Vimeo is really nice: great UI, much less cluttered than YouTube.
We are putting up our videos there now.
All posts by Kerika
Kerika is now in the Google Apps Marketplace
Cool! We just got our application approved, and now you can download Kerika from the Google Apps Marketplace.
The process was relatively smooth, and we are particularly impressed by the responsiveness of the Google team that deals with feedback from users — turnaround to our questions was just a few hours.
We will have a longer blog post soon with details.
What works for small businesses: LinkedIn, not Twitter
A great article from the Wall Street Journal on which social media channels have the most potential to help small businesses: a survey they did resulted in just 3% picking Twitter as the most effective tool.
41% picked LinkedIn, 16% picked YouTube, and 14% picked Facebook. Google+ came in at 7%.
This matches our own sense for what works, and doesn’t, although the 7% that Google+ grabbed seems surprisingly high. Is this because of the increasingly tight integration that Google is enforcing between their search engine results and your usage of Google+? We haven’t seen any benefits at all from our Google+ efforts, and remain frustrated that we still don’t have a custom URL like plus.google.com/kerika…
A new Weekly Prioritization template, inspired by Jim Collins’s work
Jim Collins, acclaimed author of Build to Last and other well-received books, wrote an interesting blog post about 10 years ago on the importance of creating a Stop Doing list.
Mr. Collins emphasized the importance of deciding not to continue doing something any longer as key to successful prioritization:
A great piece of art is composed not just of what is in the final piece, but equally important, what is not. It is the discipline to discard what does not fit — to cut out what might have already cost days or even years of effort — that distinguishes the truly exceptional artist and marks the ideal piece of work, be it a symphony, a novel, a painting, a company or, most important of all, a life.
He cited the example of Darwin Smith of Kimberly-Clark making the critical decision to sell off the company’s paper-mills, which provided the bulk of the company’s revenues and had been in existence for 100 years (!), in order to focus on the new consumer business of paper towels.
This article has inspired us to create a new task board template called “Weekly Prioritization”: it lets you organize your work in a different way from the traditional “To Do / In Progress / Done” taxonomy of Kanban, by using columns organized as:
- Must Do: in here, put everything that absolutely must get done that week.
- Should Do: everything that you would really like to get done, once you get all the “must do’s” done.
- Could Do: stuff you could do, if you had any time left
- Stop Doing: this is the really critical column — identify everything that you should stop doing!
Let us know how useful this proves to you! (Hat tip to Eitan Nguyen for the suggestion…)
And, as usual, we will continue building new process templates to help our disparate users with their projects.
Coming up: a simpler pricing for Kerika
We are moving to a simpler pricing scheme for Kerika:
- As before, you can start with a free Standard Account, which will let you have two other people work on your projects.
- Once your team grows past that point, you can upgrade to a Professional Account, which we are offering at a simple rate of $10 per user, per month (billed annually).
- Academic & Nonprofit users can still request free service, which will now allow for up to 10 free users per account.
Three key changes with our new pricing:
- You won’t have to buy “packs of licenses” any more: you can buy just as many as you need.
- The new rate is higher, but reflects the tremendous increase in functionality since our November release of task boards, Kanban boards and Scrum boards.
- The refund policy is simpler: instead of changing the subscription end-date, you will simply get a refund for the unused portion of any Professional subscription that you had purchased.
Our new pricing will continue to be very competitive, with tremendous value for your money because:
- There are no limits on the number of projects you can create within an account.
- There are no limits on the number of cards that you add to a particular project board.
- There are no limits on the files that you share as part of a card (the size of your Google Drive is entirely between you and Google.)
All of our competitors are offering very complicated pricing schemes that limit your freedom to create and reconfigure projects as needed. But not us.
And, as before, we will continue to use Google Checkout for our billing, which means we will never see or store your credit card information.
Improved integration with Google Drive, faster performance, and full iPad support
Along with our best wishes for this holiday season, we have a small present to put under the tree as well: a new version of Kerika will be available on Christmas Day! This new version will come with:
- Improved integration with Google Drive: now, you will be able share any kind of files, including music, videos, Flash, and other binary data, simply by adding them to your project cards or canvases. (When you log into Kerika again, you will be asked to reauthorize Kerika’s access to your Google Apps,)
- Improved performance: projects should load at least twice as fast as they did before, making it a lot easier to use Kerika in coffee shops and other places with unreliable WiFi.
- Full, fun iPad support: you will be able to access your Kerika projects using the Safari or Chrome browser on your tablet (no need to download any apps).
- Better support for visitors: you can give project stakeholders (like your clients, for example) read-only access to your projects. They will be able to view everything in your projects except for your chat, which will remain private to the team members.
There are also usability tweaks:
- Attachments can now be opened with a single click.
- The “Move” action can now be found in the menu at the top of the columns.
What we are working on next:
- A consolidated view of all your projects, similar in concept to the “unified inbox” you find on your smartphone.
- Easier ways to manage your account, and integration with the Google Apps Marketplace and the Chrome Web Store.
- Work estimation, work logging, and exporting of project data.
Thanks again for all your support: the very encouraging feedback we have been getting from our users continues to fuel our efforts!
