Search marketing agency: "Not a week goes by that we are not recommending Highrise"

Bloom is a search marketing agency that recently published a post called, "Highrise Makes for a Better Search Marketer."

At least in our case! We’re always looking to find tools that help us do stuff quicker, better and more efficiently. We especially love things that allow us to streamline the day-to-day business tasks of running our search marketing agency and allow our team to focus on our clients and their paid search campaigns. One of those tools is Highrise by 37signals - a web based CRM/Contact Manager. We looked at the different solutions out there to help us keep track of all the communications between our clients, suppliers, partners, and new business prospects.

What We Were Looking For
What we were looking for was a simple way to centralize our contacts and the interactions we have in collaborative way for our team. When the team at 37Signals launched Highrise last year, we were already familiar and using some of their other suite of solutions like Basecamp. We started testing out Highrise from day 1 and have never looked back!

Why We Love Highrise
Highrise is simple, effective and allows us to get down to business with a clean and highly efficient interface. We can quickly review the pulse of our communications, assign tasks to our team, and stay on top of time-sensitive and mission critical exchanges with our clients, partners and team members. Not to mention, it’s actually fun to use!

Not a week goes by that we are not recommending a client, partner or friend to try it out and see why we’re telling them that Highrise is truly a tool that enables you to focus on what you do best - in our case, making campaigns bloom!

Do you use a 37signals product in an interesting or noteworthy way? Let us know.

Basecamp's reply feature "in the wild"

Spotted on Flickr: Basecamp's reply feature in the wild (Uploaded by iQ Content)

"Basecamp (by 37signals) recently got a nice new feature - inline replies to project messages, infinitely improving project communication while on the go - in this case, I'm in the car (parked) responding to a Basecamp message on my old Nokia 62whatsit."

Learn more about Basecamp's new "reply to a message via email" feature.

Got a photo of you using a 37signals product in the wild? Send it to us.

New version of Ta-da Lists Widget released

Having problems with your Ta-da Lists Widget? Then go ahead and download v1.3, released today. According to the developers, the new version should solve the recent issues some have experienced.

If you're not familiar with Ta-da Lists Widget, it's a free Dashboard widget for OS X that offers quick access to Ta-Da List. The widget has been downloaded over 30,000 times and lots of Ta-Da List customers love it.

Four reasons why Backpack is better than other organizational tools

Micheal Hickerson, Associate Director of the Emerging Scholars Network, recently published OneManOffice: Backpack. In it, he describes why he thinks Backpack is great: 1) You can start using it for free. 2) It's easy to use. 3) Multi-user features make it a great intranet. 4) It's a simple way to make public web pages.

What makes Backpack so great, as opposed to say, oh, any of the other organizational tools out there? 

It’s free.  Actually it’s free for your first 5 pages, but that’s very useful in and of itself. That’s how I got started - created a free account and set up a few pages.  I used the free account for months before I upgraded.  And the upgrades are not expensive.  The lowest level upgrade is $7 per month. (All of 37signals’ products are based on monthly subscription rates.) 

It’s easy. It’s very intuitive, and there’s really nothing to learn.  There are certainly some tricks that you can pick up from the user forums, but you can start using Backpack out of the gate without any kind of learning curve. 

Is there anything else you need to know other than it’s free and easy to use? There is one more cool feature that will make it very useful to anyone who has to share information with colleagues in other offices.

Recently, Backpack added a multi-user feature, so that it can act like an intranet for files, notes, or other things you need to share.  You can also make Backpack pages public, making it a very easy way to create simple webpages.  Here’s a public copy of my reading list, so that you can see exactly how behind I am.

"Here’s a page that I created to help me keep track of books that I want to read...(iBackpack is a little snippet of code so that I can use Backpack on my iPhone - cool, eh?)"

Photographer calls Getting Real "one hell of a damn good book"

Kieron Heath (pictured below) is a portrait and fine art photographer who runs his own business. He recently wrote us about how he's been inspired by 37signals' philosophy and Getting Real.

In this age of the technological behemoths, venture capatalists and dragons dens (a British show where millionnaires ruin the dreams of startups with their eyes on being the next hasbro and walmart), it is so fresh and inspiring to have a group living the dream and telling everyone there is a better way and it can be done.

When I first looked at starting out as a photographer I put together a shopping list of equipment that I MUST HAVE! Without this list I thought I would never start. It was £20,000 in size. And would have made me spend a huge waste of time doing cashflow predictions and presentations to bank managers and investors.

Why did I not think my current camera would suffice, or my computer, or my printer. I ended up spending £700 on some studio lights a background and some business cards.

Like that, I'm ready to go.

I'm not going to charge huge amounts, I'm not looking to be a huge studio with five other stores. Just me a camera going to make beautiful works that I and my clients can be proud of.

