Communicating with Online and Real World Communities
PALM DESERT, Calif., Jan. 31 // -- DEMO 2007 -- CircleUp, Inc., a provider of social communication services for online and offline communities, today launched the public alpha of its flagship service at the DEMO 2007 Conference in Palm Desert, Calif.
Today, when you ask a question of online and offline communities you get back 15, 50 or 500 emails and instant messages to open, sort, cut, paste and organize before the results are useful. CircleUp is a free consumer Internet service that turbo-charges your email and instant messaging. As you ask questions and gather information from groups of any size, you get back a single, organized result instead of a blizzard of emails and IMs.
CircleUp can be used in many different ways for information gathering, collaboration and decision-making in online and offline communities:
-- 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.
-- Send a CircleUp to the 65 members of the committee for the fundraiser
asking, "Who can volunteer for the night of the event?" Get back a
master list of who will do what, and when, instead of 50 emails and
IMs.
-- IM a CircleUp to the eight people you trust on the finance message
board asking what they think the stock price will do in the moment
following the earnings announcement later that day. Get back a single,
immediate, consolidated result that can be shared and commented in the
privacy of that group instead of multiple IMs, emails and message board
posts.
-- 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.
"Our coaches and tournament directors have found many different uses for the service, particularly just before a tournament when so much information is gathered with lightning-fast turnaround," said Dick Groendal, principal of e7 Sports, the leading sports management system for tournaments, teams, clubs and camps. "Email and IM have always played an important role in tournament communications, and CircleUp enhances that in a big way by returning information that allows the coach or director to take immediate action."
Everyone knows that if you ask a better question, you'll get a better answer but few people know what to do about it. CircleUp enables non-tech-savvy people to ask better questions with Answer Patterns(TM) that add a little bit of structure to the question. They focus the response and make it possible to aggregate and organize the results automatically. The special-purpose QuestionBox(TM) widget that recipients see focuses their responses on only the information requested and eliminates the random answers, distractions and extraneous details that are common with group email requests.
"There are two kinds of people in the world these days: those who use email and those who think email is for old people," said John Payne, CEO of CircleUp, Inc. "But they all have to work together, so CircleUp universally supports email and instant messaging for users across all age and technology boundaries."
CircleUp is built on a powerful messaging hub that allows users to communicate simultaneously with circles of any size over email and public instant messaging networks. Today, CircleUp supports AIM and Yahoo! Instant Messenger, with the addition of the other public instant messaging networks and popular forms of mobile communications coming soon.
Anyone can use CircleUp in three easy steps: 1) Ask a question of any community you belong to 2) Everybody answers quickly and easily 3) Use and share the consolidated results with everyone in the community.
Users ask questions to a "circle" in a "What's Your Question" toolbar embedded in Microsoft Outlook, in desktop, browser or IM widgets, or from the CircleUp web site at http://www.circleup.com. CircleUp works right in the user's messaging environment as a part of everyday communications.
Circles are metadata associations of people you know and communicate with. Using circles, it's fast and easy to address questions to exactly the right people in the community.
The question author then chooses an Answer Pattern to determine how their results will be returned and summarized. Answer Patterns include choices, suggestions, true/false, rows and columns, ranking, rating, contact information, and more. Users can use and share the aggregated results with their circle, either directly through the CircleUp website, through an RSS feed right to their desktop in widgets, from companies like SpringWidget and WidgetBox, or to email applications like Outlook.
For the person answering the question, CircleUp makes things better as well. If you are on the receiving end of a CircleUp question, you simply get a normal email or IM from the sender, a person you already know within your community, and only realize you've been "circled up" when a QuestionBox widget appears with the sender's picture to explain the question and collect your answer. Recipients can respond with one or two clicks -- more easily and succinctly than writing back via email.
The CircleUp public alpha release is available now and a beta period with additional features will commence by Q2 of 2007. If you are attending DEMO, come meet the CircleUp team at DEMO Pavilion #58.
About CircleUp
CircleUp is a social communication service that turbo-charges email and instant messaging for information gathering, collaboration and decision making in online and offline groups and communities. It provides a fast, easy way to ask questions of any community using email and IM and get back a single, organized result instead of a blizzard of emails and instant messages. CircleUp users come from a variety of online and offline communities including youth sports, volunteers, schools, Scouts, clubs, church groups, political, alumni and professional organizations. The company is privately funded and based in Newport Beach, Calif.
About the DEMO Conferences Produced by Network World Events and Executive Forums, the semi-annual DEMO conferences focus on emerging technologies and new products, which are hand-selected from across the spectrum of the technology marketplace. The DEMO conferences have earned their reputation for consistently identifying tomorrow's cutting-edge technologies, and have served as launch pad events for companies such as Palm, E*Trade, Handspring, and U.S. Robotics, helping them to secure venture funding, establish critical business relationships, and influence early adopters. Each DEMO conference features approximately 70 new companies, products and technologies. For more information, visit http://www.demo.com.
Media Contact:
Deann Mayeda
415-591-8404
dmayeda@shiftcomm.com
