Starting immediately, when you refer a friend to Boomerang and they use the product for the first time, you and your friend both earn a spin of the Wheel o’ Prizes. So every time you recruit a new friend using your referral link, both of you benefit instantly.

When you refer friends to Boomerang, you can help them make email infinitely more satisfying. Now, you’ll also give them a chance to win a Kindle Fire, a stylish T-Boomerang shirt, or any of the other amazing prizes on the wheel:

We hope you (and your friends) enjoy the change. Happy spinning!

I’m thrilled to announce that we deployed Boomerang for Gmail 1.0 tonight! The team worked incredibly hard, over very long hours to put together the release. We’re really proud of how smoothly the improvements make everything run, and we hope you’ll enjoy them!

As part of our conversion from a beta service, we’re also announcing new pricing plans. For more information about the new plans, check out http://www.boomeranggmail.com/subscriptions.html and for answers to common questions, take a look at our updated FAQ .

If you’re a current beta customer, watch your email! We’ll be sending updates rolling throughout the night with more details on what’s new. The emails will also contain a special coupon as a thank you for all your help during our beta period.

Thanks!
-The Baydin Team

Boomerang is running again, but because of the AWS outage, we weren’t able to access messages that were scheduled using Boomerang within the last 9 days.

When AWS services resume normally, we hope to be able to recover the missing messages. In the meantime, please check the Manage Boomerang screen and compare it against your Boomerang label and Boomerang-Outbox label to see if there are messages that need to be returned or sent.

Again, we apologize for the problems and we hope to be able to have everything running again soon. We’ll be working very hard to improve our redundancy in the upcoming few days, because if this happens many more times, I’m going to go bald from stress.

-Alex

We’re sorry that this happened, and we apologize for any problems this caused.

What’s going on is that we’ve seen a lot of growth in the number of messages scheduled per user over the past few weeks, and as a result, we’ve outgrown our server capacity. Our maintenance scheduled for tonight is supposed to resolve that problem, but it’s happening a day too late.

We’ll do our best to make sure this doesn’t happen again. Thank you for understanding.

Any emails you scheduled during the downtime will be returned/sent when service resumes.

I felt like we were preaching to the choir, because the keynote speakers who talked before us, including Tony Zingale from Jive and Jamie Whitmoyer, who implemented Sony’s E2.0 infrastructure in SharePoint, showed data about how much room there is for email and search to improve inside the organization. We were thrilled to be able to announce a product that makes email collaborative, for everyone in the enterprise, just a few minutes later.

We had several large/medium companies approach us about setting up pilot programs, so I would definitely encourage other startups in this space to apply to be part of the LaunchPad at E2.0 San Francisco in November. If you weren’t able to be at E2.0, but are curious how Unsearch’s email integration can get 100% of your coworkers involved and collaborating using the systems you already have, like SharePoint, please email us about setting up a demo.

Below are a few thoughts about the conference.

Major Themes

Collaboration and Social Software is back again in 2010. After a couple rough years because of the economy, it looks like companies are again making major pushes to find and deploy software to try to get people talking, collaborating, and connecting with their coworkers again.  There were several major themes that appeared throughout the keynotes, across the Expo, and in the panels.

The Rise of Feeds
Everyone has a “News Feed” view now. It’s clear that vendors have discovered value in bite-size pieces of information, delivered in chronological order, from people you already know (or groups you are already part of). This is a major part of practically all the new E2.0 products. The big value in these feeds is that they are public and somewhat customized, but unlike email, they are not directed specifically to you, so you can read just part of the stream and not worry about missing something.

There’s a lot of value in being able to filter information this way, even if the filter is “I don’t have time to look at this today.” The software demos looked like they would have a lot of irrelevant information in the feeds, though and there was a large number of unread items in most of the demos. I tend to feel stressed by unread counts, so I’m not sure the ability to come and go through the feed, without worrying about missing things is as strong as in the consumer News Feeds.

I worry that these systems will continue to create more information overload, but I think there’s a lot of potential here. Especially since most of the feed systems allow comments and discussions to form around news entries as they catch people’s interest.

Innovation in Search
Between the “Search is Not Enough” panel, the keynote speeches describing information overload, and the cool techniques presented for incorporating more serendipitous information browsing (like DarwinEco), I think the big technological shift over the next couple years will be in changing the way search works. Of course, I’m biased. But the panelists made it clear, over and over again, that searching through these new systems is going to require more intelligence on the part of the system.

