bryan:
UPDATE: Cool, Mailbox’s CEO agrees.
My biggest gripe with Mailbox thus far is that the default snooze options, which I generally love, do not change based on the time or day of the week, which can lead to some ambiguous situations. Around 9PM last night I wanted to merely delay an email by a couple of hours. “Later today” actually deferred the email to a little after midnight but “This Evening” deferred until 6PM the next day. Similarly, “This Weekend” and “Next Week” also seem a bit too ambiguous when it’s currently Sunday night. I really think that contextually tweaking the available options as well as some of the language could go a long way towards improving this already great feature.
I’ve been using Mailbox for a few weeks now and very much enjoy it. When I first installed it I started a list all of the things I didn’t like, but almost all of my complaints went away the more I bought into the way that Mailbox is intended to be used. The only ones that really remain (aside from the snoozing behavior described above) are the lack of an iPad or desktop equivalent, and the lack of cloud search (which is coming). I also wish that their push notifications included the first line of the message body but I know this is an iOS limitation and not their fault.
Also agree with all of this. I often go to hit one of those snoozes and have to think about it for a second. I shouldn’t have to think at all.
stevekovach:
Thank you Mailbox.
This is the new normal for me too. Which is awesome.
One of the reasons I got into the investing side of things was Instagram. Over the years as a writer, I had “zeroed in” on many companies that would go on to become hot properties from an investment perspective (Twitter, Foursquare, Square, Quora, etc). But Instagram was something I had watched from its inception (when it was still Burbn), and for various reasons knew it had that potential to be the next big thing.
A little over a year into investing, there are several companies I have such hopes for (CrunchFund probably wouldn’t invest if we didn’t!), but one that stuck out in particular in the past year was Vine.
Vine, as you know, was recently launched by Twitter as their new stand-alone video application for iOS. What a lot of people don’t know (or have forgotten) is that it was a startup before it was a part of Twitter. That’s easy to forgive since the entrepreneurs decided to sell before they actually shipped a product (which, as you might imagine, is bittersweet).
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It’s great to see entrepreneurs have a successful exit. It’s even better to see them have the balls to buy the company back and try again (which CrunchFund gladly helped with).
Congrats to Tony, Ryan, and the entire About.me team (which remarkably was still intact inside of Aol). Here’s my profile (which you’ll note I have linked first and foremost in the new header up top).
Josh Constine of TechCrunch shares a bit about NewHive, including their seed investors, which includes CrunchFund.
One trend that interests me is the shifting of online tools into the background, to get out of the way of the art they’re trying to facilitate. We see this on the writing side of things with new tools like Medium and Svbtle (another CrunchFund investment). And now we’re seeing it on the more visual expression side as well, with tools like NewHive.
But don’t be fooled by what appears to simply be a newfangled WYSIWYG editor. The goal of NewHive goes far beyond that. As the team explains in their own Expression (their name for individual works), NewHive wants to enable self-publishing and creativity of any and all kinds. And, just as importantly, wants to foster a community around it.
Pay no attention to my shitty Expressions. I’m simply not very creative. But I’m working on it.
It’s hard to say what I hate worse: the disjointed nature of trying to have a conversation on Twitter, or blog comments. Actually, no it’s not. It’s clearly blog comments. They are quite possibly the worst and most useless thing on the internet. But both of the aforementioned things are the reasons I love Branch.
I first wrote about Branch almost a year ago, when they were just getting started. CrunchFund subsequently got involved in an advisory role to the company because they were trying to do the impossible: create a civil, smart place on the internet for discourse. Today, they’re officially launching out of private beta and into the public.
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I’ve been a fan of GoPollGo for a while — long before CrunchFund even existed, actually. I felt like they hit the right combination of simplicity and realtime data when it came to polling.
Now, as an investor, my one request was a killer, simple app to make polls on the go. As of today, GoPollGo has created just that.
Abdel Ibrahim of The Tech Block interviews Gentry Underwood of Mailbox:
No technology ever dies completely, so in some senses it’s easy to promise that email will stick around. But more to the point, email is a “we” technology. You or I don’t decide to use it – “we” do. You may attempt to quit checking email, but you’ll still be receiving them. Sooner or later you’ll likely cave in and start checking it again (perhaps after one-too-many missed invitations, etc.). If we’re going to stop using email we’re going to have to all decide to do that at the same time, and that’s a big, big thing to ask.
I really cannot wait to see what happens when everyone starts using Mailbox in a few weeks. It has changed my work life dramatically for the better. It’s a true revelation.
Pretty nifty way to make a holiday card and learn some simple HTML/CSS/JS at the same time.
High-res
