I did head out into the pouring rain last night to get some bourbon, which, as you probably knew, cannot be substituted with brandy in bourbon and bacon ice cream.

I guess I should not have been surprised at the people you find in a downtown liquor store  minutes before closing.  In particular, there was one woman in particularly white,  non-functional shoes, garish red lipstick, and boldly dyed hair, buying a bottle of vodka, talking about the trip she was about to take, how the store keep would not see her for awhile, but it wouldn’t be as long as her last trip.   Not sure where you can go, that time of night, in that weather, in those shoes, with luggage and vodka in tow.

Been getting some feedback from users about how soft the Zenbe design is. The buttons are  muted, they say, a bit sleepy, a bit like a washed out movie.  They want some boldly dyed hair, some red lipstick. Maybe some white shoes.

There was no shortage of intelligent, spirited debate on every aspect of Zenbe, and still is. I used to be firmly in the “add more lipstick on those buttons” camp.

But I am glad to have lost a few rounds of that particular argument, because invariably, the next message from these very same people amounts to, “I get it now, Zenbe really is making my email better-the design really works!”  While you might think you want a bold send button, and sharp edges everywhere, what you really want is to focus on your communication, not a row of buttons. Minimalist controls that fade into the background until you want them might seem a bit washed out the first time you look a them, but make sense once you start using them. Those white shoes are not getting you very far.

After much scrutiny and feedback, maybe we got the basics of Zenbe down pretty good.

So now we can have spirited debates about everything else: marketing, features, finance, customers, and where to hang the neon art.

At least the ice cream was a big hit.

Its late, its rainy, and I need some bourbon for an ice cream recipe I want to make.  I only have brandy.  I think its a very fine brandy, received as a gift years ago, patiently waiting in my liquor cabinet, but its not bourbon.  Do details like this matter?

I think they do.

Giving a demo of Zenbe for Business today, my prospective customer kept on saying “that’s neat!” He quipped at the big features, like Shareflow and Files View. He also quipped at how easy Zenbe makes it to organize email into folders.

He gave an uncontrolled “that’s neat” at  how you can share files with the “share as link” feature, either in the email composer or right from the “mail to” button in Files View.  Seems like a small feature, handy for sharing large files that people can’t get reliably in their inboxes.  But its also handy for sharing any file in a ubiquitous way, since the “share as link” function provides access to a web page where all of Zenbe’s file view functions are accessible. For example, people without MS Office can view word docs in their web browser.  Handy stuff.

Almost apologetically, Zenbe is comprised of  a host of small but time- and effort-saving features, that work within and beside the big features we explain on our website.

But the details do matter.

I need to go out and get the bourbon, don’t I?

Darn.

Email is a great communication tool.  Hundreds of millions of people spend their day getting work done, mostly in email. But it does have its problems. Especially when working with more than one other person.

When you collaborate with multiple people using email, you  assume that everybody is reading all your emails, in the right order, and saving them for later.  In real life, during a busy day, emails get lost, overlooked, read out of context, misplaced, accidentally deleted… And if a new person joins the conversation, how are they supposed to catch up?  Getting new people up to speed is especially important in the work place, where a lof of knowledge gets transferred, and quickly lost, via email.

This is not a new problem, and a lot of smart people have been creating some interesting solutions for a very long time.  Most of those, though, are designed by technical people, for technical people, and tend to be…  …complicated, and  never as effective as they should be.

Shareflow takes a different approach. A very, very simple approach. Each Zenbe for Business account starts out with a single flow for your team. You can add a comment, and it appears on the flow as if on a webpage.  Anyone on your team can add a comment to your comment, keeping the conversation together.

You can add a file, either from your desktop or easily  grab any attachement you have ever recevied or sent.  Comment on the file. Everyone on your team can view the file, and add their own comments.  All of Zenbe’s excellent file handling features, like MS Office doc rendering, or event handling from .ics attachments, all of that works on shareflow too, of course.

Need to collaborate on that new project with just a few people?  Create another flow, it takes a few seconds.  Regardless of how many separate flows you create, its very easy to keep current.  You can view all updates from any flow, or view updates flow-by-flow.

Want to invite your client to view the proposal and working docs, and see your comments?  Or add their own thoughts and avoid another giant carbon copy chain?  That’s easy, just invite them.   They won’t need a Zenbe account, they receive a URL to access the Shareflow directly, from any browser.

The best part of Shareflow is that all this knowledge and creativity is captured and searchable for all the participants to build on. No more searching for old emails, or reconstructing ideas from complicated email chains.

Take a look at Shareflow.  A picture, in this case, is worth more than a thousand words.

