{"id":166,"date":"2006-03-04T06:23:53","date_gmt":"2006-03-04T01:23:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/emilychang.com\/blog\/?p=166"},"modified":"2009-08-16T13:20:14","modified_gmt":"2009-08-16T08:20:14","slug":"foldera-simplifies-your-digital-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emilychang.com\/blog\/2006\/03\/foldera-simplifies-your-digital-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Foldera Simplifies Your Digital Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

These days, like many of you, my life is filled with electronic communications, whether that’s email, chat, collaborative project management, mobile messages, or other data sources. I’ve written about this in the past<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On any given day, I spend hours on communications and between my work as Ideacodes, eHub, and personal communications, I pretty much live between a web browser, email client, and IM. Navigating these various spaces takes time, effort, and manual labor. Even with wikis, Basecamp’s efficiency in project management, iMail’s smart folders or Gmail’s labeling, I still find myself sorting and searching through multiple applications, browser windows, saving documents to project folders on my hard drive and then backed up to external drives.<\/p>\n

Foldera<\/a> plans to change that.
\n
\nMax and I enjoyed meeting and chatting with Richard Lusk<\/a>, Foldera’s CEO and founder, and Oliver Starr<\/a>, Chief Mobility Officer, Director Business Development, and Corporate Blogger a couple of weeks ago. Since then, we’ve decided to work together and our company, Ideacodes<\/a>, will be providing strategic design consulting on Foldera’s application and creating their corporate blog.<\/p>\n

\"foldera-ideacodes\"<\/span>Richard and Oliver came by our office Friday morning to talk about the project and to show us a private demo of the web application, which is still in stealth mode but will be debuting at next week’s O’Reilly’s ETech Conference<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Foldera has truly created an innovative new web-based productivity suite which “inverts the sorting and filing paradigm,” allowing users to centralize communications based on context. The web application has a full feature set<\/a>, including:<\/p>\n

Activity Folders
\n– Instantly Organize your applications, teams, projects, and information<\/p>\n

Email
\n– Email is automatically presorted and filed on a project by project basis<\/p>\n

Document Manager
\n– File sharing with secure storage, version control and locking<\/p>\n

Task Manager
\n– Task management, with assignment and tracking<\/p>\n

Calendar
\n– Schedule events and share your Calendar with others<\/p>\n

Contact Manager
\n– Organize personal and company contact directories<\/p>\n

Comments
\n– Exchange ideas, make suggestions, and share information<\/p>\n

Instant Messenger
\n– Conduct instant conversations<\/p>\n

Administration
\n– Customizable to suit your workflow<\/p>\n

Sharing Manager
\n– Share anything, everything or nothing at all<\/p>\n

One of the core concepts is that your communications can be organized by activity, so whether you’re a large company or an individual, Foldera can be customized to suit the way you naturally communicate and work.<\/p>\n

You create a dedicated Activity Folder for each distinct project or activity. Email, instant messaging, and all your other applications are now accessed from within this folder instead of their original disconnected and unstructured state. This organizational structure also keeps everything in context; for example, all your email conversations and instant message dialogs stay right inside that specific Activity Folder, so everything related to that project stays grouped together.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Richard showed us how easy it was to send and receive email while inside an activity folder, as well as direct commenting on projects, and simple customization of permissions and preferences. You can see screenshots of each feature at the Foldera<\/a> site, but here are a few key screens of the current application:<\/p>\n

\"foldera-app\"<\/p>\n

For the skeptics out there, I would reserve judgement until you’ve tried it! Foldera is a solid product, fully functional on both PC and Mac browsers, and extremely fast. In addition to the application itself, I’ve been impressed with Richard’s rapid and open discourse about Foldera<\/a> on various blogs and in comment threads. Both Richard and Oliver are doing a great job approaching bloggers to promote and get feedback on the application and their enthusiasm and expertise shine through. Clearly, they’ve also impressed their investors, having raised $13 million since its launch and another $8.5 million after a reverse merger into an existing public company.<\/p>\n

