On Our Minds

reQall Rover on Android beta launch!

 

Today, the reQall team is announcing a new addition to our family—the beta version of reQall Rover on Android. reQall Rover is a brand new type of mobile assistant that brings you your slippers before you ask and rolls over on command. Just kidding! Truthfully, reQall Rover IS a new type of assistant—one that goes far beyond the memory assistance that reQall has always provided.

What is reQall Rover?
reQall Rover is a personalized assistant that smartly anticipates your needs to provide you with the information you need to know . . . before you know you need it. reQall Rover uses your context, location, time, social networks, emails and more to learn what you need.

What can reQall Rover help me with?
reQall Rover prepares you for a meeting by pulling pertinent emails you’ve exchanged and by accessing background information, such as LinkedIn profiles or Facebook posts, on the person you’re meeting. reQall Rover can also give you travel estimates based on current traffic conditions and your location; provide email relief by summarizing just the action items in your Gmail; show news related to your interests; tell you what’s trending on Twitter; suggest places to eat; offer deals based on your location; and more! The more it learns about your preferences, the more it personalizes the information.

Can reQall Rover speak?
Yes it can! reQall Rover provides a voice interface so you can hear a summary of what you need to know. The app can also hear and understand when you ask for help. Its vocabulary is limited right now, but over time, its understanding of words and commands grows.

Does reQall Rover work with reQall?
Yep! You can see your reQall To Do’s in reQall Rover as well. So you’ll have a one-stop source for all kinds of assistance, including memory assistance.

Is reQall Rover just for Android users?
The initial reQall Rover beta test is on Android. We’ll add other platforms in the future.

How do I get reQall Rover?
We’re starting a limited beta test where invited users can offer feedback to help us improve the app before we let everyone play with it. We’ll be sending our loyal reQall on Android Pro users a special code to give you priority access in a week or so. We’ll also let you invite three of your friends to try it. Others can sign up on the waiting list at http://rover.reqall.com/rover.

Feedback!
The reason we’re doing a limited beta is so we can get feedback to make reQall Rover the assistant that you need and want. Send us your scratches, hugs, er, we mean, comments, questions, suggestions to support@reqall.com.

 

reQall Rover Summary View

 

Meeting Prep

 

Gmail Action Summary

Voice Summary

News: Android, Web, Features

Lots of news today.

First, for all of those loyal reQall fans who have been asking/demanding/pleading for it: reQall for Android Beta is here. We implemented the top reQall functions: Here & Now, All Items list, Add by voice and text, Location and time-based reminders. We want and need your input to shape where the product goes from here. Please try it out and let us know what you like, what you don't like, and which of the other reQall features should take priority in coming to Android. Download it at http://www.reqall.com/android. It's a public beta, so everyone has access.

Second, there's a completely revamped web interface. We've done a lot of user testing on this and believe it is a significant improvement over the past interface. Again, try it out and let us know what you think.

As part of the web changes, we've introduced a bunch of new features that users have requested. Those include categories, tags, adding locations by address, new lists and viewing options, a configurable Today list, favorite lists, bulk operations. You can see what's new at http://help.reqall.com/whats-new.html. We'll be migrating many of these features into the iPhone (next) and then Android.

Thanks for all of your support. Our user community keeps us going during the long days that lead up to a release like this. And a special thanks to our beta testers who helped over the last month by finding bugs and making many suggestions for improvements. 

Getting Things Done

 “I work as a programmer and web designer and it involves a lot of concentration. I can either let interruptions occupy my mind and forget about it permanently – or reQall it!
 
If I need to come back to something later, I reQall it and keep going with my train of thought. No more loose ends. If I see a great design idea, I grab the phone and leave myself a reminder instead of sending myself email or writing on scraps of paper. It's much safer when driving, too.
 
When I finish one task, I can open up reQall to see what I need to do. Today, reQall reminded me to call and ask a question. I hit the ‘show related items’ button and there was my Evernote snapshot of the business card with the phone number I needed. Brilliant time saver!
 
David Allen of Getting Things Done says, ‘Anything that does not belong where it is, is an “open loop” pulling on your attention.’ With reQall, I am better able to keep my attention on what I am working on instead of what I have to do later.”
– Jim Sewell, programmer, Key West, Fla.

