Nozbe celebrates 3 years of web-based productivity!

Three years ago, I’ve officially shown Nozbe to the world – as you know, I’ve been using Nozbe before as my private productivity tool since early 2005… but it was February 2007 when I had something I could show to the world.

What happened in these three years?

• We had three major design changes
• We had two logos (the one you’re seeing now is the 2nd one)
• We are serving tens of thousands of users around the globe… and helping get them stuff done!
• We integrated with lots of 3rd party apps
• We killed other branches of my company: after first year of operation I closed down apivision.com consultancy business as Nozbe was so profitable (and so much fun to work on!) that I wanted to focus only on Nozbe
• We survived economic downturn with a significant revenue and profit increase (when every company was going down, we were, and are, going up)
• We found not only a business in Nozbe, but more of a calling to increase people’s productivity around the world with other initiatives like Productive Magazine, Productive Show, Internet Business Productivity blog and my Twitter profile

Where is Nozbe headed?

• We’re building apps around Nozbe, the completely new iPhone app to be released next month, apps for other platforms (Blackberry and Android and Desktop) in the works
• We’re finally translating Nozbe to other languages to make sure people all around the world get things done! (translation platform to be rolled out this month)
• We’re focusing on business customers with better sharing and collaboration capabilities. We really want companies and teams to get a lot done this year!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

I can’t thank you enough for all of your support and for using Nozbe as your productivity tool.

Without my customers we wouldn’t be running one of the leading productivity apps on the Internet and we wouldn’t have achieved better productivity ourselves.

We owe it all to you! Thanks again!

- Your Nozbe Team: Michael, Delfina, Tom and collaborators.

Offline Nozbe Backups and SSL for everyone

We’ll be celebrating 3 years of business on February 1st 2010 and because of that we’ve prepared some extra stuff for you to help you get even more done this year:

Offline Backups of your Nozbe account

You’ve been asking for this one for quite a while now and we finally delivered… but we made sure we’d give you a lot more than just backups!

While some apps let you backup to XML, CSV and some other strange formats, in Nozbe you backup to a plain, nice text file that you can actually read on any computer and get stuff done when not connected to the Internet.

That’s correct, in Nozbe you can download the backup, open in a standard text editor like Notepad, add actions, mark some as done, add projects, etc… and upload your backup back to Nozbe and see the changes!

Watch this video to see Nozbe Offline Backups in action:

Isn’t that cool?

Enhanced SSL Security to all paying customers

We’ve been listening and we decided that our dedication to Internet security is more important than anything else so from now on even Solo users get full Enhanced SSL Security by default during their entire Nozbe session.

We make sure your data is safely stored on our servers, we use triple-backup technology, firewalls and fingerprint restrictions to make sure nothing happens to your data on our backend and now we use Enhanced SSL Security on our frontend.

All of our paying Nozbe users now can enjoy the same level of security they are accustomed to when visiting online banking system. Your actions and projects are as important (if not more)as your savings.

More contexts and projects on all plans

We’ve raised Contexts and Projects allowances on most of the account plans – all existing users have been upgraded automatically and can enjoy these today. Solo users get up to 50 contexts, Plus users 200 contexts, Family users get 2000 projects, etc.

Let me thank you so much for your continued business and for being a very productive Nozbe user!

Thanks to you we’ve been enjoying a steady growth throughout these 3 years and 2009, the “recession year” for most businesses was our best year yet. We’re sure to have an even better 2010 and we’re expecting to roll out some great enhancements to your favorite productivity tool.

Technorati tags: nozbe, gtd, video, offline, backup, security

Michael's going to the USA - Nozbe Meetup/Tweetup in the Silicon Valley?

I’m traveling to the USA this week, I’ll be in the New York City Monday – Wednesday and later in the Silicon Valley Area Thursday Jan 21 till Thursday Jan 28.

How about an “unofficial” Nozbe meetup somewhere in the Silcon Valley or San Francisco?

What do you think? How do you see it? Where would you want it to be?

I’m thinking about a spontaneous and very informal meeting with a bunch of Nozbe users, sharing some experiences in productivity and Nozbe and most of all, just hanging out together :-) I’d love to meet at least some of you in person.

What do you think?

Changes in Forum - Search, New GTD Section and more...

One of our New Year’s resolutions has been to improve our communication with our users and we’re working hard towards this goal.

Email Support

• Our Email support has always been timely, our Customer Support Pro – Delfina – handles support daily (even on weekends) so if you email us at questions AT nozbe DOT com – you’ll receive an answer within max 48 hours (in the worst-case scenario), but usually Delfina will reply to you within just a few hours.

Forums

• Forum Search – you’ve requested this for a long time and we’ve finally delivered – Forum Search is there and you can check out what others are saying on the forums on the subject you want to comment
• New Forum – Productivity and Getting Things Done – we’ve opened a new, not directly related to Nozbe forum, where you can share your best practices in GTD and comment on those with other Nozbe users. It’s an experiment to see if you want to talk about your productivity tips and tricks – keep the discussion going!
• Response times on Forums – Delfina has been keeping up with Forums when she could, but our response times on forums were not as fast as with email and we’re not proud of that, so from now on not only Delfina but also yours truly (Michael – that’s me!) and Tom (our chief developer) will also participate in discussions on a regular basis.

