Organizing your inbox might sound tempting. The Radicati Group reports that the average employee spends about 25 percent of their day on email; by 2013, approximately 507 billion email messages will be sent each day. Many people dream of hyperproductive days unhampered by junk mail, forwards and unimportant exchanges. We’re envious of (and slightly annoyed by) friends who accomplish that “inbox zero” feat (and then post about it on Facebook or Twitter — you know who you are).

But before you get obsessive-compulsive about color-coding and labeling emails, keep in mind that over-organizing doesn’t necessarily solve your email problems. In fact, you’ll likely remember less of the information that’s in the emails if you do that.

A study conducted last year by IBM Research — originally posted on MIT’s Technology Review — found that while “active foldering” reduces the complexity of the inbox, there’s a lack of systematic data about the extent to which these folders are actually used, so it’s hard to determine whether the hours occupied by filing emails to folders is time well spent.

Also, “frequent filers” tend to remember less than non-frequent filers about their email messages. The IBM Research study, which analyzed 345 frequent users’ methods of finding emails, found that email users tended to have pretty good memories when it came to content, purpose, or task-related information in emails, recalling more than 80 percent of such information; those who moved things into folders were less likely to remember these things, possibly because they were not frequently exposed to the information in the inbox.

Of course, users aren’t going to remember everything that’s conveyed in every email. But when it comes to effective search — which in some cases negates the need for all that foldering — remembering key words is, well, key.

Lastly, the study suggests that email threading is the better alternative to manually moving emails into designated folders. People with high thread-count emails were less likely to use or need to use folders, and people with more threads were less likely to need to scroll through their inboxes, as well, suggesting that threads were an effective way to compress inbox information.

Gmail already has a pretty efficient search function and collates emails into threads. But as part of Google’s efforts to push Google+ in other areas — like search — the company is also suggesting Gmail solutions through Google+. In fact, new Gmail users don’t have a choice when it comes to Google+; building a profile is part of the sign-up process. (Google’s current Gmail user base: 350 million; Google’s social network users: Murky.) Searching for emails through Google+’s circles seems a bit confusing for the average user, though, and would benefit only those users who have spent a lot of time building up their Google+ contacts.

For those looking for outside apps to aid in email organization, some of the more popular ones include Xobni and Postbox. Others, such as Shortmail and Clarify, think simpler, shorter emails could put you on the path to inbox nirvana.

(Photo courtesy of robep/Flickr)

Salesforce.com has bought Manymoon, the social productivity start-up.

The price of the acquisition was not disclosed, but one source put the sale at between $25 million and $35 million.

Manymoon makes one of the more popular tools on Google’s apps platform.

The San Francisco company, funded with only a small seed funding round by Harrison Metal, offers an online collaboration app that businesses and consumers can use to organize group projects, conversations, tasks or documents that are often done via email or other software.

Manymoon is rather typical of the innovative app makers the search giant has been courting to populate its marketplace.

Salesforce.com has been moving aggressively into social networking in the enterprise arena with its Chatter offering and more.

Earlier today, in fact, it was also part of a $4 million funding of Seesmic, the social dashboard app maker.

Here is the Manymoon blog post–which just went up–on the sale, as well as a video interview BoomTown did with its co-founders Amit Kulkarni and Manav Monga, just as Manymoon joined the Google Apps Marketplace store rollout in March:

Manymoon Acquired by Salesforce.com

February 1, 2011

Today we are excited to announce that Manymoon has been acquired by salesforce.com!

Manymoon has experienced tremendous growth since our launch, with more than 50,000 businesses adopting our social productivity app. We’ve launched on three major web platforms: Google Apps, LinkedIn, and the Google Chrome Web Store. We think we’re on to something special, building an easy-to-use application that integrates with the tools you already use to help you get work done. Over 1,000 new businesses choose Manymoon each week to track any type of work activity with anyone from anywhere.

We’re looking forward to even more growth in 2011, and are thrilled to now be part of salesforce.com, the leader in enterprise cloud computing, to continue to deliver an amazing social productivity application for everyone to use.

What Does This Mean for Manymoon Customers?

We’ll still be the Manymoon that helps you get work done. The Manymoon team will remain intact and will operate as a separate business within salesforce.com so we can continue our focus on building a great social app that makes our customers more productive and successful every day.

The Manymoon you know and love will remain the same:

* Manymoon Standard, our free product, will continue to be available for existing and new customers. In fact, we’ll continue to add features to our free product. And, if you want to upgrade, you are welcome to do that through the Manymoon website whenever you like.

* Existing premium features, subscriptions and price points will remain unchanged.

