simple | Daily Webapps

FamilyLeaf – Private Family Social Network

FamilyLeaf is an attempt to provide a private social network to members of the same family or to communities of close friends and acquaintances, small in number.

There have been in the past attempts to create similar sites, such as MyFamily.com, Famento.com or FamilyCrossings.com, but FamilyLeaf makes things very easy to get started and it’s completely free to use, at least for now. The webapp currently displays an invite signup screen, as it wants to prevent growing too fast too soon, but it’s expected to be able to obtain an account relatively fast.

FamilyLeaf was founded by Wesley Zhao and Ajay Mehta, two childhood friends. Compared to other early-stage startups, they took the effort to make the site as friendly as possible to foreign traffic. There are already localized versions in Italian, French or Spanish.

The site is backed by Y! Combinator and has been featured in the media in extensive reviews, such as this one (which appeared in TechCrunch). During their initial launch month, FamilyLeaf had 2’000 unique monthly visitors.

AnkiWeb.net – Review Decks Online

AnkiWeb.net is a system for spaced repetition, which displays flash cards based on how often they’re successfully remembered. The stand-alone desktop program, called Anki, was the starting point: a simple free flashcard program. Nowadays it runs on smartphones and most computer platforms, or on the Internet via AnkiWeb.net.

The underlying technique, spaced repetition, can do wonders for people wanting to learn a set of facts or a new language. In fact, Anki got recommended as the ideal tool to learn the vocabulary of a new language in a LifeHacker featured article.

The Fool’s Workshop also reviewed Anki: they mention that Anki’s strongest areas are in the statistics it provides, its tagging abilities, its strong interval study centered approach and its “card model”.

Despite running mostly on mobile phones or desktop computers, AnkiWeb managed to attract a significant online presence, averaging over 3’000 unique monthly visitors in the last 12 months.

ScreenLeap – Share Your Screen

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.

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.

List.ly – Collaborative Lists

List.ly is an online tool for building collaborative lists. Upon sharing the lists, other users can contribute to them or see what others have added. Each entry in the list can be voted upon, in order to produce democratically a ranking order.

Lists can be easily embedded in external websites. The List.ly homepage features trending lists that get the most attention. A search bar for retrieving lists by keywords is also provided.

List.ly was launched in April 2011 and currently it attracts consistently over one thousand unique visitors each month, according to Compete.

The service was formerly known as twtpickin and it was founded by Shyam Subramanyan. In his Google Profile he is currently listed as founder for BoomyLabs.com .

Single

FamilyLeaf – Private Family Social Network

Single

AnkiWeb.net – Review Decks Online

Single

ScreenLeap – Share Your Screen

Single

Trello – Organize Anything, Together

Single

Ptable.com – Interactive Periodic Table

Single

SimpleNote – Sync Notes Across Devices

Single

Asana – Task Management for Teams

Single

Yola – Interactive Site Builder

Single

YouSendIt – Digital File Delivery

Single

List.ly – Collaborative Lists

Featured