(Not keeping track how many words this video might be worth.)

Think Shareflow might help your business communications?  Why not sign up for the 30 day free trial?  And let us know what you think!

Oh my!  talk about overdue blogging.

We launched Zenbe for Business almost TWO WEEKS AGO!  Its true.  If you visit  zenbe.com you will see a new website pomoting a new product.  Its awesome, I have to say.  I liked Zenbe Personal, don’t get me wrong, but Zenbe for Business is so much faster, works so much better, and of course has Shareflow, the collaboration tool that lets me happily move away from the morass of services me and the team had been using until now.

We offer a free 30 day trial, so sign up and check it out.  Yes, we ask you for a credit card for the trial: that helps us keep out spammers, which improves the quality of our service.  Equally important, it quiet the bonking sound from the game of whack-a-mole we had been playing with spammers, who are attracted to new email services like…. like… I should stop here.

Since you probably know all about Zenbe Personal, let me talk about the single largest innovation in Zenbe for Business. We call it Shareflow, again showing our mastery at creating unassuming names for phenomenally useful features.

Shareflow  lets you create an interactive web page, invite people to it, and let everyone post comments, emails, events, files…. Of course everyone can use, find, and comment on anything in a Shareflow.  Its simple and effective.  I’ll comment on why Shareflow on exactly what Shareflow is effective at in an upcoming post, but in the meantime you can watch our simple demo….

What is Shareflow?

Zenbe Personal, the popular free service, is still live and supported, but signup is still closed.   You can login right from the new site, just use your zenbe username and password.

We are name challenged.  Every company I have ever worked at, prior to entering what I call the “fancy overly elaborate marketing phase”  has been name challenged: we can’t ever figure out a name great enough to describe a great new product.  The best minds in the room once named a product “Keeno”, until someone pointed out that naming a financial services product after anything to do with gambling is not such a good idea.

Naming things at Zenbe is no different.

Zenbe for Business, our subscription business offering based (loosely) on our free Zenbe Personal service, offers an uninspiring name for a wonderful new product.  If your company lives on email,  you need to check out the latest from Zenbe, which you can do shortly at http://zenbe.com.

In a little while, we will be posting our new home page, which describes our new Zenbe for Business offering. Signups will be turned on in a few days, but let us know you are interested and we will send you a discount coupon when we are ready.

If you are a Zenbe Personal user, don’t be confused when the new home page comes up.

You can still login to the free Zenbe you know and love by going to http://zenbe.com/login. You can also login from the new home page: click on login, and then enter your username and password.

The entire free Zenbe site is available at http://zenbe.com/personal, but we are still holding off on sending out new invites. With a little luck, we will send out Zenbe Personal invites in a few weeks.

As we have mentioned, we are busy working on a new version of Zenbe. We will be releasing Zenbe for Business in a week or two. It offers a host of innovations on top of an improved architecture that performs blazingly fast. Zenbe for Business offers such a great experience that we will actually charge money for it. Gasp!

We are not shutting down Zenbe Personal, what you use now. We are not going to ask you to pay for it. And we are planning on porting Zenbe Personal to our new platform, giving you all the benefits of Zenbe for Business.

For now, though, we have closed new applications for Zenbe. We expect to reopen in a few months, but for now we are just too busy to handle any more customers on Zenbe Personal.

So keep on enjoying Zenbe, and tell your friends, but point out that they won’t be able to get an invitation to signup anytime soon.

A Zenbe user blogged about how free customers aren’t necessarily the best customers when it comes to asking them to pay…

http://entresting.com/contracts-and-compliments

…but that doesn’t mean that free customers don’t add value. We learned a lot running a free service that 100,000 people or more signed up for. That expertise went into engineering a much better not-free service. While I am not sure the benefits justify all the expense of our free service right now, there are definitely benefits. So its not all that bad…
PS: don’t forget about this stuff..
http://www.zenbe.com/welcome/goodies

With the release of products like Mozilla Prism and Google Chrome, people are realizing that web applications like Zenbe work great as stand-alone desktop applications. Here’s a step by step guide to bringing Zenbe to your desktop.

Step 1: Choose Your Browser

The first step in bringing Zenbe to your destkop is to choose a site-specific browser. There are three choices: Google Chrome, Mozilla Prism, or Fluid (for Mac only). I will use Mozilla Prism for this tutorial as Google Chrome is not yet officially supported by Zenbe, and I can’t use Fluid because I’m a PC user.

Step 2: Install Mozilla Prism

If you’ve never used Mozilla Prism before, you will have to install it in Firefox. You can download it here.