The amount of information getting shared, through microblogging and social collaboration systems, continues to increase. Files are still important, but most of the new shared information is showed through searchable, non-proprietary-file-format HTML, which means that all the Web 2.0 tools for navigating this information can be brought to the enterprise.  That’s exciting.

Millenials
Barely a panel went by without a mention of millenials (people who graduated from college after 2000 seemed like the general definition) – a bit strange, since I only saw a handful of fellow millenials in attendance. There were two major ways that millenials came up in discussion.  The first is that we were described as being more comfortable sharing information digitally and more willing to become contributors using collaboration software. In my experience as a millenial at a big company, this was absolutely true. There were plenty of older (even 50+) people who were heavy users of our wikis at ADI, but virtually ALL of the millenials used it a lot.

The second context where millenials received frequent mention was in a sort of reverse-Luddite way. Essentially, said some panelists, millenials grew up with Facebook and are incapable of learning to operate in an environment without it. We are apparently too young to understand how to communicate via email or in person, and without Facebook for Business, we are unmanageable. Selling social software based on these premises struck me as asinine – selling software on the basis of old people being too dumb to adapt to a world where the telephone isn’t the dominant form of communication would be clearly offensive, so why is it OK to generalize about millenials in such an obviously wrong way?

New Infrastructure Ideas
My favorite product at the expo was an infrastructure product.  Cisco’s Pulse has some very bright minds working on it. Pulse is based on physical boxes that sit in front of Exchange servers, or Wiki systems, or video sharing systems, with all the network traffic itself running through them. Like, with a physical wire. The Pulse systems pull information out of the physical packets on the network and identify the appearance of a set of pre-specified keywords as they go over the wire, connecting people with the experts who regularly communicate about that keyword.

They’ve also got some incredible tech baked in for detecting phonetic appearances of those keywords in online video, making the video searchable. This reverse-keyword technique is different, because instead of building an index of every word mentioned (and dealing with associated transcription issues), they instead look specifically for a dictionary of words that are known to have meaning.

This approach is technically very interesting to me, and I am looking forward to seeing how the product develops, and potentially integrating Unsearch with it. I am very impressed with Cisco’s ability to innovate as a HUGE company – and a system this complex needs a lot of resources and a lot of different expertise, so it almost requires a big company to build it. Very impressive.

The LaunchPad

Baydin was incredibly excited to be named the winner of the Enterprise 2.0 Launchpad. Companies from around the globe, including some pretty big names, competed to launch products at the LaunchPad. The four companies on stage came from Cambridge (us), Portugal, Switzerland, and Germany.

Our fellow finalists put together some amazing demos. They did a great job presenting, and all of them are working on stuff that could really have an impact. We were honored that the Enterprise 2.0 attendees selected us as the winner out of a group with this much potential.

The finalists were:

Doodle – A very easy way to schedule a meeting. Suggest times that work for you, and let the other invitees vote for which times they’d prefer. They announced a new feature that lets a meeting organizer see free/busy status for fellow Doodle-users when first selecting possible times for the meeting.  Think MS Exchange-style scheduling, but cross-platform.

InnovationCast – Leonardo described InnovationCast as a tool for managing innovation as a company develops new products and services. Built on top of Telligent, they provide some really neat analytics on how innovation grows and spreads through an organization.

MindQuilt – Enterprise Q&A tool, think StackOverflow/Yahoo Answers for inside a company. I expected MindQuilt to be really derivative, but it turns out they add some really slick autotagging features and integrate really well with email and IM clients, making it easy for users to get into it. I expect them to have a lot of success in large companies.

The E2Conf folks haven’t uploaded the video of our presentations yet, as far as I can tell, but you can see some photos from the LaunchPad and the other Wednesday keynotes here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/adunne/sets/72157624252543430/.  The videos that we created to be selected as finalists are here: http://launchpad.e2conf.com/final-four-2/.

Thanks very much to all of you who voted for our video and made it possible for us to be part of the conference this year.

Image via Wikipedia

My fraternity mailing list is home to a great group of people, including some great entrepreneurs and some great investors. But when you get 400 opinionated MIT grads on a single mailing list, and the topic shifts to anything controversial, the discussion might explode. We’ve had well over 125 emails come through in the last three days after someone brought up the health care bill, and several folks have emailed to get off the discussion list list. 

Don’t do that! Instead, use these super easy techniques to mute or filter the discussion out of your Inbox in less than 30 seconds. It’s faster than removing yourself from the mailing list, and better too, because when this discussion peters out, you’ll still be on the list in case something interesting comes up later.

