
If inviting people to add photos isn’t your thing, you can set up your own groups of food by using the app’s “Magazine” feature which you can set up for any theme you like. For example, if you wanted to make a Magazine for the top 10 dishes in San Francisco, you could do that in just a few taps. It’s yet another way that DishPal is utilizing curation to power discovery.
If you just want to share pictures and stories about food, checking out DishPal might be for you. I like taking pictures of food, but I don’t really want to provide a review for a restaurant like Yelp, Foursquare, and Foodspotting wants me to do. This app is for hardcore foodies.
Some of us can’t be bothered to check in, but still want to find interesting people nearby. The challenge for developers is how to do this in a way that is both useful and not creepy. Glancee, available for both iOS and Android, gets closer to solving these problems than most I’ve seen.
The app lets you sign in with Facebook, then it shows you people within 100 yards, or one, two, or ten miles who have things in common. In some ways this sounds similar another app I recently covered, Highlight — but there are key differences, that will make each app appeal to different sets of users.
Glancee works extra hard to match interests while minimizing the stalker feel. The main screen shows the Facebook profile photos of nearby people, but does not show a map of where they are, and it only summarizes the number of friends and interests in common. If you click through to the other person’s profile page, then you’ll see a list of Facebook friends in common as well as their interests versus yours.
The app compares your Likes in common with Wikipedia listings to identify similar categorical interests. Examples I’ve seen: If the other person likes The New Yorker, a line of text might say “You like The Econoimst.” If they like The Sopranos, it says “You like Mad men.” Sometimes these comparisons end up better than others, but overall the feature does succeed in showing you things loosely in common that might not have been obvious if you only compare Likes.
The app also goes very easy on notifications. During the past week I’ve been using Glancee, it’s sent maybe ten of them to me. I have to go to the app to see who’s nearby.
If you want to talk to anyone, a chat feature lets you message or voice call with them. A “News” tab on the home page shows you people with an especially large number of commonalities, as well as people who have visited your profile, or the activity of people you’ve communicated with. Also, the app goes very easy on your battery life.
In terms of future business models, Glancee’s ideas are along the lines of other location apps: targeting nearby ads, deals, etc. based on the users behavior.
Before I share my personal opinion about Glancee, I should point out that there are many other location apps that somehow use ambient location to try to create quality new connections. But very few are directly comparable to each other. Glancee cofounder Andrea Vaccari noted on my Highlight post that there’s also JoinMingle, Gatsby, Ban.jo, Shoutflow, Blendr, and Unsocial. And of course, there are many more location apps that have been around for years, like Loopt and Foursquare, not to mention Google Latitude or Facebook Places.
Briefly, here are the other things that some of these non-checkin apps are trying to do. JoinMingle is explicitly for professional networking, Gatsby provides a very opaque means of connecting in that it pairs you with specific people for one-hour-limited conversations, Ban.jo aggregates every other location service that it can, Blendr is dating-oriented, and Unsocial is designed around meeting people at conferences and other events. Shoutflow is the most similar that I’ve seen to Highlight and Glancee, but it’s not available in the US iTunes App Store so I haven’t personally used it. So, none of these apps appear to be that directly competitive to Glancee and Highlight (there’s lots more to say about each of these other apps, but they’re not what this article is about, sorry).
Glancee and Highlight are the ones that I’ve used that have provided social experiences that I have found to be meaningful. But, because I live in San Francisco and I’m a tech reporter, Highlight has been much more visceral for me. Being able to see exactly where other users are in relation to me makes a big difference considering that I’m in a city of hundreds of thousands of people sandwiched in a few square miles. So does the fact that it only shows people in a few blocks radius. And so does the fact that I get pinged by it whenever anyone is near. These are crucial subtle differences that totally reshape the user experience. Specifically, Highlight has been connecting me with long-lost friends and interesting new people in the tech world, who I’ve ended up having impromptu meetings with, and Glancee hasn’t.
But that’s just my tech-bubble perspective. Glancee is doing a lot of things right, and considering that a large portion of the US population does not live in dense urban areas, this could be the app for them. If you’re in a suburb or a spread-out small city or a rural area, the miles-radius range is more appropriate, and a neighborhood map is less relevant. Also, if you don’t like aggressive notifications and you like a long battery life, you’re going to like it more than Highlight.
But there’s always this caveat: Ambient location is not just something to build a company around, it is a feature that Facebook or Foursquare or any other big company doing location could also do very easily. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them test ambient out if any of these startups get serious traction. So readers, may each of you find the ambient location app that’s right for you.