fremium | Daily Webapps

ScreenLeap – Share Your Screen

ScreenLeap is an Y-Combinator backed company that aims to “make screen sharing sexy”. With just one click, the app enables users to share their screen to any device with a browser, instead of 15 steps that are required for the most popular alternative available nowadays, Cisco WebEx.

Despite being launched in February 2012, the app already had 10’000 unique monthly visitors in March according to Compete. The media coverage is partly responsible for this, as the app was featured in TheNextWeb and TechCrunch; it will be interesting to see if they can keep and grow this traffic level once the media coverage wears off.

ScreenLeap was founded by Tuyen Truong, a serial entrepreneur whose previous attempts include TeamWork Live, a productivity suite that failed to achieve critical mass.

The BetaKit article hints about potential revenue streams in the near future: while the screensharing services will remain free, there are plans to introduce additional features later on, including voice integration, branded pages and integration with enterprise client sales and support systems.

Trello – Organize Anything, Together

Trello is a collaboration tool for teams which organizes pending tasks and keeps a big-picture overview on a project’s remaining tasks.

The service is innovative due to its special use of configurable lists (that can be named at the discretion of the user). Each list contains cards describing the tasks required to be performed; these cards can be dragged from one list to another, have people added or assigned, and the changes made to them are automatically synchronized everywhere if there are other opened browsers displaying them.

According to the Compete.com data, the site gets at least 10’000 unique visitors per month.

Trello was launched in September 2011 by Joel Spolsky. Joel is a rather popular figure whose beginnings can be traced back in 2000 when he founded Fogcreek together with Michael Pryor. Since then he has launched a range of successful services, including FogBugz and StackOverflow. In September 2011 the Wired magazine named Trello as one of “The 7 Coolest Startups You Haven’t Heard of Yet”.

Ptable.com – Interactive Periodic Table

PTable.com offers an interactive, online-based periodic table of elements (also known as the Mendeleev table). The site is accessible without requiring a Flash plugin; it shows comprehensive information about the elements, their isotopes, their orbitals, as well as their state at different temperatures.

The table is one of the most interactive and comprehensive versions that we’ve seen until now on the web, and this fact reflects itself in its traffic. Compete.com shows that the site managed to consistently attract at least 100’000 monthly unique visitors in the last year.

The service is ad-supported but free of charge. All the features are available to regular users without requiring any sort of sign-up or any form of payment.

The table has been created by Michael Dayah from Knoxville, Tennessee, United States. The site has a long history behind it; the first version appeared in 1997, one year before Google. However the first version was pretty much a static page; as the web evolved, additional features got added to the page. Interactivity was radically enhanced throughout the summer of 2007 and improvements continue into the present day.

SimpleNote – Sync Notes Across Devices

SimpleNoteApp is an app for keeping notes and synchronizing their content across different devices and the web. On the app’s website there are 10 reasons mentioned for using the app, including universal access to the notes’ content, instant search, secure transfers as well as good publishing and organizational tools.

There are ads, however they’re unobtrusive and barely noticeable. For a $20 annual premium account the user can disable the ads and gain the ability to sync memos to Dropbox.

According to Compete, the app consistently received around 10’000 unique visitors each month during the last year.

The app is produced by Simperium, a startup based in San Francisco. The company was founded by Mike Johnston and Fred Cheng and received funding from the Y Combinator startup accelerator program in the summer of 2010.

Asana – Task Management for Teams

Asana is an online task management solution for teams, founded by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and former engineering manager Justin Rosenstein. During their tenure at Facebook they’ve noticed a huge overhead in trying to keep teams organized and on the same page; as a result they’ve left Facebook together to pursue the opportunity of building a web-based tool which addresses this problem.

In trying to avoid what they call “work about work” they’ve build a webapp aiming to be:

responsive – just like a desktop app;
intuitive – to the degree where it can replace pencil and paper to-dos without causing inconveniences;
collaborative – to allow users to get big picture overviews on the current state of the project without having bits and pieces spread over in each employee’s notebook.

During 2011, Asana tested what they’ve created with real customers via a private beta-testing program. The results have been encouraging; on 2nd of November 2011 they’ve announced the general availability of their app to the public.

In November 2009 the company managed to raise an initial $9 million series A funding round from Benchmark Capital and Andreessen-Horowitz, which supported the 2-year development efforts leading to the public launch. Their traffic during the beta program generated around 10’000 monthly unique visitors to their site, but this number is expected to rise as anyone interested in using Asana in their teams can now sign-up for free.

Yola – Interactive Site Builder

Yola allows non-technical people to easily create a professional looking site from within the browser by using an intuitive builder interface. It offers hundreds of site templates, customizable design, online forms and Google Maps integration. Yola also features blog tools, e-commerce support and it acts as a domain registrar.

The site consistently receives hundreds of thousands of visitors on a monthly basis. According to Alexa.com, it is ranked in the top 5’000 sites world-wide.

