2/19/08 - Featured Company: CircleUp
Web Site: www.circleup.com
Headquarters: Newport Beach, Calif.
Year Founded: 2006
Founders: John Payne; Doug Tung; Jim Jonassen
Investors: Sid R. Bass Associates and early angel investors
Employees: 15
Total Capital Raised: $3 Million
Company News: www.circleup.com/my/cu/info/press/
*Updated: 2/19/08
By John Payne, Co-Founder and CEO
The evolution of emailing has been incredible to watch since its inception. From a techie tool used by engineers, academics and scientists to the defacto method of communication for hundreds of millions of people, email has transformed the way that people from all walks of life communicate. Instant messaging has been hot on its heels in the younger demographic and is now reaching critical mass even in the enterprise. With emails worldwide totaling almost 100 billion messages daily, an almost unmanageable torrent of information flows every single day. And with the emergence of the social platforms and their proprietary messaging and publishing systems at places like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5 and others, the problem of group collaboration and communication across these heterogenous messaging systems has continued to grow.
It is no surprise that although Internet communications among groups is the most widely used collaboration tool in existence, the messaging systems themselves have proven to be relatively inefficient when it comes to group communication and information gathering.
For a year now, CircleUp has turbo-charged group communication via email, instant messaging and social networking services already in use around the world today. Where messaging has failed, CircleUp has taken the lead in creating an innovative communications tool that allows users to gather information, make plans or decisions and collaborate more effectively. CircleUp is a social communications service for real world groups that is built to make people’s lives easier and reduce information overload.
Why CircleUp?
Today, when you ask a specific question or gather information from online and “real world” communities you get back a blizzard of emails that often include random answers, distractions and extraneous details that complicate and delay the information gathering, collaboration and decision-making process. The problem today really has three parts: You ask for information, opinions, decisions, facts or guidance from 30 people in a group you belong to, and you get back 35 emails or instant messages to sort through, including tons of “reply to alls” that really gum up the works.
You not only have to find and open all 35 emails or instant messages, but you have to painstakingly cut and paste the information you need to get the group information all in one place.
Once you have it in one place, it’s buried on your hard drive somewhere it can’t be used or shared by anyone but you!
CircleUp solves that problem with a unique new social communications service that gathers the answers and presents you and the group with a single, organized result that can be used and shared by everyone.
CircleUp is a free service for consumers, professionals and small businesses. There is no charge to ask or answer questions, and no registration, download, or membership required for those who are circled-up. The service uses your messaging credentials as a proxy for membership in a group you already belong to.
Who Can Benefit From CircleUp?
Campus Clubs Use It: Send a CircleUp to 100 people in the campus ski club asking for drivers for the spring trip to Lake Tahoe. Get back a breakdown of who can drive, who needs a ride, and how many snowboards fit on top of each car instead of sorting through a flurry of 80 IM and email responses.
Businesses Use It: The event coordinator sends a CircleUp to ask 50 sales managers for their flight arrival and departure information so she could schedule airport pickups and hotel arrivals and gets back a single list of arrival and departure info instead of 50 emails.
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 really big signs. Get back a single list of all attendees that can be shared by riders and drivers.
Coaches Use It: Expedite a CircleUp to 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.
CircleUp Results
How Do I "CircleUp"?
CircleUp was created with the mainstream email and IM user in mind: techie or non-techie, the mom on the go, the soccer coach dad, the president of the university ski club, or the event coordinator of a top company.
Simply ask a question using the CircleUp Wizard found at www.circleup.com and integrated to messaging applications such as Microsoft Outlook, Facebook or at www.circleup.com.
Then choose a specific AnswerPattern, which determines how the results (answers) will be returned, putting an end to the back-and-forth that often goes along with getting incomplete or incorrect information while organizing them in one single location.
If you are on the receiving end of a CircleUp question, you will get what looks like a normal email, Facebook message or notification or IM from the questioner. So, if you typically communicate with friends or colleagues through Yahoo! IM or through email, that mode of communication will not change. You will only realize that you’ve been circled up when a Flash-based QuestionBox widget with the sender’s picture appears on your desktop or in a browser to explain the question and collect your answer.
The respondent makes a quick, focused response that’s even easier and more efficient for them than crafting a response to the email. And the results are aggregated for all riders and drivers to share.
Most widgets today are distribution endpoints, a way for someone to take something from his/her site and offer distribution everywhere. As you can see in discussion above, we’ve turned the traditional widget model on its head by using the widget as a collection endpoint. CircleUp widgets act as a tool to focus a user on a specific task and gather very specific information or decisions.
CircleUp is Now on Facebook Platform
CircleUp recently announced the availability of its powerful new messaging features on Facebook Platform that significantly enhances the power and utility of Facebook groups, events and Friend Lists when added to any user’s profile on Facebook.
CircleUp is one of the first applications to take advantage of recently available features in the Facebook Platform api to access informal groups of friends via Facebook Friend List. To check out the new Facebook application from CircleUp, go to http://apps.facebook.com/circleup/.
CircleUp Continues to Make Group Communication Painless
Since 2006, we’ve grown to over 100,000 registered leaders who can use CircleUp to reach 4.5 million members in their various groups, teams, clubs and business organizations. To meet the demands of our expanding user base, we have added exciting new features to our application. Some of these new features include:
*A new inbox that makes organizing your CircleUps easier than ever before.
*Fast and easy to use Circle Management that is even more powerful and flexible.
*New and improved Outlook Toolbar that lets you integrate CircleUp with your Outlook contacts in real time, right inside of Outlook, for free
There are many other improvements that can be seen by clicking here. These features continue to make CircleUp even easier to use with your groups, teams, clubs and business contacts.
When we first started CircleUp, our main concern was to make sure that our solution mapped to the problem consumers find most extremely painful—efficient communication in groups. We’re social animals, and participating in a wide variety of communities is a normal way of life for all of us. Email and IM have become the standard for communications among those groups, whether in sports, school, volunteerism, politics, online gaming, or even business. Our goal is to take the basic, extremely powerful tools we all use today and dramatically expand their efficiency where it counts the most -with the circles of people we interact with every day.
What do you think about CircleUp? Leave your comments below. Feedback about StartUp Beat?—email us at editor@startupbeat.com
