iPhone App, Outlook Plug-in and Faster Uploads with Express!
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When it comes to companies offering computer-related services, none is better than YouSendIt; and now we have the judges’ word on it. This week, in the 7th Annual American Business Awards competition, YouSendIt was chosen as the Best Overall Company in computer software and services among entrants with up to 100 employees. Our Microsoft Outlook plug-in also was named a finalist in the competition for New Product or Service of the Year in the software-as-a-service category.
The awards, known as the Stevies, were presented at a ceremony in New York City, where YouSendIt won the Best Overall Company competition over half a dozen other finalists, including VerticalResponse and Terra Technology. The panel of American Business Awards judges looked at impressive business growth over the past year and the efficacy of our core digital file delivery service in making their selection.
It’s a great honor to be recognized by such a prominent organization as the American Business Awards. We’ve worked hard to make YouSendIt the most trusted service for delivering digital files and our thanks go out to those who continue to support us, most notably, our users and devoted employees.
Earlier this year, YouSendIt earned a Webware 100 award (for the third straight year!), was named a Red Herring North America 100 winner and also received a 2009 Product Innovation Award and "Hot Company" designation from Network Products Guide.
It’s been a great 2009 – here’s to many more successes!
Cheers,
Ivan Koon, CEO
Track Your Files while Making Tracks with New YouSendIt iPhone Application
If you’re like most people, after you send a file through YouSendIt, it’s important to know that your customer received it on time. But you’re busy running to client meetings, marketing your company at events and cheering on your Little League All Star. It may not be convenient or even possible to keep checking your desktop or e-mail for that confirmation receipt.
Now you can monitor your YouSendIt file deliveries from anywhere at any time with today’s launch of the new YouSendIt “Tracker” application for the AppleTM iPhone or iPod Touch (Read our press release). Available for free, YouSendIt Tracker lets you monitor your file deliveries with a single click on your phone, providing on-the-go visibility for the delivery status of files to see who downloaded what and when, as well as how many times a file has been downloaded.
Millions of you enjoy our service every day, and our vision is to help you get your job done even more quickly and easily. With YouSendIt Tracker for iPhone, the ease of accessing our service is drastically increased, providing up-to-the-moment visibility on the status of critical files, increasing productivity for our users.
To get YouSendIt Tracker—at no charge—visit the “Business” category of Apple’s iTunes App Store. If you’re already registered with YouSendIt, you can begin tracking files immediately, otherwise you’ll need to take two extra minutes and create a free, Lite account on our Web site.
And apologies (for now) to Blackberry and other smart phone users! YouSendIt Tracker marks our entrance into the mobile market, with more innovations to come as part of our overall mobile strategy.
If you’re already using Tracker, let us know how it’s going!
What seems like a like time ago I had a job that had me on an airplane at least once a week; it was exhausting, I got sick a lot, but what I loved was the constant 1 on 1 interaction with customers, investors and interesting companies.
Being, fundamentally, a communications platform YouSendIt has the pleasure of hearing from our customers 24/7. While we see most of our activity on the web we’ve always had loyal users who are thrilled to meet us face to face and I was delighted to spend time with them at three different industry events last week. I thought I’d share the highlights of my road trip, enjoy:
Monday: Free! Summit, San Mateo, CA
The Free! Summit was the first show of its kind to explore the use of free as part of a viable business model. I was invited to participate in a panel discussion alongside Ooma.com and PracticeFusion.com to explain why free users are important to our businesses. While our three companies are very different it was striking how all of us had to get through similar challenges in the early days (like building trust around free services). We discussed lessons learned, “Freemium” business models, and the future of free (my contribution was comparing free adoption inside enterprise vs. consumer services, more on this soon). Mike Masnick from TechDirt.com moderated and, since he’s written about it all, kept things moving.
Chris Anderson’s keynote did a great job outlining the history of free, common misconceptions, and growing business models (including free to play games and virtual goods); hope to work with him more in the future. He’s got a new book coming out that is making use of free distribution at launch, look for it in July. I also met Dave Allen who is the bassist for the Gang of Four and expert on licensing issues around music recordings; he had many interesting stories about how bands are using free for marketing and merchandising.
