We also opted for Pipedrive for our small sales team of three people. It's fairly intuitive for non-techie sales people and quick to get set up. With a bit of tweaking you can also get it to report on many metrics that are important to startups.

We left intercom a couple of months ago, and that was down to a pricing decision on their part.

I know of other companies that will now leave due the price changes. I'm sure they'll run the figures, but my guess is that not truly grandfathering in the existing prices for existing customers will bring in less revenue due to the number leaving.

Plus is it worth upsetting existing customers and advocates for the sake of a few dollars?

Regardless of the numbers involved, the product has really started to mature recently. We've been on the nReduce programme with them, and Clay has done some great stuff with Thetaboard. The Bootstrap Tour described in the blog post works well with the product. As Thetaboard starts to get a little more attention, I'm sure the numbers will become statistically significant.

Thetaboard is also integrated with edocr.com now and should see traffic filtering from us, as more and more people become aware of the benefits Thetaboard brings

It got traction because it worked simply with no config and was very cost effective in certain use cases.

I know it was used as a precursor to iMessage type eaperince to send 'texts' and images using only data, so was perfect for communicating across countries with no carrier charges.

So the only point was in avoiding one time step like adding an account to the client (like users do with e-mail too) / or registering on some XMPP server? Still it hardly justifies creating more walled networks (unless they allow federation and regular XMPP communication with their servers).

Do you think consumers care about walled networks? No.

To a degree they do, since users of one walled network can't communicate with users of other walled ones, and if they want they need to create an account in each of them. While federated XMPP is like e-mail, i.e you can use one ID to communicate with users from many servers. So there is an obvious comfort even for the end user.

They've been building the product as they go, in fact they are a team on nReduce themselves. Give them a prod tomorrow after the demo day, they're normally quite responsive.

We're doing MalinkoApp.com as part of nReduce. It's been amazing seeing ThetaBoard progress over the last 9 weeks - a lot of hard work has gone in to it, and Clay has been very responsive to comments and suggestions.

With real-time updates it becomes more of a player in the collaborative area - time to start putting it through it paces with our small team I think.

We've found that over the weeks the startups have got more comfortable using the nReduce platform to give more constructive feedback, and are not afraid to shy away from being direct. Also some of the teams involved have actually changed their plans when the rest of their 'support network' have firmly suggested alternative approaches.

Glad that is working out for you! Let me know if you have other feedback!

There seems to be a focus on Transcendental Meditation. But that may be because they are good at publicising it.

Yes, there is definitely the middle ground.

Hide all but the most common actions on a page, but make it clear and consistent where the other actions will be found.

Although it is a nice feature, for me the most important Chrome feature is unifying the address and search box. Even non-technical people know to respond to a software update prompts, but the number of people I see (including normally quite tech savvy people) that still search for a url, or enter a search in the address field surprises me. OK, you could argue it is bowing down the lowest common denominator, but I believe it's a great feature that saves the frustration of people that just want to do go somewhere or find something on the web quickly.