Two weeks ago some of the Increo team took a small field trip to Stanford’s Startup 101 career fair.  I’ve already shared a bit about what impresses me and this time I figured I’d share some of the fun.  I brought a camera  and snapped a few pictures of the team “hard at work”.  Enjoy!

At Increo, we put a great deal of time and thought into our designs and features – we keep things simple while giving users the power and options they need. We believe a clean UI is integral to a smooth and memorable user experience. Here are a few examples of our philosophy in action:

3 easy steps to creating a Backboard

1. Choose your file to upload.
2. Pick some settings and write a few words about what you uploaded.
3. Invite your reviewers (or invite them later)

That’s it. You don’t need to leave the homepage to start Step 1.  You don’t need to change anything in Step 2. And you don’t even need have an account before you start to create your Backboard.

Hide stuff when you don’t need it

• Step 2 (Customize) is probably the least fun step, so we tried to make it as simple as possible. For instance, the Advanced Options (for downloading, printing, and deadlines) are initially hidden so they’re not intrusive. The user who is looking for more options will find them, and the user who is going through quickly isn’t bothered by more choices.
• In the case you do need a deadline, we make it as easy as possible - just one drop down menu for any day in the upcoming two weeks (and, of course, you can use the full-blown monthly calendar selector if you need a custom deadline).

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We know it’s a tough time to be looking for a job right now, so we’re pleased to announce we have partnered with Resume Boutique to offer free resume reviews via Backboard.

Stand out from the crowd with the best resume you can offer. Just upload to a Backboard and paste the URL into the request form.

Reviews are free through March 31, so dust off that resume and upload it for your free expert review.

Ever noticed how most restaurant websites link to PDFs of their menu?

As a potential customer, I really don’t want to have to download and open the menu of five or six different restaurants to figure out where I want to eat.

At the same time, the restaurant owners want me to be able to see the menu right away, so the butter-dipped lobster tail catches my eye.  The more potential customers that see the menu, the better.

Imagine if those restaurants used embedit.in to display PDFs of their menus on the website.  The menu shows up right in the page, tempting me with the caramel-apple cheesecake.  Restaurants retain the flexibility to change the embed as often as they would like.  It’s a win-win for everyone.

As an example, here’s the dinner menu for the Palo Alto cajun spot Nola, sized to fit the Increo on Ideas blog:

Last week brought some big changes to Backboard.  A few things that we wanted to push didn’t quite make it into that release, so yesterday, we updated Backboard yet again with some nifty new features.  Upload a new Backboard and check them out!

Text highlighting

Ever find yourself wanting to highlight the text in a Backboard instead of underline or circle it?  Well now you can.  Simply mouse over the text in question and highlight away.  You’ll still get the familiar text entry box to make your suggestions, but now the selected area behind the text will remain highlighted.

The need for speed

If you have a lot of Backboards on your My Backboards page like we do, then you probably noticed that the page took some time to load.  Well wait no longer, we’ve significantly improved the loading speed of the My Backboards page.  Images are only loaded when you need them and no earlier, meaning the page loads and responds much quicker.  We also made some tweaks to the javascript loading on other parts of the site to improve response times and will continue to look for places we can improve the speed of the site.

As always…

We love bringing you new features and we hope you’re as excited about these changes as we are.  As always, let us know what you think!

I gave a short three-minute presentation to the Silicon Valley JavaScript Meetup Group last month about Backboard. I talked a little bit about Backboard and how it does real-time feedback using Orbited. Enjoy!

For the second time in as many days, Backboard has major new features! We’ve been really busy doing lots of great stuff, and the whole team is excited to share them with you today.

A new look

The first change is the most obvious: Backboard has a fresh new look:

Time zones

The Backboard team lives and works in California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, and having Pacific Standard Time on the server works great for us. But we realize that some of you live in other time zones, so we’ve added support for multiple time zones.

If you don’t change anything, Backboard will make its best guess as to what the correct time zone for you is, but you can always set it by visiting your account settings:

Deadlines

Want all of your feedback by a certain time? Backboard can’t force your colleagues to be any less lazy, but it can tell them by when you want their feedback.

Backboard will email your colleagues when the deadline is approaching and tell them if they’ve missed it. Castigating them for being deadbeats, though, is still up to you.

Built-in printing, with markup!

One feature requested more than any others is printing your documents with feedback. Even though we love extolling the virtues of a paperless office, there still are times when you’d love to have a hard copy. Wait no longer: right below your document, you’ll find a print button that will give you the option to print the document, the feedback, or both:

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Since Backboard first launched red pen annotation, I’ve been amazed by all the creative ways to leave feedback.  Each member of the Backboard team expresses themselves differently: circles, underlines, big cross-outs, arrows; you name it, we’ve seen it.

Like Carlos, a new Backboard user that posted on our feedback Backboard last week, sometimes you need a little more structure to your drawing.  If you’re not into free form annotation, you can hold down Shift while you’re drawing to create a straight line or the Option (Mac)/Alt (Windows) key for an oval.  The perfectionists out there can use both for a perfect circle.

Lately, the Backboard team has taken annotation to the next level (whether it’s a level up for its creativity or a level down for its ridiculousness is up to you to decide).  After feedback is closed on team Backboards, small red-pen animals, vehicles and other doodles often show up.  Here’s a sample for your enjoyment:

And my personal favorite, TROGDOR the BURNiNATOR burninating the countryside.  On the original Backboard, this is an animation.  Mouse over the first part of the feedback and see TROGDOR brighten.  Mouse over the second part, and see his burninating.

We’d like to share the fun with the Backboard community.  Link me to the Backboard featuring your best feedback art (in the comments) by Wednesday, February 11.  I’ll set the best annotation artist up with a complimentary month of a premium Backboard account.

Spam is a constant problem — I would guess this not news to you — and there are countless software packages and tools available to fight it with varying success rates.

One common technique is to use a temporary or disposable email address when signing up for online services so that it doesn’t matter if the company turns around and spams you or, worse yet, sells your address. You could use your old Hotmail address for this purpose or even a custom service like Mailinator.

Often, you have a better technique right at your fingertips that requires no extra effort on your part: plus-addressing.

Let’s say your email address is:

john.doe@gmail.com

You will also receive email sent to:

john.doe+anything@gmail.com

That is, you can add a plus sign and then any word to your email address, and it will still be delivered to you!

Next time you sign up for an online service, use a +servicename sub-address. If you start receiving spam at that address, not only can you hold the service accountable but you can easily set up a rule in your email program to delete it all.

Email providers vary in their support of sub-addressing and some (such as Yahoo) use minus-addressing instead (where the plus sign is replaced by a minus sign), but with a few quick test emails you should be able to figure out what works for you.

With Backboard, we promise to never disclose your email address to anyone and we have gone to great lengths to make sure you get the smallest amount of email required to make the service work.

If you want to test us though, sign up for Backboard with a +backboard sub-address and see for yourself!

Over at TechCrunch, there’s some interesting discussion about a recent decision by Nielsen to remove Reply All from Outlook for each of their 35,000 employees. It’s positioned as an efficiency play–too many people overuse Reply All, clogging their colleagues’ inboxes.

Sure, sorting through email is a time sink.  More of a time sink is discovering someone didn’t get a critical email, causing a whole bunch of new emails, duplicating effort, and letting something get out without all necessary eyes on it.

I would encourage Nielsen to give Reply All a second chance and take a look at lightening the email load with great new communication tools.  Select a few to deploy and educate employees about how and when to use them.  Think about corporate IM or Yammer for quick updates, Doodle or even Outlook for scheduling meetings, Xobni for inbox organization, and of course, Backboard for document review.