With this slower approach I can upgrade my equipment and expand my advertising as my revenue increases.

Next year I will most likely go full time on the business and follow your 4 day week idea and become an efficient friendly photography business

Thanks for the inspiration and your continued work to make the web a better simpler place.

PC Magazine and Declutter It agree: Fight clutter with Backpack

In 12 Tech Tools to Clear Your Clutter, PC Magazine offers up ways to tidy up your tech life. The piece recommends getting started with Backpack.

Wouldn't it be great to get those pictures off your digital camera already? Scan that stack of business cards and get them into Outlook? Transfer videotapes and camcorder footage onto DVD so you can actually watch your home movies? Arm yourself with a smartphone and take your e-mail, calendar, and contacts on the go?...Here are our picks for the best stuff to get you organized—and maybe even help you stay that way:

Getting Started
A good way to get inspired to clean up is by making lists. Backpack is an incredibly easy-to-use, Web-based organizational service that's like having an online loose-leaf binder to use as you please, creating checklists, setting reminders, and embedding important files and links on the page. It's so straightforward, intuitive, and versatile it wins our Editors' Choice award.

Declutter It is Jennifer Chait blog's blog about organizing. She says, "I’m big time into simple living and getting back to a less over stuffed way, less commercial way of life, and instead celebrating a more family and people centered approach to life."

In I’ve Decided to Backpackit, she talks about how she's using Backpack to reduce the amount of paper she uses:

To give you a brief description of what this tool is all about, it basically is a way to keep yourself organized on-line. It’s a great way to reduce the amount of paper you use. I am constantly scribbling little notes to myself and when I am in “work mode”, my desk can look pretty scary.

With Backpack you can keep up with your schedule using their calendar and also use their pages to keep to-do lists, notes, ideas or whatever!

Do you want to fight clutter? Try Backpack.

Revixio, creators of CorePage, inspired and informed by Getting Real

CorePage is "an instant link page system." Its About page gives a hat tip to Getting Real:

We'd like to acknowledge the inspiration and information we received from a great web application development company called 37signals.

Many of us at Revixio have used their products for years and are unabashedly huge fans. We also read and recommend their book, "Getting Real" and adopted their iterative development process in the creation of CorePage. We built CorePage using Ruby on Rails, the open-source web framework that they pioneered. Finally, thanks to their CEO, Jason Fried, for his advice and inspiration.

We wanted to find out more so we asked David Peltz, Founder and CEO, of Revixio Software to tells how his team used Getting Real to build CorePage, "The Instant Link Page System."

It seems a little weird, frankly, to be telling the world how we read this great book about how to build a successful web application. After all, we're a group of four partners with a track record of building successful web applications, web sites and multimedia projects — for other people.

So, when the time felt right for these friends and former collaborators to form their own company, I, having recently read "Getting Real," proposed an unusual idea; "Let's not do it the way we've always done it. Let's try to enjoy the process and adopt the methods of an already successful company that we all admire, 37signals, and do it their way." As with many start-ups, most of us were going to be working on this project on a part time basis, at least initially, and those who were already working full time didn't relish the idea of simply doing more of the same work at night. So, once the other partners had their own copies of the book (we splurged on the paperback), and committed to it, we were on our way.

A look at the CorePage app.

Getting the most out of Backpack as a GTD ("Getting Things Done") solution

Brett Kelly, a programmer from Southern California, writes The Cranking Widgets Blog, a personal productivity blog that focuses on David Allen's Getting Things Done. He recently published a post about why he loves Getting Things Done with Backpack.

So, what does Backpack bring to the table that makes me so giddy? Well, several things, actually…