Game, Set and Match

"I'm a professional tennis coach and I live my life mostly on the tennis court. I work over 30 hours as a full-time coach and it can get hectic, especially as my clients can sometimes swap and change times with little notice – and that can happen whilst I'm concentrating on coaching someone else.
 
Before reQall, I was using different applications. Many of them were quite useful, but they never really satisfied my idea of a memory jogger or an app that I could use to help me remember things, such as booking courts or creating lesson plans for my tennis groups.
 
After coming upon a clip on YouTube about reQall’s full range of uses, I got really addicted to it and used it on an hourly basis at times. I use the SMS and email notifications to remind me of the little things that I have in my brain.
 
reQall Pro allows me to organize my thoughts in so many simple ways. Since then, I've managed to remember 90 percent of things – the rest is just me being lazy and not remembering to input information. I must add that the sharing of information, which allows me to remind my girlfriend of things from my iPhone, is so useful. I find it amusing that even with her amazing memory, she can find my reminders that I send to her quite useful.

Thanks, reQall. You have inspired me to remember more!!"

– Lam Huynh, Birmingham, England

Dude, Where’s My Car?

“Before reQall, I used to park a 10-minute walk from my place of employment and pay $8 a day, three days a week for parking. Since getting reQall, I park in a two or three-hour parking space that’s a three-minute walk from work. I set a reQall reminder to move the car to another spot just after midday – the parking inspector usually doesn't get around on time, and I need to move the car only once a day. Apart from two parking tickets – not reQall’s fault, since I neglected to act on the reminder – I have saved $24 a week since November 2008.

reQall has saved me at least $1200 (Australian) and covered the cost of my $879 pre-paid, unlocked iPhone I purchased on the first day it became available – not to mention the fact it has also saved me many hours of walking around.”
– Doug Young

reQall Saved My Bacon – and Remembered the Beer

“My wife and I were about to go grocery shopping. I was walking around adding stuff to a hand-written shopping list.

I had just installed reQall on my Blackberry. She took a few minutes longer to get ready, so to test it out, I decided to read the shopping list to reQall.

When we got to the store, I realized I'd left the shopping list on the kitchen counter! My wife wasn't pleased, and told me I'd forget my head if it wasn't screwed on, and she's probably correct there! She said we'd be bound to forget half of the stuff we wanted.

Then I remembered I'd used reQall!

I brought up the app on the phone, and there, transcribed, was the shopping list! My wife was happy, peace resumed and we were able to get everything we needed. It probably saved my bacon, as that was one of the items on the list that we might well have forgotten to buy! My wife was so impressed that she installed it on her Blackberry too, and uses it all the time.

Not sure if I like all the ‘honey dos’ but, I got my own back last week. I called reQall and said: ‘Ask wife to buy a six-pack at store at 5 p.m.’ As she was leaving her downtown office, the message from reQall popped up on her Blackberry and she swung by the store on the way home. When I got there, there was cold beer waiting for me!

Thanks, reQall. Twice.”
– Ian B. May, North Charleston, S.C.

On Your Mind: Mother's Little Mobile Helper

“I’m a new mother that had a mad case of Crazy Brain before finding reQall.
 
I went back to work just six weeks after my daughter was born. I very much underestimated the life of a working mom, and would very often forget things – even really important ones! So I had to take a stand and get my life back in control.  
 
I am an iPhone user, so I did a little research and found that many people enjoy reQall. I tried it for free and now I can’t live without my reQall Pro. Thanks for such a great application!”
 
Gerri M. Kimble

reQall: Top 10 Productivity App and Top 10 Overall App for Dummies!

We're very excited that reQall is featured in a new book, Incredible iPhone Apps For Dummies, by Bob LeVitus. reQall is listed as one of the Top 10 Productivity Apps (Chapter 11) and one of the Top 10 Overall Apps (Chapter 17). A few quotes from Bob:

• "reQall is smart and different from most organizer apps."  
• "I think what I like best about reQall is that it remembers things for me with the least possible effort on my part."
• "I love it so much that it's one of the sixteen icons on my home screen."

