CircleUp Rockets Into Beta Supercharging 'Real World' Group Communication
Posted on: Monday, 30 April 2007, 09:00 CDT
NEWPORT BEACH, Calif., April 30 /PRNewswire/ -- CircleUp, Inc., the provider of social communication services for online and offline communities, today debuted the public beta version of its flagship service. Enhancing the communication tools people already use in email and instant messaging, CircleUp allows you to pose questions and gather needed information from groups of any size and get back a single, organized response that can be used and shared among all members of the group instead of a disorganized and often inconclusive blizzard of emails and IMs. Based on feedback from users of the alpha version, introduced at February's DEMO 07 conference, CircleUp (http://www.circleup.com/) now offers enhanced usability and added functionality, including lots of new ways to get questions into the service and get results out to where they are most useful.
Despite all of the hubbub about MySpace and other new social networks, the majority of social communication still takes place over email and IM. Millions of times a day, leaders ask questions using email and IM to gather information, get commitments or foster consensus among members of groups. Billions of times a day, those members respond in a barrage of poorly worded communication, causing massive message overload and the all too frequent use of the dreaded "reply to all." CircleUp is a web service that solves this painful problem by enhancing email and IM when communicating with groups to reduce inbox clutter, organize and share the results of group communications and put an end to the insanity of "reply to all."
Streamline Communication With Groups
If you're like most people, you have five to ten 'circles' in your work, family, social, sports and online networks. Gathering information from these circles is an inefficient process, as email and IM weren't designed for receiving responses from dozens or hundreds of people. Yet these are the tools group organizers use every day. Using CircleUp, you can overcome the tyranny of your inbox when communicating with groups:
-- Coaches Use It: CircleUp with the families of 20 kids who made the traveling team for the big soccer tournament, asking how many tournament T- shirts they want. Get back an exact list of shirt sizes instead of 27 emails and IMs.
-- Brides Use It: A bride planning everything from bridal outfits to travel logistics for her wedding guests lives or dies by email and IM. With CircleUp, she gets organized responses that can be used and shared as she plans for the biggest day of her life.
-- Politicos Use It: CircleUp with 100 local campaign volunteers to see who can attend the big rally, who needs a ride, who can drive and who has a truck or van to haul the big signs. Get back a single list of all attendees that can be shared by riders and drivers.
No one in the circle has to register or download anything to answer, and a QuestionBox(TM) widget clearly frames the exact information needed. Everyone gets the answers they need consolidated and presented in a highly usable format -- with no more effort than sending an email or IM. Answers are no longer buried in the depths of your inbox - you can export, print, paste, mashup or share them.
"Email and IM aren't going away any time soon. CircleUp is the first of a whole class of messaging applications that will emerge to tame the raging beast and make these tools efficient, useful and shareable," said John Payne, CEO of CircleUp. "As a communications service for real-world groups, CircleUp was created to provide real life answers from real people -- not just more data to filter through."
Questions Go In and Results Come Out
A major focus of the CircleUp beta release is a suite of new features that make it easy to get questions into the service right from any users desktop and get useful results back out in ways that can be integrated, used and shared.
A "What's Your Question" widget is available as a Google Desktop Gadget, a NetVibes Start Page widget or for optional download as an Outlook plug-in. CircleUp also supports the WYQ widget in partner applications including the tournament and team pages of partner e7 Sports, where it is available to their large base of tournament directors and coaches. And of course, anyone can ask questions from their personal myQuestions page at http://www.circleup.com/.
This release also includes lots of useful ways to get results out of the service and put them to work:
-- Syndicated Real-Time Results Tracking -- RSS feeds to track the progress of your questions in real time without having to visit the CircleUp site.
-- The Daily Result -- A single, organized result sent right to your inbox daily to keep you posted on who's answered, who needs a reminder and what the consolidated result is -- giving you one email instead of 15, 50 or even 500.
-- Microformat Support -- Enables browser export of contact information directly to tools like Outlook, or mashups with Google Maps, and more. File export and application integration -- "Save as" exports results seamlessly to Excel and PDF.
Other new features included in the beta are large group lists and tag and community pages which automatically organize all questions and announcements sent to a specific circle in one place for everyone to see, share, comment, reference and discuss without the need to register. In addition, a blog-like comment system makes it possible to maintain a conversation as the results of a question change over time and announcements communicate bulletins and notifications to any circle.
About CircleUp
CircleUp is a social communication service that turbo-charges email and instant messaging for information gathering, collaboration and decision making in online and offline groups and communities. It provides a fast, easy way to ask questions of any community using email and IM and get back a single, organized result instead of a blizzard of emails and instant messages. CircleUp users come from a variety of online and offline communities including youth sports, volunteers, schools, Scouts, clubs, church groups, political, alumni and professional organizations. The company is privately funded and based in Newport Beach, Calif. For more information on CircleUp, go to http://www.circleup.com/.
For more information: Deann Mayeda SHIFT Communications for CircleUp dmayeda@shiftcomm.com (415) 591-8404
CircleUp, Inc.
CONTACT: Deann Mayeda, SHIFT Communications for CircleUp,+1-415-591-8404,or dmayeda@shiftcomm.com
Web site: http://www.circleup.com/
Source: PRNewswire
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