* Manymoon will continue to work with Google Apps, LinkedIn and the Chrome Web Store. And, we will continue to develop new features to enhance support of these platforms.

*We’ll continue to support our customers in the Manymoon Support Universe.

Salesforce.com and Manymoon Together

Our approach to the market remains unchanged: work with the tools that people already use online (Google Apps, LinkedIn, Chrome), build an app that requires no training or setup, focus on serving the daily productivity needs of professionals and be on the cutting edge of the latest technologies like HTML5. As we’ve grown, we’ve learned that serving customers is more than just building an app with nifty features. It includes providing scalability, security, performance and support–all areas in which salesforce.com has a proven track record.

Like most startups, we admire salesforce.com as the original cloud computing company that made this industry possible. Over the last 12 years salesforce.com has been an evangelist and driver for bringing applications, platforms and collaboration to the cloud. We’re excited to be part of their vision for cloud, social and mobile, utilize their knowledge and experience to build a world-class social productivity app, and move even faster in delivering new capabilities to you!

What’s Next?

We are going to invest more in what you’ve told us you like about Manymoon: Google Apps, LinkedIn and Chrome Web Store support. You can expect to see many of the key social productivity features you’ve requested released in the near future. We’re also going to be working on some exciting, new developments in the coming months…so stay tuned!

Thanks,

The Manymoon Team

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110201/salesforce-buys-manymoon/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110110/early-adopter-the-daytum-iphone-app-visualizes-your-life-and-lunch-as-data/ http://allthingsd.com/20110110/early-adopter-the-daytum-iphone-app-visualizes-your-life-and-lunch-as-data/#comments Mon, 10 Jan 2011 19:03:40 +0000 Drake Martinet http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=34868

For data nerds everywhere, the pinnacle of numerical navel-gazing has, at least since 2005, been Nicholas Felton’s beautifully designed “Annual Reports” on the numbers behind his personal behavior.

He has meticulously recorded, quantified, analyzed and laid out all manner of data from his life in a series that riffs on the annual reports that businesses issue to their shareholders.

Instead of earnings and capital expenditure statements, Felton’s reports are full of numbers like cost-per-mile-run at the gym and how many hours he worked from home versus office.

And now, of course, there’s an app for that.

Daytum, the name under which Felton and his co-creator Ryan Case have released what is essentially a consumer-focused designers’ portfolio project, previously existed only as a Web app to help users track and organize the everyday data of their lives.

The Apple iPhone version, released on New Year’s Eve, puts the sans-serif-chic data collection interface into your pocket and out into the world, where life’s data actually happens.

So, what is it good for?

Felton and Case hope that the app, plus a forthcoming API to their Daytum Web application, will enable more people to see their own data in a new way.

The app is designed to help you begin tagging the pieces of data that you’d like to track.

There’s no automated input. Just tap the screen to create a category of data you are interested in tracking.

Add the category “Lunch” and then set up some recurring fields under lunch. “Sandwich,” for example.

Then, anytime you eat a sandwich, or anything else, for lunch, you can quickly mark it down.

The app allows you to add data points as they happen, even if you don’t have an Internet connection right then.

How else would you track how much money you give to subway musicians each month?

So, we ask again, what’s it good for?

Whether or not you ate a sandwich today, Felton admitted, is not all that interesting. He claims the data of life becomes more compelling in the aggregate.

Maybe you’d like to know how many miles you walked this month, or how your mood correlated with the weather, or if you or your partner changed more diapers this year.

It might not seem like groundbreaking stuff, but the data of a life starts to tell a story when laid out, clean and collected, in Felton’s various visualizations.

Felton said that data’s value comes on may levels.

“It helps you see and share all kinds of stuff about your life–it can be really interesting to people who know you,” he said.

Digitizing the human analog data of the world is certainly a growth area in tech.

Tools have emerged to find out when users are awake via their tweets, there has been major growth in mobile purchase tracking and patents are being awarded to companies that offer deals based on where a person goes.

If the renaissance of this arena is still years off, it might be the perfect time to try to get ahead of the curve and tap the brains of people who are already thinking like it’s 2015.

Felton has spent the last half-decade staring at and organizing his own data and, more recently, the data of others via Daytum.

I asked him what wisdom he might have gained from his unusual pursuit.

“People seem to record binary items really well–things like one drink, or watching one TV show,” he said. “Recording gets harder and less regular when it’s things without a set size or quantity, like when they ate a meal.”

When I asked if he felt suspicious of the businesses that were gathering his data, he came back with something a little deeper.

