CircleUp Moves Into Beta, Adds New Features
4/30/07 – CircleUp, the Newport Beach-based provider of social communication services that utilize existing Internet tools, today launched the public beta version of its flagship service. Utilizing email and instant messaging (IM) to allow questions to be asked and information gathered from groups of any size, CircleUp allows users to get back a single, organized response that can be used and shared among all members of a group.
CircleUp launched its alpha version at the DEMO 07 conference in February. The company says its public beta offers enhanced usability and added functionality, including new ways to get questions into the service and get results out to where they can be most useful.
The company cites the idea that most people have five to ten “circles” in their work, family, social, sports and online networks, and that the process of gathering information from these circles is inefficient. CircleUp says its service targets this process, allowing users to effectively organize these circles online.
A major focus of the beta release, according to CircleUp, is a suite of new features that make it easy to get questions into the service from any user’s desktop and get useful results back out in ways that can be integrated, used and shared.
The new features include a “What’s Your Question” widget, available as a Google Desktop Gadget, and a NetVibes Start Page widget. They also include Syndicated Real-Time Results Tracking utilizing RSS feeds, The Daily Result—a single, organized result sent directly to the user’s inbox, Microformat Support—which enables browser export of contact information directly to tools like Outlook, and mashups with Google Maps.
For more about CircleUp, see the company’s entry in The Pitch: Featured Company: CircleUp
CircleUp - www.circleup.com
