The WebNotes team would like to wish all of our users (and anyone else reading our blog) a happy and prosperous New Year! To welcome in the new year we are beginning a new phase of development and would like to ask all of our users to participate in a survey that we've put together. Two lucky submitters will receive a $50 Amazon.com gift certificate (TBA on January 15th)! Check out our WebNotes survey
here. We've had over a hundred responses in the first few hours of the survey, and the data is looking extremely useful!
Interested in putting together a survey like this for your own business? We used a product called
Survey Monkey and have found it useful it so far, but there are probably other services out there. They have a free version which will allow you to collect data on up to 100 people, but given that our user base is much larger we had to opt for the paid version. Fortunately the data we've gotten so far has already made it worth it! We'll post about some of the more interesting results after we've tabulated everything.
We’re very excited to announce two major updates that just went live today: new versions of our IE and Firefox toolbars, which are substantially faster when loading WebNotes in your browser, and a new Beta invite system that allows any user to invite up to 10 others to join WebNotes.
We hope that these updates will make it even easier to use WebNotes and to invite your friends and colleagues to try us out. These updates were based on your feedback, so keep the comments and suggestions coming!
Thanks again to all of our users who have been submitting bugs and providing us with valuable feedback on how we can improve WebNotes. We’ve been spending a lot of time lately making adjustments to our
toolbars,
bookmarklet and
"My WebNotes" site to address the issues you’ve brought up, and today we rolled out a major update that takes care of many of them.
If you’re using the WebNotes toolbar for IE or Firefox, you should be notified of the update automatically, and if you’re using the WebNotes bookmarklet, these changes will take effect the next time you run it.
Keep the feedback coming!
A few weeks ago I met up with Gopal Shenoy, Director of Product Management at salary.com, after he saw us present at this summer’s Web Innovator’s Group. Gopal runs a great blog about product management best practices, and recently posted a review of WebNotes (along with a video interview with me) on his site. Check us out!
Since we launched our private Beta program this summer, we’ve
been getting non-stop feedback from our users (keep it coming!) about how they
use WebNotes and what we can do to make it better for them. For the last couple of months we’ve been making
improvements and rolling out updates on a continuous basis, and later this
month we will be releasing our largest patch to date.
The latest update will contain major performance improvements
in our browser plug-ins, as well as numerous UI and stability updates to our
annotation, organization, and sharing tools.
Stay tuned for more information as we get nearer to rolling this out –
and in the mean time, keep up the great feedback!
At WebNotes, we believe that where you work reflects what
you do. To that end, we’ve decided to post a few photos of our sweet setup on the 11th floor of
100 Memorial Drive apartments.
Besides a breathtaking view of the city and a large clean space, we were lucky enough to
have the City of Boston anchor the fireworks barge right in front of our
apartment. We couldn't resist hosting a 4th of July party, and don’t think any of us had ever been this close to fireworks before.
When you tell most people that you’re in a startup working in an
apartment room, they get the picture of sleeping bags, soda cans, and
half-empty pizza boxes strewn around. To set the record straight, the office we work
at is actually our office, not where
we sleep.
We even have a conference room, where we usually go for
meetings. Although it seems silly to move ten feet into the adjacent room to have a
meeting when everyone you need to meet with is already 5 feet away from you, having that space set aside just for meetings makes a big
psychological difference in terms of focus. It’s difficult to garner
attention and have productive meetings when everyone is spread apart on the rim
of the room, facing their computer screens. Having that intimacy of sitting
around the same table works wonders.
On a side note, we go shopping weekly to stock the fridge and
pantries with drinks and requested goodies. And as of now, we have far too much
beer left over from the 4th of July. No worries though -- Bennett has been dealing with the problem on a daily basis.
P.S. Then there’s always The Office.
A few consecutive all-nighters paid off after a great show at the
WebInno conference. Since then we have received a huge amount of great feedback -- keep it coming! Although registration is now closed again, you can still sign up for a Beta account through our homepage, and we’ll send you an invite as soon as space on our waitlist opens up.
Following
up on the heels of WebInno, we will also be presenting at TECH Cocktail
at Tequila Rain in Boston this Thursday the 24th. If you missed us
at WebInno, be sure to come by for free drinks on the house and a live demo, as
well as more Beta invites. We hope to see you there!
We just found out from David Beisel
of Venrock that we were selected as one of the three “Main Dishes” at
the 18th Web Innovators Conference
on in Cambridge! This is very exciting for us as we prepare to enter private Beta mode and take in another wave of user feedback.
If you’re around Boston, I encourage you to come check
out some of the latest web and mobile startups in the area. We will also be opening up Beta account signups
for the 24 hour period following the conference, so if you want an account,
sign up then!
We’ve been working on WebNotes for just about a year now, which is much too long for a company to go without a blog. We’ll be posting updates
about our product and company as time goes on, so stay tuned!