Thanks, Bob!  The book also includes great recommendations for apps for business, education, food, fitness, sports, travel and more.  It's available now in stores and online. 

2009 review, 2010 preview

In the spirit of the new year, here's a quick year-end review and year-ahead preview.

Looking back on 2009

Between the improvements that came from your fantastic feedback and the new features that came from our R&D team, the list of changes was huge!

The biggest change was the release of reQall Pro, with major improvements such as the Here and Now page, locations, Google Calendar integration, Outlook integration, add by email and reply by email. At the same time both Pro and reQall Standard were updated to add recurring dates, sharing with non-reQall users, integrating with your iPhone/BlackBerry contacts, and call/email/browse from your items. Some other changes in ’09:

• reQall for iPhone got push notifications, maps of your items, creating Places from the map, recording on the iPod Touch, and eyes-free recording.
• reQall for Blackberry now provides real-time location-based reminders, an offline mode, an automated connection setting, and support for locations on Verizon Storms/Tours (many thanks again to reQall user Maxx for helping on this).
• On the web, the 3^rd party contact import code was completely replaced, and the Memory Jogger pages were added.
• All 3 major platforms were updated to include Evernote integration.
• Outlook integration got a lot of attention with support for Exchange, Outlook 2000/2002, 64 bit platforms, setting reminders and two-way sync.
• Keyword recognition was changed to add extra words, recognize your places and allow you to strip keywords.
• We replaced our computer transcription software with Yap, which provides a much better automated transcript.
• There were many other changes that you requested, such as changing the subjects of reminders, adding Canadian numbers, changing the distance for location notifications, supporting new browser versions like Firefox 3.5, etc.

Looking ahead to 2010

As you can see from everything we created in 2009, our goal is to take the strain off you and let reQall handle it! This is our mantra for 2010—we’re going to be releasing more upgrades and features within reQall, all of which are designed to make your life easier.

This is why our main focus is on a new user interface. We’ve gotten feedback from you and from Don Norman, our Chief Mentor, on ways we can improve the interface to both make it simpler AND give you more control. We also found that the existing interface couldn’t easily handle some of the new capability we’re working on, like categories and tagging.  This new interface should be available in Q1 on the iPhone and Web. We’ll then put it on the BlackBerry.

We'll also start on our next high-priority item—reQall for Android. We know many of you want this yesterday, and we wish it were available. We’re driving to get it done as quickly as possible and will come back with an expected release date.

Other than these 2 specific items, our focus for the first half of 2010 is on making reQall even more intelligent. We’ll be doing more with locations and with helping you to take action on your to-do’s. Our chief brain, Sunil Vemuri, has a major new feature coming so that more than ever you can let reQall handle it. We’ll let you know about this soon and get some of you to try it.

Like any fantastic group of users, you’ve given us many more things to do. For some requests, we’re waiting on others, like any-time location alerts on the iPhone (Apple needs to allow apps to run in the background) and BB OS 5.0 support (RIM needs to release the 5.0 SDK). The list of your requests is too long to get everything done this year, but we do have many things queued for the first 6 months of 2010.

Thank you for 2009, and we wish you the very best for 2010. We’ll be working for you throughout the year, so please don’t forget - let reQall handle it!

 

Clean off your desk!

I've heard from several sources that today is National Clean Off Your Desk Day. Luckily, I cleaned my desk over the holidays, and it hasn't yet slid back into chaos. In case your holiday was more fun and the piles are still on your desk, here are a couple of links to get you motivated.

John Campanelli at The Plain Dealer provides some motivating stats, including "Almost 21,000 -- Number of bacteria per square inch on the typical worker's desk."  Ugh!!!!  

Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project, says in her blog that part of cleaning off is dealing with "notes on a scratch pad--mostly to-do reminders" that "pile up quickly".  

Marjorie Geiser asks if you're a "post-it junkie". If so, ask yourself if you're going to take action on them. If not, toss them. 

And what do we at reQall say? Tell Gretchen, Marjorie and your friends to get rid of post-its, scratch pads, AND the bacteria by putting those reminders into reQall. Happy cleaning!

- Deb