We are pleased to share with you our January 2009 updates

• Task Attachments:You can now upload and attach documents to tasks as well as notes.

• Inviting People:You can now add multiple people to a workspace at one time. Instead of getting a place to put one email address you get a box where you can type in one or more email addresses separated by commas or line breaks. You can also paste a list of email addresses in.   This will make it particularly easy to invite groups of people into multiple workspaces.

• TimeZones: Dates and time on posts should not automatically adjust to your timezone.

• Editing Tasks: You can now update/edit tasks by double clicking on them

• Desktop Client: The notes screen on the desktop client has been upgraded in a number of ways and can now run under Linux as wee as on the PC/MAC

We received comment to another post which ask: Is there a chance you could share more about where [WizeHive] is located and…its future goals?

Since we have not put much company info on the home page I thought I’d share a bit here.

WizeHive was founded by myself, Michael Levinson and a friend of mine, Mike Carson. Mike is a world class developer and we met over our mutual interest in the stock market and automated trading systems (another story for another day).   I’m a builder/entrepreneur/investor.  I like to build things and enjoy working with nice people.

We have also had some help from a ton of other people but mostly from Ted Henson, a friend and colleague of mine who works during the day at a company I sold a few years back, Yasmine Mustafa, a colleague I met through DreamIt Ventures last year, and David Speers, a very talented guy involved in the Philly startup community and founder of www.phillypreneurs.com. 

Anyway, if it isn’t obvious already we are located in the Philadelphia area, mostly in the western outskirts of the city.

Writing mission statements is always something I think people spend way too much time wordsmithing so here is a 10 minute beta version of mine…  We want to build a great application that helps people improve their life by helping them get better organized.  This may be helping them organize personal matters, business matters, etc.   It may be organizing information, tasks, files, etc.  

While we think there are some really good products out there now hovering around this space – none of them exactly did what I wanted them to do in the way I wanted it to work – so I’m confident there is a niche for us to focus on.

The reaction for the first few days to WizeHive has been very positive.  It is encouraging to see how many people are looking for something in this area. 

I received one email question today that I thought was worth sharing both the question and answer.   Here was the question…

“Hi!  Thanks for letting me see the beta site.  I was a bit confused initially about the way that Workspaces and Pages fit together, but I finally got it.    I’d be interested in seeing examples of real-life uses of wizehive, because it seems to me that it’s almost too open ended.  It tries to be everything at once.”

Now to the answer…

First, we are looking at ways we can make the concept of pages a little clearer.   Its a bit tricky because they get used differently depending on the workspace and some workspaces make heavy use of them and some don’t.   But we are aware of that conceptual hurdle.

Now to my core answer.    As I wrote in another post WizeHive really was a solution to a problem I was having.  I had lots of things going on, they were all a bit different, but at a core level I wanted to capture and organize information and capture and organize (and manage) activities.   The main video on the WizeHive site is a simplified version of my real life although I changed the names of the workspaces and pages in the videos for privacy reasons.   But, I’ll share more of that info now.

First, I am founder and part owner of a 10+ person tech services company based in the suburbs of Philly.   I’m not in the office much and don’t participate in the daily activities of the company but was/am interested in keeping tabs on what was/is going on.   I needed something for customer management.  I wanted something where we could record all customer and prospect  ”touches” – sales calls, support calls, help desk tickets, etc.   We tried Salesforce.com, which is a great product; but it was overkill, expensive (for the customizable version) and too structured.   That was one motivation for WizeHive.  We now use WizeHive for that, setting each customer up as its own page.  It’s amazing after about 4 months how much customer data and activity we have captured; it’s interesting to look at an individual customer and realize what we wouldn’t have as history without WizeHive.   We also extensively use the task feature where we have open help desk tickets, open AR collection, follow-ups needed for selling, etc.

Second, we developed WizeHive in part because of my involvement in a startup firm, DreamIt Ventures.    I had two partners within DreamIt and we had a lot to do in a short amount of time.    As we worked around the clock last year to launch DreamIt we had emails containing ideas, best practices, etc flying all over the place and I was constantly thinking it would be great if I could just forward these into one place where I could organize them.    I actually tried some wiki products and spent hours searching the internet for something where I could email and forward things from my email to the wiki or blog so it could be saved, organized and captured.    I also was having a hard time not only tracking what I had committed to do – but what my partners had committed to accomplishing as well (yes…so I could bug them when they were behind).    So we implemented a workspace for DreamIt which included one page for each area (kickoff weekend, office space, funding day, etc.) and organized everything around these pages.

In 2009 we plan on another session of DreamIt but this year our use of WizeHive is going to be much more extensive.   Beginning in January we will accept applications for our summer program…and I expect we will get at least 300 to 400 applications.   Each application will be captured and forwarded via email (or we may create a plug in for it) to WizeHive where it will become a seperate page.   Then, each of us reviewing the application can comment and share ideas on the application in one central place; rather than in emails and a google spreadsheet, which is what we did last year.    I have also set up a seperate workspace for contact management, where each VC firm and angel investor we talk to is set up as a seperate page.  We then used the custom database feature to create a number of fields where we capture information such as firm name, telephone #, etc.     For DreamIt we then have a 3rd workspace where we are organizing our 2009 program, where each page is a seperate area (marketing, recruitment, etc).

This summer we also used WizeHive for the rollout of WizeHive itself.    In this case we set up pages for features, competition, roll out strategies, design, etc.  Each time we read something or see something that is relevant we email it or paste it in and we have assembled a valuable library of info that we refer back to regularly.  We also again use the task list mostly for managing our development goals and activities.     We also set up a separate workspace for support activities and forward all inbound support info to it so we are developing a database of support items which we may open up to users down the road. 

I also have a Workspace set up for my personal use that is mostly for task management for my home tasks, for my family, etc. Although I could keep this in a separate list (I did before) it is great for me to be able to see everything that I have on my plate all in one place.

So there you have it…my crazy life and a detailed set of examples of how I use WizeHive. I”m hoping in a few weeks after we’ve had some beta users begin really banging away at WizeHive that I will be able to share many more stories with you about how they are using it to improve their life and/or business.