For Valentine’s Day, Google changed their home page logo to emulate the famous ‘Love’ design by artist Robert Indiana. The classic love symbol has been reproduced countless times, but folks from Philly know it from the classic “Love Sculpture” in Love Park on the Parkway.
Here’s a quick video of Robert Indiana at Love Park:
On Friday, August 13, 2010, we passed the 3-month mark of starting the company.
It’s been one hell of a ride.
We’re frequently asked where our office is located and how exactly we get things done, so I thought we’d share.
Our Principles
We know it takes a certain mindset to work this way. Some need the comfort of an office and a ‘place to go’ everyday. Our team and our developers have been working virtually in their own spaces long before we started this company, so there really was no ‘cubicle culture’ issue to deal with.
Our Tools
Working the way we do requires a set of specialized tools tailored for remote workgroups. Here’s a few of our ‘tried and true’ applications:
37Signals Campfire – To us, Campfire is the most important communication tool. The three of us are in the “Water Cooler” chatroom all day . It makes checking in easy. Working through an issue is painless when we’re sharing screen comps or writing quick drafts of documents. And it’s great on long client calls when we need to communicate something to each other.
37Signals Basecamp – What can I say… every single project that we are working on – internal or external – gets a project within Basecamp. All of our clients use it and so do our vendors. Quick tip: When you set up one of your vendors you can give them permission to post private messages. This way there can be a conversation between us and the vendor.
37Signals Highrise – I use the tool most often but it keeps every contact that we have and what conversations we’ve had with them. It also serves us as a deal flow system. We have a contact form on our site that uses a WordPress plugin to push new inquiries from our site to Highrise. It also sets tasks for me for the next day to make sure I follow up.
Google Voice – Google voice serves as our company phone number and general voicemail. The number rings our Skype and our cell phones so we are never out of reach. Plus, we get emails when we are in client meeting with the voice mails just in case there is a big emergency.
Google Apps – We use Google mail for our mail as well as Gtalk for a lot communication. Gtalk is very useful with our development team. We are considering moving all the developers to Campfire. Since we are virtual sharing document could be a chalenge so we write all of our documents in Google Docs. We like to keep everything simple and Google docs gets us 90% there.
There is also DropBox for company files, Right Signature for contracts, Xero for accounting, internet connections, cell phones, a few Apple products, and the determination to make all this work.
This is just a quick summary of how we make stuff work with no office, a lot of time zones, determination, and the love for what we want to accomplish.
We’ll continue to share the things that work and don’t work for us. If you have any tips or tools not shown here, feel free to share!
Once again Google has slipped in some new features into Google Docs. They’ve put in some good stuff, and hopefully there’s more to come. A margin ruler has been added to Google Docs, better outline functions, and some interesting image placement features. Google says that better importing should reduce the need to re-format and apply outlining, but only live testing will tell. A formula bar in Spreadsheets brings us a little closer to Excel, but personally I think there’s a long way to go.
The thing that really impresses me is the ability to collaborate in real-time with Google Docs. There’s some new commenting features but there’s nothing like doing an audio chat while working together. This is especially handy when writing proposals. For example, each team leader involved with the proposal can write their own part, without emailing version #523 or waiting for it to come down the line.
The last piece mentioned, and it didn’t get a lot of attention was a new collaborative drawing tool. I think this could be great. I’d like to start using Google Docs more, and I often create flowcharts to go along with pseudo-code. This could definitely be interesting.
I wonder how far Google will take Google Docs. I think there are some incredibly interesting places for it to go, especially since they’ve acquired DocVerse.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_hJ3R8jEZM