See Max’s post, Foldera – Next Generation Communications<\/a>.<\/p>\n

To read what others have said about Foldera:
\nTwo passionate companies (that are seeing huge adoption)<\/a> by Robert Scoble
\nFoldera: Never organize your inbox again<\/a> by Mike Arrington at TechCrunch
\nFoldera: 1 Million SignUps in 12 Days<\/a> (later corrected to 400,000 signups<\/a>) by Shel Israel
\nFoldera, 400,000 downloads in 12 days?<\/a> by Robert Scoble
\nWill Foldera hit the mark?<\/a> by Marc Orchant at ZDNet<\/p>\n

UPDATE: TechNewsRadio interviews Richard Lusk about Foldera. Listen to the 7 minute podcast here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

8 comments<\/strong><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Gary Pick<\/a> on March 08, 2006 at 07:28 PM:
    \nIt will be interesting to find out if Foldera makes it.\u00a0 When I heard about the company by an investment advisor, I wasn\u2019t sure what to think.\u00a0 Unfortunately, I was unable to view the BETA version or anything other than the company Web Site     http:\/\/www.taskport.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    Since the launch, it has been pretty exciting to see the numbers.\u00a0 Although I didn\u2019t invest in the company (I never like to invest in something I can\u2019t try see, first), I do think it is a good idea and I\u2019ve seen other companies with similar \u201cNew\u201d Folder applications.\u00a0 Bulk Register of Baltimore offers a folder solution to manage domain portfolios.<\/p>\n

    My thought process, initially, was, how are they going to make any money.\u00a0 A company\u2019s stock price is based on expected income from contracts or steady revenue expectations.\u00a0 The Foldera Solution is expecting to get their revenue, primarily, from Google Adsense Revenue.\u00a0 To me, that seems risky.\u00a0 Although, we all know that Google is great, Foldera is betting that they will pay advertising click revenue for searches done through the application dashboard and that the amount of visitors using Google through their service will be large.\u00a0 They will have to have a pretty large pool of users, making quite a large number of clicks.\u00a0 And, if Google decides to dramatically decrease their per click pay-outs or their is some kind of click-fraud issue (Google\u2019s potential down-fall) I can only pray for Foldera \/ TaskPort \/ Expert Systems or the lot.<\/p>\n

    I am not sure if what value, if any, their other add-ons might have.\u00a0 Anybody know ?<\/p>\n

    I with them luck.<\/p>\n

    -G.Pick<\/li>\n

  2. Richard Lusk<\/a> on March 09, 2006 at 10:12 AM:
    \nHi Emily,<\/p>\n

    Thank you so much for taking the time to meet with us and to take Foldera for a spin the other day.<\/p>\n

    And thanks for sending so many of your readers our way too. I really appreciate it.<\/p>\n

    Gary-here are answers to your questions:<\/p>\n

    We operated under the stealth name Taskport for a number of years, but when our firm was acquired by Expert Systems we changed our name to Foldera. You can see what Foldera is all about over at:<\/p>\n

    http:\/\/www.foldera.com<\/a><\/p>\n

    ….and sign up for a free beta account there too :)<\/p>\n

    Foldera\u2019s mission is to be the best Business Organizer in the world. Our aim is to organize your email, documents, events and tasks on a project by project basis while you work. And we do it for you -so you don\u2019t have to waste your time organizing your stuff by hand anymore.<\/p>\n

    You asked about our revenue model- here\u2019s how it works:<\/p>\n

    We give you and every business as many Foldera\u2019s as you want-for Free<\/p>\n

    \u2022We give you free storage too-if you want more, you can pay us a little money and get some more.<\/p>\n

    \u2022A free online help trail is embedded in Foldera, but if you get in a jam, and want to speak to a Foldera tech representative on the phone-that costs us money, so unfortunately we have to charge you for the call (unless the support issue is our fault, in which case we won\u2019t charge you a thing)<\/p>\n

    \u2022We also charge you a one time fee to host your MX records-ie if you want your own custom domain we can make that happen too \u2013ie-