Giving real thanks, this Thanksgiving
This Thanksgiving holiday, we have good cause to be grateful to all the folks who gave us detailed feedback on our new task management software, and helped us identify about 25 different improvements that we plan to make over the next week covering areas such as:
- Eliminating any confusion that might exist regarding project privacy;
- Making it easier to edit card titles;
- Making it easier to chat on individual cards;
- Improving the emails that are sent when people are added or removed from projects;
- Improving the overall performance, by at least by 50%;
- Simplifying the experience for new users;
- Simplifying the use of canvases and whiteboards;
- Adding helpful hints throughout the product; and
- Eliminating references to “Kanban” which some people find confusing (without eliminating any functionality).
We will be updating Kerika next week, and will continue to release new versions every two weeks, and over the next month we plan to market and publicize the software more.
Kerika isn’t written in Indonesian. (And Google Docs isn’t in Vietnamese either…)
An odd problem that we cannot quite figure out: every once in a while Google’s Chrome browser will tell the user that the application is written in Indonesian, and then offer to do a translation.
We cannot figure out what’s going on with this: all of the code is written in Javascript and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), so why would Chrome consider it to be an Indonesian page?
The problem must lie with Google Chrome itself: now, we are noticing that it will sometimes report that Google Docs is written in Vietnamese, as this screenshot shows!
Our latest version: better integration with Google, and more UI coolness
You will have a new version of Kerika tomorrow, with a bunch of great new features. One big improvement is in Kerika’s integration with Google: we are upgrading to Google’s newer, better authentication system, so you will be asked to sign-in through Google again as if you were a brand new user — but don’t worry, none of your old projects or data are affected in any way by this change! The new sign-in process consolidates in one place all the permissions that Kerika requests with respect to your Google account; they include:
- Access to your basic information: name, email address and photograph, which we use to make sure your Kerika account is set up properly. Now, the photo you use on Google will be used automatically for your Kerika projects as well.
- Access to your Google Docs account, which, as before, we use to store the files you upload to your Kerika projects. Now, when you upload files to a Kerika project, they will be stored in the Google Docs account of the Account Owner. This makes it easier for Account Owners to manage all the content assets related to their projects.
- Access to your contacts: this will be used in our next release (look for it in a couple of weeks) which will have auto-completion of names and email addresses when you invite people to join your projects.
There’s a long list of benefits that come with the new version of Kerika:
- When you add a URL to a Kerika page, that web site will show up as an embedded page within your Kerika page (i.e. as an IFRAME): you can customize the size and the display, so that only the content you are interested in is shown. Which means that Kerika lets you literally cut-and-paste the Internet.
- When you add Web content to Kerika pages, the system automatically gets the title of the Web content, so you don’t have to enter that by hand. And, of course, you can always rename it if you like.
- When you upload files to Kerika projects, they will now be stored in sub-folders within your Google Docs that are named for the Kerika projects. This means your Google Docs account doesn’t get cluttered with files in the same way as it did before.
- If you use Google Drive, you will find that your Kerika documents are available across all your computers. Kerika is well integrated with Google Drive.
- When someone joins a project that already has a bunch of Google Docs, they won’t get a bunch of emails any more from Google letting them know that they have access to each of these files. (These emails were kind of annoying ;-)
- If someone is removed from a project team, they will no longer have access to the Google Docs that were part of that project.
- On Firefox, Chrome and Safari (but not IE9), you will see thumbnails of the documents on your Kerika projects, which makes it easier for you to quickly distinguish between several files.
- When you make a project open to the public, its documents are available only to people who know the URL of the documents. We feel this is a better approach to privacy when you considering making a project open to the public.
- When you are uploading a large file to your Kerika project, you don’t have to wait for the uploading to finish in order to do other work inside Kerika.
- When you copy a project, or use someone’s public project as a template, you will get your own copies of all the documents in that project.
- Switching between different Kerika pages is now much faster since images are now retrieved from your browser cache instead of from the server.
- A long-awaited bug fix: when you have images (pictures) on your Kerika pages, they will be shown properly on Internet Explorer 9 and Safari. (We had to fix a problem with the way these browsers dealt with Google Docs.)
- Text blocks can now have a border color as well.
- The emails sent when you invite people have been improved.
- And, finally, the thumbnails of Kerika pages — which you can post to Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, etc. — are much improved.
Thanks for your continued support of Kerika, and for providing feedback on how we can improve the product. There’s more good stuff coming your way, so keep collaborating…
A simpler way to deal with thumbnails
Sometimes you have to admit that your bright ideas just didn’t turn out as well as you liked…
One such bright idea was to have Idea Pages show thumbnails of their contents when viewed from their parent pages. Here’s an example of this works in practice:
A great idea in theory; not so great in practice…
The original goal was two-fold:
- To let users know quickly which items on an Idea Page contained other pages;
- To give users a quick visual sense for what was contained in those pages;
In practice, however, the effect of these thumbnails showing through all the time was a splotchy, rather ugly effect. To remedy this, we are adopting a new mechanism that we hope will continue to meet our two goals: with our latest version, any item on an Idea Page that contains another page will appear with it’s text/label underlined, like this:
As you can see, items that contain pages now appear with their text labels underlined. If you move your mouse over a shape that has underlined text in its label, you see a thumbnail appear as before:
Selecting the shape now provides a green “+” button: this lets you open the page contained within that shape.
This new green “+” button also appears on shapes that don’t contain any pages within them: in that case, clicking on the “+” button lets you create a new page that is contained within that shape.
In effect, the old double-click mouse operation has been replaced with a green “+” button that appears when you select a shape with a single mouse click.
We hope you find these changes helpful; we earnestly seek your feedback!