CircleUp’s group collab goes beta

By Vivek | April 30th, 2007 at 01:02 am ET         

CircleUp, which been working behind the scenes for the past few months has finally gone live with the public beta of it’s smart collaboration app. I had written about CircleUp last month when it had partnered with e7sports. CircleUp’s concept is to make your collaboration easier by allowing you to pose questions and gather needed information from groups of any size and get back a single, organized response that can be used and shared among all members of the groups. All the communication happens via email and IM, while CircleUp keeps tracks of your responses to eventually aggregate the details.

Personally I hate going to yet another site that tells me it can make my online life easier. All it eventually means is another app, another id, and another place for me to login. Naaa. CircleUp understands this fact really well since with this launch it is introducing “What’s Your Question” widgets for Google Desktop, NetVibes Start Page and an Outlook plug-in. That means not round-trips to another site to get your questions kicking. Just get things done right from your personalized page. Lazy-feature list doesn’t stop here. CircleUp delivers RSS feeds for your questions, the aggregated “Daily Result” delivered to your email, and export to Excel and PDF. CircleUp has even the microformat fans covered by enabling browser export of contact information directly to tools like Outlook, or mashups with Google Maps, and more. On the whole a pretty well featured application to start with. Still would like to see integration with other IM clients besides AIM, Yahoo.

Grouptivity is a similar solution but without the IM integration that tends towards getting discussions enabled around any webpage or content.

Links:
CircleUp