Once you’ve installed Prism, go to Zenbe.com and login. In your Firefox menubar, click “Tools” and then “Convert website to application.” Select the options you want on the menu that appears and click “Ok”.

Step 3: Change Your Icon

The icon that is generated automatically by Prism looks pretty pixelated and ugly, so I created a higher quality one. You can download it here (don’t worry if it looks tiny–it will be normal size after you download it).

Once you’ve downloaded the icon to your destkop, right click on the shortcut created by Prism and select “Properties.”

Under the “Shortcut” tab, click “Change icon.” Browse for the .ico file and select it. That’s it! Enjoy Zenbe on your desktop!

I  dislike capitalism, free markets, entrepreneurship.

Shocking, considering I spent a long time working next door to the NYSE, have started multiple companies, and am investor in many more. The only thing I can say for it is that it’s at least slightly better than all the alternatives.

It is the waste.  So many false starts, so many mistakes, so many convoluted paths towards success. If only there was an infallible higher authority that could decide what was worth doing.  If only this entity could just ensure that only the things worth doing were done, and nothing else, it would be a simpler, better world, right?  No giant bailouts for giant companies that have been using free credit to pay people to buy their products for decades, and even the friendly little hamburger joint up the street wouldn’t have gone out of business.

Even Zenbe could take a straighter path.  We know what we want to do, and we know how to do it, but its strangely difficult to get there in a straight line.  We have better ways to let you explore your Inbox. Favorites view, conversations, and the files tab are just the start.

But when we demoed our original concepts, they were so far beyond the LIFO grid view of email that people didn’t get it. We realized we needed to create scaffolding, that could lead a user from their old-fashioned email world into a new, richer world of communication & collaboration.

I have been reading some blogs where people are confusing what we are trying to do. They see our Twitter and Facebook sidebars and say ” I would never give up my favorite client for that”.  Of course they wouldn’t.  But people who would never take the time to use yet another client, or login to facebook, these people love those sidebars.

Really, though, those are just demonstrators: imagine being able to install any kind of functionality you want there, or create your own. Imagine having information from your email flow into a sidebar for you to review or interact with it, so you have less stuff to deal with in your inbox.

That’s why those views are there: to help people use Twitter who don’t use it now, and as scaffolding to build a better future for communication….

I have a secret.

Last Wednesday night, when I should have stayed home and gotten rid of a cold, I instead went out to a big gala event to celebrate the secret renaming of the Tri-Borough Bridge to the Robert Kennedy Bridge.  Hey, I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, and it was to support a good cause!

It was great to see Alec Baldwin and other uber-famous people perform Speak Truth to Power, and I tried to ask Martha Stewart what she thought of the whole Mark Cuban thing, but she just smiled.  I don’t think she heard me over Kerry Kennedy’s passionate speech.

Those people all have their secrets, too.

I have another secret. Last Thursday night, when I REALLY should have stayed in bed, I again went out to another event for Witness, because who doesn’t want to meet Peter Gabriel, or take home Michale Stipe’s signed iPod?

Zenbe has its own secrets. Its loaded with secret features that make your email experience better. Except that, unlike a real secret, we don’t want them to be secrets.  They are just so embedded in the app, and so task specific, we have a hard time explaining them in the UI.

Here are some of my favorite, or most aggravating ones:

Picking an Avatar from Flicker

Avatars are fun, but its intimidating to pick one. Thats why we added the Flickr Tab to the avatar picker.  Just click on the pencil (a pencil icon means “edit this” anywhere in Zenbe) on any Avatar space, then select the Flickr Tab. Enter a search phrase, I usually just pick the person’s name, or maybe an animal or idea that represents the person, and see what Flickr spits up.  There is always and interesting image that you can associate with the person.

Finding Email or Files with the gray filter bar

Those gray bars that appear in every list, in the mail tab or files view, are filter controls. You can use them to find email or files in the view you are in. If you are in your Inbox, and filter on a tag, you will only see items with that tag, that are in your Inbox.  This is different from the search box in the upper right, which searches ALL YOUR EMAIL (or all your files) wherever it might be. 

Tagging a File makes it easy to find, and keeps it around

You can organize files separately from email. If you go to the files tab, and use the tag filter control, you can quickly find any files that are associated with that tag.  If you tagged an email, any attachments in that email will show up.  You  can also tag files on the files tab, and they will show up too. If you tag a file, we know you care about it, so even if you delete the email, Zenbe will keep the file. 

Keyboard shortcuts

They are there, just read the help to learn more. 

I’ll write more about all our wonderful secret features later. Right now, i have to get back to shaking this horrible cold…