“I think the walling up of data by businesses is really a missed opportunity, not cause for suspicion,” he said. “Someone knows how long it has been since I called my mother, but I can’t be certain. That information could be valuable to me.”

He added: “Businesses seem to be stuck on the idea of loyalty rewards being about points.”

For Felton, data can be its own reward.

His next data-driven project might bring the whole idea home.

Felton’s father passed away in September, and he’s decided to postpone his 2010 report for something larger and more personal.

So, he will release a single report on all of his father’s 81 years based on data gathered from years of slides, travel postcards, “FasTrak” auto toll payments and myriad other sources.

“I have gotten to know things about him that I never knew while he was alive,” he said. “I’ve learned that he was much better at maths and sciences than English back in school. I can actually quantify that.”

But the question on the minds of so many emerging data-driven businesses is: How well can we know people, our users and consumers based on their data?

Finding that answer seems to be Felton’s personal mission. And in the spirit of his other reports, he will share it, and the tools he uses to find it, with the world.

Still not convinced of what it’s all good for? We’ll let him explain for himself in this video interview:

(Early Adopter is a new column on early-stage start-ups and ideas that will be written weekly by Drake Martinet.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110110/early-adopter-the-daytum-iphone-app-visualizes-your-life-and-lunch-as-data/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090915/how-to-tweak-outlook-email-to-work-for-you/ http://allthingsd.com/20090915/how-to-tweak-outlook-email-to-work-for-you/#comments Tue, 15 Sep 2009 22:26:03 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/20090915/how-to-tweakoutlook-emailto-work-for-you/ If you have a job, chances are you use Microsoft Outlook.

But are you using it to your best advantage?

Despite the popularity of Microsoft Outlook, several of its functions aren’t noticeable unless you dig around in menus or try out keystroke shortcuts. Many of these tricks can be found by reading a user manual, but users would rather be spending their time in Outlook responding to or writing emails.

In last week’s column I reviewed a program called Postbox, which displays email and its contents in unique ways. In that review I mentioned that Outlook, too, has extra functions, but that these aren’t always as obvious as they should be. Below, I’ve compiled a list of what I consider to be some of Outlook’s lesser-known talents. I focused on Outlook 2007, which many people currently use, and I also included a handful of notes about what Outlook 2010—due out late spring or early summer—will include. With any luck, you’ll find a few tips here that make your time in Outlook better spent.

Search Me

Rather than simply entering a word into the Outlook search box, you can help the search engine narrow its results by giving it specific parameters. For example, if I remember that my friend sent an email with “LSU tickets” in the subject line, I can type “subject: LSU” to pull out all emails about the Louisiana university. Or if I want to find all emails from Molly, I can write, “from: Molly.” This works with several other terms including “to,” “sent,” “cc” and “message size.”

Search Folders, shown in the folder list with a magnifying glass icon beside them, offer a way of saving the searches you perform most often. If, for example, you often search for flight confirmation emails, you could make a Search Folder called “Travel” that would contain a constantly updated list of emails containing the names of airlines.

New folders can be set up by right clicking on the Search Folders icon, selecting New Search Folder and following steps to select a type of folder from one of many pre-set types of folders—such as “mail sent directly to me,” “large mail” or “mail flagged for follow up.” Or you can create a custom Search Folder by telling it to search for certain words that appear within specific message fields.

Color Coding

To make certain emails stand out in a large list—like emails from your boss or messages addressed only to you—you can set up a rule that makes the email show up in a specific color. Or you can set certain emails to appear in bold font, or in a specific font type and size. Just think of all the emails from your mom that will never go unnoticed again thanks to red type, 14-point font and underlined text.

Setting up the way emails are displayed can be done by going to the Tools menu, selecting Organize, Using Colors and then choosing specific colors for emails from specific people. More advanced automatic settings for applying font type and size to emails can be added by selecting Automatic Formatting in the top right corner of the Using Colors screen. Click “Add” to create more rules.

Souped-Up Calendar

The Outlook Calendar can be organized to look the way you want it rather than the way it’s set up by default. For example, if you like looking at your day in hourly intervals rather than Outlook’s default 30-minute blocks, you can right click anywhere you see hours shown and select 60 minutes. Other increments are also available, like five, 10 and 15 minutes.

Outlook can also display other time zones right beside your own time zone by right clicking on the listed meeting hours, selecting Change Time Zone and checking the box labeled Show an Additional Time Zone. This is helpful for people who often work with distant colleagues, saving them from making a mistake and not factoring the right time zone for the other person. A Swap Time Zone button here quickly changes from one set zone to another, which could be a boon for people who regularly travel to different places and want their Outlook settings to reflect that they’re working from there.

