We were excited to be featured on the BBC show yesterday and mentioned “as a great way to manage contacts from all across the web!” Thanks to the BBC team and feel free to check out the video spot on the BBC website by clicking the video or link below. We look forward to working with people all around the globe!
This post was written by Shane Mac, Marketing Manager at Gist. Feel free to contact me anytime with questions, feedback, or if you just want to say hello at shanem@gist.com.
Last week, I had the pleasure to talk with Richard Zeidel, VP of Business Development, from Tungle.me.
Tungle.me is a scheduling application that syncs with your existing calendar. Here is what it can do for you:
1. Eliminate double-bookings, time zone mishaps and the back-and-forth of finding a time to meet
2. Easily schedule meetings, inside or outside your organization
3. Invite others to schedule with you, without having to sign up
For any business person out there, Tungle is a great way to save time, manage your calendar, and connect easily to people you’d like to meet. If you would like to set up a meeting and chat, you can check out my Tungle page at http://tungle.me/shanemac.
In this interview we discuss how Tungle got started and where the future of Scheduling may be headed. Enjoy.
This post was written by Shane Mac, Marketing Manager at Gist. Feel free to contact me anytime with questions, feedback, or if you just want to say hello atshanem@gist.com.
I had the opportunity to talk with a friend of mine from Vayner Media the other day and ask him what were the web tools that their team used and could not live without. The interview discusses the four main tools below and how they use them in their day to day workflow.
1. Basecamp – Manage Projects Better with Basecamp. Simple project management tool for business.
2. Dropbox – Software that syncs your files online and across your computers.
3. Kindling App – Kindling connects people to the right ideas – and each other – for better collaboration.
4. Toodledo – An easy to use, online to-do list. Get organized, stay motivated, and be more productive.
You can find Marcus on twitter at @MarcusKRZ or check out their company, Vayner Media, here.
This post was written by Shane Mac, Marketing Manager at Gist. Feel free to contact me anytime with questions, feedback, or if you just want to say hello atshanem@gist.com.
Here at Gist we not only build a service to help you be more productive, but also read quite a bit on the subject of enabling and inspiring people. Two recent reads we’ve really enjoyed are Cognitive Surplus by author and speaker Clay Shirky and Delivering Happiness by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh.
Cognitive Surplus (explained by Shirky in the video clip above) presents the idea that the internet (and crowdsourced creation in general) has unleashed the greatest combination of mass brainpower known to humankind. We used to spend all of our time on TV, Shirky says, and now we’re starting to spend all of our time in collective pursuits that produce (not merely consume) knowledge. The benefits of Cognitive Surplus, Shirky says, are just beginning, and our own improvements in productivity to this point pale in comparison to the productivity we are and will gain by tapping into the thoughts of people everywhere using the Internet.
Tony Hsieh also writes about harnessing the power of the crowd, but in his case he uses the story of his company Zappos to demonstrate how spreading an idea (happiness) among a ever-increasing concentric circle of employees, customers, and recommenders of his brand has made all of them more productive. Hsieh turned the shoe retailing world on its head by focusing on people, and by making Customer Service a core part of his life, not just his company. Read this book because you want to know how to start a company based on values that you believe in, and not just to make a buck. Tony did both, and has created a multi-billion dollar brand in the process.
If you’ve got a favorite book on productivity or on enabling people that you think Gist users would enjoy, let us know on Twitter at @Gist or by email at feedback@gist.com.
It’s hard to keep track of what everyone in your network is doing. That’s why we created Gist. Gist helps you build professional relationships by serving you the right information at the right moment to get a meeting, deliver an amazing pitch, or just find a better way to make a connection. We would love you to try out Gist here.
To view a 90 second video of exactly what Gist does, click here.
You can follow Gist on twitter here or join us on our facebook fan page here.
This post was written by Greg Meyer, Customer Experience Manager at Gist. Feel free to contact me with questions, feedback, or if you just want to say hello at greg@gist.com.
The Gist team recently took a day off from coding, talking to customers, and doing the business of a company to do something physical and tangible: climb a mountain. Fueled by donuts, energy bars, and sandwiches, we made it to the top of Mt. Si in North Bend, WA, a 2700′ rise and 8 mile round-trip hike, and completed the task as a team. We started our task at 10am, made the top of the mountain around 2pm, and returned triumphant to the bottom of the mountain at 4:30pm. Our journey embodies the process of building a company, one step at a time.
Not all of the paths are charted.