Wednesday: Red Herring 100 North America, San Diego, CA
I was invited to speak at the Red Herring North America event in San Diego as YouSendIt was a finalist for the Red Herring 100 Awards. I enjoyed the insights from the group of active venture investors who attended; topics ranged from capital efficiency to how China may lead the startup charge to how venture funds are re-thinking (sometimes more aggressively) investment strategies in this economy. There was a lot of energy and innovation from the finalists themselves, every company I learned about was thriving by differentiating from the crowd (be it through really understanding their markets, technology breakthroughs, company culture, etc.). In the spirit of the event I told the story of the evolution of YouSendIt (get a copy of my slides here and more details here) and got a chance to demonstrate our upcoming mobile offerings (stay tuned). We were a Red Herring 100 winner, by the way, thanks so much for your support!
Friday: TiECon 2009, Santa Clara, CA
TiECon 2004 was the one event that I can think of that changed the direction of YouSendIt from being a lifestyle business to building a lasting brand with over 100,000 customers. I’ve attended the event almost every year since then (I missed 2006 and regretted it). It was good to catch up with some familiar faces that continue to thrive and are rooting for YouSendIt as well as meeting entrepreneurs and funds who are coming up. Highly recommended.
To conclude, while I missed the action-packed days in the office I always prefer hearing from our customers (current and future) directly, so please feel free to write to us here, by email, twitter, or any other method that works for you. We’re always listening.
Ranjith
Founder and CTO
YouSendIt had been graciously nominated for the 2009 Best New Products Stevie Award. Please help us win by voting at http://peopleschoice.stevieawards.com/default.cfm.
You can vote for us using the "Vote with the Short Code" box: enter I216S or look us up under Favorite Software as a Service.
Voting enters you to win a $1000 Amazon gift card. You can't beat that!
Thanks for your support and Happy Friday!
For those of you Twitter fans, follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/YSI
Our customers know YouSendIt for sending large files but many are unaware that you can make it just as easy for customers, vendors, or anyone for that matter, to send you large files without needing a subscription. There are two ways you can receive files from YouSendIt:
1. YouSendIt Dropbox: Consider this a personal mailbox. Users simply click on your personal Dropbox URL, enter their email address, upload the file, add a subject line and message if they want and hit submit. It is just as easy as sending an email.
The Dropbox is a premium feature available for Pro, Business Plus and Corporate Suite and can be branded with your company logo and unique URL.
Want to see how easy it is? Click on mine and send me a file: http://dropbox.yousendit.com/AngelaSanfilippo
2. YouSendIt SiteDrop: This is more like a mailbox for your company. It has the same premise as the Dropbox. The only differences are: 1) you embed it on your website, and 2) you can customize the information you capture. One of our printing customers, FastSigns, uses it to allow customers to drop off files for printing. See it in action at http://www.fastsigns.com/default.aspx?tabID=200&StoreID=160.
Read more on both from our March customer newsletter at http://www.yousendit.com/cms/newsletter-mar09-producttips&s=12901?cid=welbrg&rid=67744841.
Happy Sending and Receiving!
Angela Sanfilippo, Director of Marketing
Make an Earth Day pledge to reduce the number of pages you will print, shipments you will send by courier, and CDs and DVDs you will burn.
Visit http://news.yousendit.com/servlet/website/ResponseForm?NlpE.26Hkmo_.40hkt_zmHgKHshgL
Each pledge enters you in the challenge and qualifies you for the opportunity to win these environmentally friendly prizes:
· A $359 Amazon Kindle Wireless Reading Device (Saving trees),
· tickets to Disney’s new movie, Earth (Learning about the planet we call home),
· or one of five $100 Amazon gift cards (Reducing carbon emissions)
You have until April 30 to make your pledge, so pledge now!
Users have already pledged to to save the following over the course of the next year:
Pages: 11,239,344
Shipments: 376,296
Travel Miles: 30,907,320
DVDs: 552,300
Saved: 1,349 trees
That's 43,161 lbs of carbon emissions offset each year!
Saved: 369,211 lbs of carbon emissions
That's the equivalent of the exhaust of 34 cars per year!
Saved: 2135 Million BTUs of energy.
That's enough to power 23 homes a year!
Saved: 2,282,991 Gallons of Fresh Water used during production.
That's the equivalent of 120 swimming pools!
How Businesses Are Benefiting:
Material costs saved: $ 806,912 business dollars.
Shipping costs saved: $ 1,862,665 business dollars.
We are looking to our users to tell us a little more about how you work everyday. We are specifically looking for salespeople, students and creative/art directors. Contact us at feedback at yousendit.com if you are interested!
YouSendIt was selected as a finalist for the CNET 2009 Webware Awards and YouSendIt needs your vote!
We're calling all loyal YouSendIt users to help us win. You can vote at http://www.cnet.com/html/ww/100/2009/poll/infrastructure.html
We appreciate your support!
The YouSendIt Family