Like color-coded emails, calendar events can be automatically sorted into pre-set categories like Personal, Travel and Family by setting formatting to look for certain words like Tennis (Personal), United (Travel) and Mom, Dad or Allison (Family). Added events that use these words automatically get labeled with a designated color to give your calendar a visual way of distinguishing different types of activities.

Another useful calendar tip: You can hold Control while selecting certain dates on the small view of the calendar and you’ll see only the schedules for those dates. So if I want to see Sept. 19, 22 and 24, I hold Control while selecting each date to see the three days’ activities displayed in the right viewing panel.

Visual Contacts

All Contacts in Outlook can be labeled with a photo of the person, which you add by double clicking on the small head icon in someone’s contact card and then choosing a photo from your collection. People who work in the same company and use Outlook can add their own photo to their contact and it will show up with their emails.

The top right corner of each contact card shows what a person’s digital business card would look like; this is an image that can be edited and copied using a right click, and then it can be copied and pasted to any email signature.

Looking Ahead

In Outlook 2010, due out next year, Microsoft (MSFT) says it hopes to streamline work in Outlook, creating smarter rules that do more with less manual work.

One example of this approach is that emails in the next version of Outlook will be, by default, sorted into conversations—a little like Gmail’s current system. An Ignore button will move all future emails related to the same conversation into the Deleted Items folder. That will include those with changed subject lines because Microsoft uses a special identifier to know which emails are associated with one another. A Clean Up button moves all redundant replies to the Deleted Items folder, leaving just the most recent message in the conversation.

Another feature is Reply with Meeting, a button in Outlook 2010 that will let users create a meeting out of an email. Selecting Reply with Meeting automatically invites those included in the email to attend a meeting.

The title of the meeting is the same as the subject of the email. If the users are in the same corporate network and they all use Outlook Calendar, this tool also looks for the next available time and date on everyone’s calendar.

Quick Steps, another streamlined feature of Outlook 2010, are one-click shortcuts that simultaneously perform several common actions that people take when handling email. If you select a Quick Step called Reply and Delete, it replies to an email and deletes the original. Users can create their own personalized Quick Steps like one labeled Social that, when selected, marks the email as read, moves it to a special folder and labels it under a certain category.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg.

Write to
Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090915/how-to-tweak-outlook-email-to-work-for-you/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090116/another-twitter-app-funded-tweetdeck-raises-an-angel-round-next-up-a-business-plan/ http://allthingsd.com/20090116/another-twitter-app-funded-tweetdeck-raises-an-angel-round-next-up-a-business-plan/#comments Fri, 16 Jan 2009 12:54:58 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=3209 Yes, you can still get someone to invest in a Web start-up with zero revenue. It helps if you can insert the word “Twitter” into your pitch, though.

TweetDeck, a one-man company that makes a very helpful piece of free software that organizes your Twitter streams, is raising an angel round led by Betaworks, the investment company with a hankering for all things Twitter. The round, which hasn’t closed yet, will eventually end up somewhere south of $500,000, I’m told.

When it does, the financing will make 34-year-old programmer Iain Dodsworth a paper millionaire. Nice work for a Brit who built TweetDeck just last June because he was following 30 people on Twitter and wanted a better way to organize their Tweets.

Dodsworth says TweetDeck has been downloaded 250,000 times since then and that users are sending out 120,000 messages a day using the software. That places it above other free Twitter clients like Twitterific and twhirl, both of which are cranking out 80,000 to 85,000 messages a day, according to tracking service TweetRush.

All of them are part of the burgeoning ecosystem that revolves around Twitter, which powers all of their companies by letting them plug into its data stream. In exchange, all of these companies make Twitter more successful, by bolting on frills and features to its bare-bones service.

And no money changes hands at any point: Twitter doesn’t charge for use of its data, and its partners do all their development work for free. That could change at some point. As Twitter casts about for a business model to support its service–it is, famously, just about revenue-free at this point–an obvious solution would be to start charging a fee to the likes of TweetDeck.

No problem, says Dodsworth, who says he’d be happy to pay Twitter, particularly if it gave him even more access in exchange. Oh. And what about his business model? It’s coming, Dodsworth says–he’d like to start selling a pro version of his software, targeting power users and corporations.

That strikes me as a fairly small market, but then again TweetDeck is a very small operation. Dodsworth says he doesn’t plan on hiring any additional help in the near future, even as he preps new features like a version for Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone.

I’ll let him explain himself, via a short video interview I taped with him yesterday–just as soon as the Internet cooperates and lets me post the clip. In the meantime, you can also track Dodsworth on Twitter here or here.

[ See post to watch video ]

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