When you build a company, you don’t know all of the paths that you might take. On our mountain climb, we didn’t know exactly how long it would take, didn’t know initially where we might stop along the way to rest, and didn’t know where our pace might not match with our ability. But we knew our goal: to get to the top of the mountain with the whole team. We were able to mesh our styles — some of us are world-class climbers, while others are merely world-class coders and testers — and work together as a team to reach the top. We all felt a little bit uncomfortable: fast people had to go slower than they wanted, and the slow people had to go faster than they wanted (and Ally the Black Lab probably covered more ground than anyone.)
All the decisions won’t be perfect.
We didn’t know exactly how we would feel getting from the bottom of the mountain, reaching the top, and coming back down again. But we knew the path — at least some of the trail was well-worn — and other aspects needed continuous improvement. Did we have enough water and supplies? Did we need to stop at some points where others wanted to go on? We made the best decisions we were capable of at the time, and then corrected when we hit a wrong path. When we made a decision, we sometimes relied upon the actions of a few leaders, and made other decisions as a group.
The important thing is to get back on the right path quickly.
At Gist, we go through this task every two weeks. Using an Agile development process, we plan our next set of work, agree on how much work it will be, work together to produce a new feature or version of the product, and release it. It’s not always a seamless task: sometimes the mountain is more forbidding and treacherous and we have to go back up the mountain when we think we’re done to rescue a member of the team, and other times the sun is shining and we all finish in record time. We are a team and we climb our mountains together — we hope our product reflects this shared commitment.
It’s hard to keep track of what everyone in your network is doing. That’s why we created Gist. Gist helps you build professional relationships by serving you the right information at the right moment to get a meeting, deliver an amazing pitch, or just find a better way to make a connection. We would love you to try out Gist here.
To view a 90 second video of exactly what Gist does, click here.
You can follow Gist on twitter here or join us on our facebook fan page here.
This post was written by Greg Meyer, Customer Experience Manager at Gist. Feel free to contact me with questions, feedback, or if you just want to say hello at greg@gist.com.
We are very excited to share the details on our latest release with you all. We constantly seek to improve Gist and incorporate your feedback and requests and this month the team focused on enhancing and improving Gist Profiles – making it easier for people to know more about you online. There are many new capabilities including one we are really proud of – a crowdsourcing capability that will really enhance your use of Gist.
Gist helps you learn more about the most important people in your network, and help you find all of the news about those people from many different sources (not just email.) Here are a few highlights of our current release, focused on making you more effective at managing and connecting to your contacts and staying up to date (we’d love to know what you think about it – let us know at feedback@gist.com.)
Leveraging the Gist Community to Make Your Profiles Even Better
In this release of Gist, we’re introducing a new capability that will allow you to gain from the wisdom of the crowd by suggesting which data is relevant for a person. We’re starting with Twitter handles, and you’ll now see a Suggest checkbox when editing a Contact or Company Twitter handle or when reviewing Suggested Profile Information in Gist. This is a powerful crowdsourcing capability that will make it easier for you to build accurate and relevant Contact and Company profiles automatically.
Gist Suggests Information for You
We’re also excited to introduce the Suggested Profile Information pane, a new way to enhance your Contact and Company records that takes advantage of the magic going on behind the scenes at Gist. We are constantly looking for new information about your contacts and companies, and in the past Gist added this information automatically. The Suggested Information pane now shows you all the data we’ve found and allows you to accept or reject each piece of information. We even provide background information on where we found the data as well as our confidence that the data is accurate.
Improved Display and Editing for Contact and Company Records
We continually add new sources and types of data to the Gist Contact and Company detail pages, and this release we’ve improved display and editing for these pages.
We optimized the Contact and Company pages for two primary activities:
1. Quickly referencing contact details
2. Reading, responding, and connecting with the latest news and social network posts by and about your contacts and companies.
Information You Need with Contact Details and News Prioritized
When you visit a Gist Contact or Company page, you’ll now see basic contact detail, immediately followed by the What’s New section. All the rich profile data gathered by Gist is still available with one click, and it’s no longer visible on every contact view (unless you want it to expand). We’ve left the actions on the top of a profile page to allow you easily to share contact information, request a profile, or invite a friend to use Gist.
We’ve added new enhancements to people and company detail pages:
Twitter details for your contacts
You’ll now see the follows/followers counts for each Twitter handle listed in a Contact or Company detail page and on the Gist Public Profile.
