pelago

Today we completed a successful three month beta program and launched Intervals. There is a definite need for easier Task and Time Tracking, especially for small businesses. Feedback from our beta testers has been great.

“I’ve needed this for so long. Intervals is quickly showing me where my time is going for good or bad.
Super easy to get up and running! I was tracking clients, projects, time and money in a matter of minutes.”
Garth Humbert, Principal, Carom Visual Communication

“Intervals is a very well thought out tool. We’ve used a number of task management and team organization packages and none have come close to providing the necessary functions for managing pro projects for high-end clients…and at such a reasonable price. Definitely a great value!”

Eric Barone, Sonik Newmedia

Download the Intervals Launch Press Release (PDF | 75kb)

The first 30 days are free so you can cancel if it’s not right. Prices starts at $20 per month.

Try Intervals today, set up takes a few minutes.

If you are like us, some of your clients have a difficult time grasping the nuances of email marketing options. “Can’t I just send an email with my current email program?” Well, yes you can send an email to 1,500 people via BCC in Outlook, but how do you manage the list? What about spam concerns? Does it convey the professionalism that you want?

This article from idealware.org does a great job of covering the gamut of options. We’ve used PHPList for many of our clients, but it is well suited for a Dedicated Hosting environment. The limitations most hosting companies place on outgoing email volume make it a little tricky to scale in a shared hosting environment. PHPList also lacks advanced metrics that a lot of the paid services offer.

Here’s a tool/lifehack that might be useful:

HassleMe

Not eating enough fruit? Forgot to feed the fish again? Need a little help keeping your New Year’s resolutions?
Tell us what to hassle you about, and we’ll nag you via email at semi-unpredictable intervals.

Jaime

Inc.com discusses the growth and coming future of Software as a Service (SaaS)…aka the ASP model.

It makes perfect sense for small companies that want to focus on their core business instead of building business infrastructure. Our Intervals Task and Time Management product (intervals101.com) was built so that we could track all of our time, tasks, and projects. When we first developed it we didn’t anticipate having others use it, but we received a lot of requests from our clients so we decided to retrofit it and make it a product.

The “build to solve your own problems” and share with others approach. I anticipate that there will be a lot of this and a lot of options for consumers in the near future. Especially with the advent of so many frameworks out there to speed up development time and time to market.

This one’s similar to LiveHTTPHeaders for FireFox. IE’s handling of headers is sometimes different than FireFox so it’s always nice to see what’s going on under the hood:

ieHTTPHeaders is an Explorer Bar for Microsoft Internet Explorer that will display the HTTP Headers sent and received by Internet Explorer as you surf the web. It can be useful in debugging various web-development problems related to cookies, caching, etc.

Tip: Once installed, the plugin can be accessed through the View > Explorer Bar menu.

SAAS is gaining momentum in the marketplace, as is evidenced by the multitudes of products popping up on the web each day. This list of debunked myths reinforces the need for web-based software. This is the ideal time for launching our time and task management software, Intervals.

Now that we’ve launched Intervals into beta — and are only weeks away from going live — there is only one thing left to do; order fleece vests with our logo on them.

Listamatic is a list definitions repository.

You can view many different types of list definitions here. It just goes to show you the many different ways in which you can write a list through CSS. You can submit your own for others to use as well.

Tonight we open up the beta program for Intervals. If you are a dollar for hour service company or just need to know where your time is going, Intervals may be perfect for you. Intervals is web based task and time management. Although most would consider it a “Project Management” application we consider it an “unproject management” application. Most tools in the space are nightmares to use …so we shy away from calling it a “Project Management” tool.

» Learn more about Intervals

Last week I attended a training session by Adaptive Path on user experience design and two nuggets stood out:

1. Adaptive Path has formulated a very powerful tool for explaining the components needed to build a successful web team.

» The Nine Pillars of Successful Web Teams

This wasn’t the main point of their training, but I found it extremely valuable. We are a web only shop and sometimes our clients don’t fully appreciate what all that entails and what kind of expertise we bring to the table. The web is a multi-disciplinary animal and the 9 Pillars does a powerful job of showing the pieces. It’s also a great tool to think about your own career development and what may be missing from your team.

2. It’s great getting together with peers in the Web Development industry.

It’s rare that professionals from small and big companies, generalists and specialists, get together and talk shop. Our industry needs to make more efforts for collaboration and discussion. Maybe we should host an event in Santa Barbara?

-Michael