Muting a Thread in Gmail

Gmail provides this functionality out-of-the-box, without needing to create a custom filter. Just turn on keyboard shortcuts and press the “M” key while the thread is selected or opened. Unfortunately, there’s not a keyboard-shortcut-averse way to mute the conversation, but the keyboard shortcuts are fast and efficient anyway. For more info, here’s Google’s official FAQ entry on muting conversations.  

Muting a Thread in Outlook 2010

Microsoft has done a great job playing catchup to Google in terms of features like this one in Outlook 2010. Hopefully, it won’t be three more years before they catch up to whatever Google builds in 2012! 

Outlook 2010 also comes with the ability to mute threads right out of the box.  Just right-click a message in the thread, choose the “Move” menu, and choose the “Always Move Messages in this Conversation” option. 

Click the screenshot to the right to get a visual look at the menu option.

Muting a Thread in Outlook 2007/2003

Unfortunately, muting a conversation in Outlook 2007/2003 will take a full 30 seconds, instead of two clicks or a keypress, because they’re 3 and 7 years old. 

The best thing to do is to create a rule that will move all messages sent to the mailing list, for a specific amount of time, into an archive folder or the Trash. 

Just click the “Tools” menu, and choose “Rules and Alerts.”  Select the “New Rule” button, then choose the option to “Move messages sent to a distribution list to a folder.” Click the “people or distribution list” hyperlink in the pane at the bottom, and type in the email address for the mailing list.  Click the “folder” hyperlink, and pick your folder.  Then, click Next, scroll down to pick the “received in a specific date span” box, and click the hyperlink to set the date range. 

Boom! For the next 7 days, anything coming over the mailing list will go to the Trash. And in 7 days, the rule will stop firing, so you’ll see messages that you might care about again, once this thread has stopped dumping political diatribes all over your Inbox. 

Take a look at the screenshot on the left for a quick intro to the Rules Wizard. 

The list of requirements for a high-quality to do list for me (in rough priority) are:

• Runs in Windows
• Create a new task with one keyboard shortcut (ideally the enter key)
• Accessible via iPhone
• Supports multiple lists
• Somewhat attractive and somewhat elegant
• Rearrange Tasks

Has anyone found a great app like this?

We’ve tried Remember the Milk (multiple lists support sucks), Google Tasks (works OK, but has some quirks, and native app would be better), Tudomo (no web/iPhone access, plus expensive), FruitfulTime (entering a new task is a 3-step process, total dealbreaker). Since we build Outlook addins, we’d use Outlook, but we can’t get to the tasks in the cloud. 

Image via Wikipedia

It’s already 11 AM, and you’re staring into the monitor with your eyes glazed over. There are still 21 messages in your inbox, and none of them are compelling. So instead, you decide to read a little bit of news and catch up on how the Red Sox did last night.

Next thing you know, it’s lunchtime, and there are still 21 unread messages in your inbox.

We’ve all been there, and that’s part of why we included a special structured procrastination tool in Boomerang.

Good procrastination vs Bad procrastination

Procrastination is like cholesterol – there’s a good kind, and a bad kind.

The real problem isn’t that we can’t face dealing with any of these messages. It’s that the number of them is overwhelming, especially since many of them require at least a couple minutes worth of yak shaving to get them finished.

At this point, we can either fall into the trap of “bad procrastination” and go check out some links on the web, or we can use “good procrastination” to help us get rid of some of the less-important or more annoying email messages for a while, so we can focus on the more valuable and easier messages first. 

Here’s how Boomerang can help

Just right-click the one of the low-priority emails that you want to deal with later, hover over the Boomerang menu, and choose to bring the message back at a random time.

Use Boomerang to bring the message back before 5pm today, within a week, or sometime in the next month. Boomerang will return the message to your inbox, unread and flagged, for you to work on some undetermined but bounded time later. That way, instead of dealing with 21 messages all at once, you can take care of each one individually.

Of course, the messages are still accessible, right there in the Boomerang folder. So if you find yourself a few extra minutes, you can work on them right away.

It’s all about willpower

Scientists have discovered that the root cause of procrastination is often that people have only a limited amount of willpower. Clearing out some of the messages that you don’t want to deal with right away can make it easier to get your to-do list under the threshold of how much willpower you have right now.

You can deal with the other messages later, after your willpower has had time to build back up. Try using Boomerang for structured procrastination today (it’s free to try), and discover a better way to procrastinate.