Facebook Work History, imported automatically
If you’ve connected your Facebook account to Gist, we now import Facebook Work History into Contact detail pages. (Note: if you had already connected Gist to your Facebook account, you’ll need to reauthorize Gist to get this additional data. Simply go to your Accounts page, click on Social Networks and click the Reauthorize… link next to your Facebook account)
Pick your preferred phone number formatting
Visit the Account Setting page to configure your preferred formatting for phone numbers.
Editing details is faster
We made editing contact details into a single form, allowing you to quickly update many fields at once. (And sped up the overall page load so you can do what you need to do faster.)
Gist Now Finds Contact Details in Email Signatures
Another new and interesting feature in Gist is the ability to automatically find contact details in the emails your contacts send to you. Cool! If you’ve connected Gist to your email account and configured “email body” content to be uploaded to Gist, we’ll now examine emails you’ve received from your contacts and look for email signatures that contain contact data. When our system discovers this data, it automatically breaks up the data and associates the appropriate fields in the profile record. So, in addition to all the data you’re used to Gist finding for you, you’ll now start to see phone numbers, addresses, company names and titles pulled from email signatures!
Move Beyond a Business Card
Gist makes it easy publish the most up-to-date version of you so that other people can find out more about you. We call this a Gist Public Profile — it’s a single place for people to find your complete contact details and a customized news and social network data feed, customized just for you. In this release, we redesigned the look of Gist Public Profiles to show off your latest news, blogs and tweets and the ability for people to connect with you on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn right from your Public Profile Page (see CEO T.A. McCann’s profile at http://gist.com/tamccann). You can claim your own Gist Public Profile today – don’t forget to customize the news feed and social network sources to automatically keep your profile fresh with content.
Wow, A Lot Has Changed!
We are a small and mighty team, and want to hear how these changes are making your Gist experience even better. Please let us know what you think at feedback@gist.com, and if you have great ideas for features for future Gist versions, be sure to contribute your idea on our support site.
Here is a video from our CEO, T.A. McCann, that describes some of the new features in more detail.
That’s right, we are giving away an iPad this month! We’re asking our awesome users to help us spread the word about Gist and one of our lucky users will win an iPad.
Here is how to enter to win:
Signup or login to Gist and use the invite feature shown below.
Every 5 invites = 1 entry to win the iPad. Enter as often as you like!
(ex. 50 invites = 10 entries)
UPDATE: We’ve had such a great response that we will be giving away an iPad monthly so keep the invites flowing!
Start sharing. Stay connected! Sign up for Gist here.
It was awesome to have Robert Scoble stop by the Gist office when he was in Seattle and do a quick interview with T.A. McCann and Steve Newman. The interview discusses a few different questions:
1. What is this monster screen on the wall?
2. What is Gist?
3. What is your business model?
4. What is coming down the pipeline for Gist?
5. How does Gist fit into Location?
Anyone is welcome to stop by the office and say hello if you are in town. Enjoy the interview and share your thoughts in the comments.
UPDATE: As of June 1, 2011 the Gist Gadget is no longer available. You can still use Gist with Gmail by downloading one of our browser extensions. Get Gist in your Gmail by clicking here.
With a sleek new redesign and an even simplier interface, the Gist Gadget for Google Apps provides contact details, news, and status updates inside Gmail. If you haven’t tried the Gist Gadget yet, we would really love for you to give it a shot. (We promise you won’t be disappointed…)
This post was written by Shane Mac, Marketing Manager at Gist. Feel free to contact me anytime with questions, feedback, or if you just want to say hello at shanem@gist.com.
To all of our Gist iPhone app users out there, we have some awesome new enhancements. If you don’t have the Gist iPhone yet then go download it in the iTunes store here.
The Gist iPhone app brings together all of your contacts, updates them with the latest news, delivers it to you where and when you need it.
New Email Functionality
(We added more actions for contacting meeting attendees.)
When you connect your calendar to Gist you can see all of the latest information about the people you are about to meet with. On top of that, you can send a quick email directly from Gist to let the people you are meeting with know that you are running late, confirm the meeting beforehand, or send a follow up after. It is that easy with Gist.
Easily share contact info
(New My Profile view lets you easily share your contact info)
Business cards. Hello 1999? Use Gist to send a complete profile with all of your contact information to anyone in your network or someone you have just met. Simple, quick and easy.
Learn that Name
(An awesome new game to learn the names of all of our contacts)
This post was written by Shane Mac, Marketing Manager at Gist. Feel free to contact me anytime with questions, feedback, or if you just want to say hello at shanem@gist.com.