In addition to the freemium model, Yola offers paid pricing plans with additional features. Yola Silver costs $99.95 per year and offers a custom domain name with private registration as well as additional traffic statistics; Yola Premier costs $499.95 and gives users the ability to have a one-on-one consultation with a professional in order to create a unique 5-page website design that can be expand as needed.

The service was initially called SynthaSite and it was founded by Vinny Lingham in March 2007. It raised $5 million financing in November 2007 from Columbus Venture Capital. An additional $20 millions was raised in Series B funding in February 2009. Shortly thereafter, the company was renamed to Yola (March 26, 2009); Lingham declared that they needed a name which is easy to pronounce and resonates well no matter the language.

Weebly – Create Powerful Websites

Weebly allows users to create a free website using a powerful and intuitive set of online tools. Their builder includes a drag-and-drop interface, hundreds of professional themes, easy blogging, lots of multimedia features as well as fast and helpful support.

Although traditionally their service has been free of charge, in June 2008 Weebly added the paid pricing plans, allowing the creation of password-protected pages and larger file size limits.

Compete.com shows that the site has been visited in the last year by at least 2 million unique visitors each month. The site is ranked by Alexa in the top 500 sites of the world.

The site has been created by David Rusenko, Chris Fanini and Dan Veltri, who met during their studies for an undergraduate degree at The Pennsylvania State University. The company received its initial funding from Ycombinator, a micro-seed funding organization for entrepreneurs.

Zoho – Business Productivity Tools

Zoho is a productivity suite that offers online collaborative apps similar to the traditional Microsoft Office programs; due to this, Zoho is often seen as a Google Apps competitor. Recently the company expanded its suite to include administration tools for invoicing, recruitment and user support, aimed at increasing productivity for small business owners.

Zoho receives hundreds of thousands of visitors to its website every month, according to Quantcast. The site offers more than 25 apps designed for online collaboration and business productivity, such as Chat, Docs, Meetings, Wiki, BugTracker, CRM, Invoice, Recruits, Reports, Calendar or Writer. The company said that it had registered more than 5 million user accounts until now.

Zoho has been founded in 1996; currently it is headquartered in Pleasanton, California, USA. The key person behind Zoho’s success is its founder and CEO, Sridhar Vembu. He graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras but he also holds a PhD. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University. Sridhar became famous for its unique staffing practices at Zoho: he created ZOHO University, a two-year training program for disadvantaged Indian high school graduates, with a strong focus on technical competence; graduates of this program make up for 10% of the company’s workforce.

Zoho did not receive any external capital or bank loans. Sridhar insisted on the company’s independence by following a boot-strap model where the company’s profits are used to grow the service organically. Acquisition offers from external investors, including Marc Benioff from Salesforce.com, have been refused consistently despite their aggressive bidding.

Freshbooks – Manage Invoices Online

FreshBooks is an online invoicing service that allows freelancers and small business owners to create, send and track online invoices and estimates for their customers.

FreshBooks also offers the ability to purchase stamps in order to physically deliver the invoices for those users that want to save time and avoid interactions with the post office. Nowadays the company claims to send more invoices each month than the number of hairs on one person’s head (which is around 100’000).

The service sees more than 100’000 unique visitors each month. In addition to the free plan the site offers 3 paid plans, starting at $19.95 per month; the paid plans offer additional number of clients that can be tracked as well as the ability to add multiple staff users to the same account.

The company was founded in 2003 by Mike McDerment and Joe Sawada. Mike acts nowadays as the company’s CEO; its headquarters are located in Toronto, Canada. The company’s team currently includes more than 50 full-timers, including positions such as recruiters, web developers, art directors and software developers.

YouSendIt – Digital File Delivery

YouSendIt is an online file publishing service that allows users to send big files to other recipients without worrying about hosting issues, bandwidth consumption or other problems that are associated with this topic.

The service offers 4 pricing plans:

lite, a free ad-supported service which limits the maximum file size to 50 MB,
pro, $49.99 per year, which increases the maximum file size to 2 GB,
pro plus, $149.99 per year, which makes the total storage size unlimited,
corporate suite, aimed at multi-user configurations (starts at $999.99 per year for 5 users).

The site was launched in July 2003 and they’ve had a phenomenal growth since then. Compete shows an average of 1 million unique visitors per month in the last year.

The company was created by Amir Shaikh, Khalid Shaikh and Ranjith Kumaran. It managed to raise over $50 million dollars across several funding series. Although YouSendIt links are frequently shared on websites, the company has recently marketed itself as a method of business communication to differentiate itself from RapidShare and other similar tools.

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ScreenLeap – Share Your Screen

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Trello – Organize Anything, Together

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Ptable.com – Interactive Periodic Table

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SimpleNote – Sync Notes Across Devices

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Asana – Task Management for Teams

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Yola – Interactive Site Builder

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Weebly – Create Powerful Websites

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Zoho – Business Productivity Tools

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Freshbooks – Manage Invoices Online

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YouSendIt – Digital File Delivery

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