Facebook

• We’ve set up our Facebook page so make sure to stop by, become a fan and participate in the discussions going on there.

Twitter

• Nozbe is active on Twitter and as you know you can even use DM (Direct Messages) to send your actions to Nozbe directly from Twitter – here are setup instructions
• I’m also active on Twitter so make sure to follow me (6000+ followers can’t be wrong, right? :-)

Thanks for your feedback!

Just wanted to reiterate that although our forum participation has been lacking, we’ve read all of your feedback there and we’re cooking really cool stuff for you right now… Next week we’ll be announcing one of the most-requested features… on steroids! So make sure to subscribe to our blog and keep an eye on us!

Technorati tags: nozbe, gtd, forum, community, twitter, facebook

Work on Documents more effectively with Version control and Thumbnails

As you very well know, each project in Nozbe has Actions (to-dos), Notes and Files – and we have given too little significance to this last part of our productivity setup… but not anymore.

Work and Collaborate more effectively on documents (files) right in Nozbe!

We’ve pushed several updates to Nozbe to make sure you can now better work on files and documents, so here goes:

• Version Control – this is a big deal – you can now upload a document, your teammate can download it, make changes and upload the new version of the file – and Nozbe keeps all the versions right there so you can always go back to the previous versions of your documents. (just click on the file and click on the “new version” button)
• Thumbnail view – if your document is an image, just put your cursor above the file name and you’ll see the thumbnail view of the image, you can quickly scan the list of files to see what’s where
• Faster uploading – now uploading files is easier and you can track the percentage of the file being uploaded… so you know what’s happening and if your Internet connection is treating you well and sending the file to Nozbe

These three enhancements make using Nozbe Files section perfect for collaboration:

• work on Word documents together, make changes, upload…
• attach images, logos, and revise them with your team, no need for additional hosting space

... and now that the Family plan has 4GB of storage, you have plenty of room to collaborate with your teammates.

Get your documents done! :-)

Technorati tags: gtd, productivity, documents, nozbe, word

Install Nozbe on your computer as stand-alone web app using Fluid or Prism

Wouldn’t it be nice to install Nozbe web app as a stand-alone app on your computer? I’ve learned that many of my users are already doing this so I did it myself this week and wanted to make it really simple for the rest of us.

Basically this means that one dedicated browser window is now an app. It’s really cool and most of all, helps prevent distractions. Plus, since Nozbe’s interface doesn’t rely a lot on Forward/Back browser keys, it works very well.

• If you’re on a Mac, get Fluid
• If you’re on a PC, get Prism

Update: In the comments Mickey Mellen noted that if you’re using Google Chrome browser you can just click on menu “File” and then “Create Application Shortcut” to do the very same thing.

Here’s the step-by-step process:

1. Download a high-res Nozbe icon from here – just “save image as…”

2. If you’re on a Mac, install Fluid, open it up and use this info:

URL: http://www.nozbe.com/account/index
Name: Nozbe
Location: Applications
Icon: Other… and choose the high-res icon you’ve downloaded in step 1

If you’re on a PC, get Mozilla Prism and use the same data as above:

3. Enjoy!

The Nozbe web-app will be created and you’ll be able to use it, add it to your dock or desktop and launch it to get more done!

Thanks for everyone who sent this in, I’m enjoying my Nozbe.app on my Mac and I’m hoping this small tip will also make you more productive when using Nozbe every day.

P.S. And as tomorrow is weekend, good luck with your Weekly Review if you haven’t done one yet.

Magic Arrow is back! Add actions, notes and files to the top and... bottom

Back in the Nozbe Classic days we’ve had a Magic Arrow – a feature almost no one knew about since it was placed in a little unfortunate spot.

We didn’t implement it in Nozbe 2.0 but I was missing the arrow… or rather missing the solution the arrow gave me to this problem:

What if I sometimes want to add my actions to the TOP and sometimes to the BOTTOM of my list?

When you add an action in Nozbe, it goes by default to the top of the list. And usually it’s good. But sometimes not really.

Magic Arrow changes direction

Just click to “add action” in Nozbe and you’ll see a new arrow on the left side of the input box:

By default the arrow is pointing “upwards” to let you know that the action you’re about to add will appear on top of your task list.

Click on the Magic Arrow to change direction!

When you click on the arrow, it magically changes into an arrow pointing “downwards”:

Now every action you add appears at the bottom of the list. Like magic!

Additional cool things about the Magic Arrow:

• It works for actions, notes and files so you can decide if you want to add stuff to the top or to the bottom of your list
• It works across Projects, Contexts and Next Actions – full flexibility there!
• It all happens with a click of the mouse, no settings, no additional clicks, you decide when stuff goes up and when it goes down

Hope you like our Magic Arrow

We’ll be brining lots of refinements and cool features you’ve been asking us about over the course of January to make sure you can get a lot done right at the beginning of this new year.

Happy New Year (and a productive one at that) everyone!

Technorati tags: gtd, nozbe, project, task, management, productivity