• Polish - Seriously, Backpack looks and acts just like you want it to. One of the driving concepts in the development process at 37signals is that you only include the features that you think most people will need. Obviously, there are tons of people who wish Backpack did [feature] - hell, there are a couple things I wouldn’t mind seeing in the next update - but they choose features to include and make sure they freaking work. And they do.
• The Free-form nature of pages - My Backpack is made up of many, many pages of lists - but there are also a growing number of pages dedicated to specific projects. For example, I’ve been invited to a special luncheon with the Internal Revenue Service in a couple of weeks, and they’d like me to bring along a few things (financial records and such). Before Backpack, it would’ve ended up with me emailing myself a pantload of PDF bank statements, then aggregating all of those emails under a specific gmail tag. Obviously, that would have gotten extremely unwieldy in short order. Now I have all of those PDFs arranged nicely on a few Backpack pages (where you can actually store the files, not just link to them), as well as notes about specific items, a picture of my daughter and a copy of the Gettysburg Address. You shove stuff on a page, drag it where you want it (including to other pages), there’s very little limitation on how you use it.
• Pages can be arbitrarily long - From what I can gather, there’s no set limit on the size of a Backpack page (well, except for the amount of data you’re allowed to store based on the plan you’re using). Using the previous example, I’ve got 38 PDF files on a single page as I write this. I’m pretty sure I could add another 50 and be just fine as cherry wine. I’m also not the least bit concerned with how long my lists get or anything like that, so even you mover-and-shaker types out there can rest easy knowing that you’re not going to “break” the Backpack.
• Each page has an email address - I have one page called “Inbox” where I send random thoughts, new inputs I receive while away from a computer, as well as messages sent from Jott (yep, Jott has built-in support for Backpack through it’s Jott Links service). The magic here is that my new “stuff” is now sitting a click away from the lists that manage the rest of my stuff. Hell, I can even *drag* it to the appropriate list. Freaking sweet.
• iPhone friendly (sorta) - While the default Backpack doesn’t have a special interface for the iPhone (and I’m sure this is one of the most requested candidate features), there are a couple of super easy tricks that allow you to reformat a Backpack page for easy iPhone viewing (without making it look wonky when viewed through a regular browser) and even change the WebClip icon for Backpack when you add it to the home screen.

CEO suggests using Basecamp to encourage accountability and participation

Small Business Trends is a publication for small business owners and entrepreneurs. Zane Safrit, former CEO of Conference Calls Unlimited, just published an article there called Time-Generating Resources for CEOs.

Today’s competitive pressures force CEOs to squeeze the most out of shorter and shorter time segments, those brief-fleeting moments in-between interruptions... want to share with you the resources I found over those 7 years that gave me greater amounts of uninterrupted time.

He leads with Basecamp as his first suggestion.

BASECAMP. It’s a wiki product offered and hosted by 37signals. First, what’s a wiki? According to Wikipedia (For this word, who else?), a wiki is a “collection of web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language.

I’d add it’s a one-stop resource for your projects, the to-do’s and timelines with each project, a place to document your meeting notes and expectations that arise from them. It’s a repository of resources and ideas and your own private brainstorming sessions. You add content to those ideas that progress. You delete those crushed by reality.

There are many wiki products. I chose Basecamp because it’s affordable (start with free), easy to use (key for both you as the CEO and your company), its features are constantly upgraded without interrupting my use, and 37signals, the company behind it, offer a host of complimentary services that integrate with Basecamp. It saved us hours of time and frustration, minimized disputes by documenting the conversations, encouraged accountability AND participation, rewarded everyone’s engagement with an easy means to participate in an open, transparent manner. I continue to use it today.

Read the whole article for more time-saving resources.

30 sleeps creator: "Getting Real has played an integral role in my pursuit of happiness"

Brad Bollenbach is applying the Getting Real approach to life hacking with his site 30sleeps.com. It's a site for people who want to change their lives, with the idea being that it's a lot easier to make changes if you take them one month at a time. Brad wrote to tell us more about how Getting Real has influenced him.

As an entrepreneur, writer, UI designer, and software developer, your philosophy of "Getting Real" is the motive power that's brought my business ideas to life. It's helped me make lightweight a lifestyle, and driven me to Get Shit Done (TM).

What's Your Problem?
Getting Real suggests building things that solve your own problems.

Almost a year ago, I asked myself, "What most frustrates me about the world?" The answer, for me, was that so many people seem to live at a fraction of their potential. This motivated me to build something that would inspire, educate, and empower people to change their lives.

I created a site called 30 sleeps, which is based on the idea of using 30-day goals (an idea I got from personal growth blogger Steve Pavlina) as a primary vehicle for personal change. Realizing my own shortcomings too, I knew this would be a great way for me to explore, decipher, and document the day-to-day problems that my own life presents, whether related to building meaningful relationships, breaking bad habits, or even figuring out how to set my hourly consulting rate.

A lot of people can identify bugs in their daily life, but stop short of authoring the patch. The Getting Real approach of building something that I want has imbued my work with a fire that is hard to light in any other way. And when you're building to change the world, that kind of passion is a nuclear weapon.

Embracing Constraints
I've had several business ideas in the past, none of which ever made it out of thoughtspace.

In starting 30 sleeps, I took a lesson from how you guys used constraints to drive the development of Basecamp. My primary constraint was a deadline: June 1, 2007. I made a commitment to myself that, no matter what, 30zzz was going live on that date. This gave me only a few weeks to get something running.

Tightening the noose forced me to start building something right away, even though I had only a vague idea of what I wanted the site to be. My first coding session involved literally opening up TextMate and just plowing. The UI went from nothing, to horribly bad, to ugly, to tolerable, to usable, to running in production.

Had I waited until I was "ready" to start this project, I'd still be twiddling my thumbs.