For the answer, just ask Harvest. A New York-based company founded by a couple of designers fed up with the tools available to track time and bill clients, six-year old Harvest now has 22 employees, a third of whom are spread around the country – and a unique approach to management and communicating without being co-located, as co-founder Danny Wen explained in an interview.

Tools

The heart of Harvest’s method is a pair of tools. First, the one they sell – a product to help professionals easily log where all their minutes go. But they also built a second sister product dubbed Co-op which is available free online (though presumably will be of more limited use without it’s paid-for sibling). Together they function as Harvest’s virtual office. “Co-op is essentially a private Twitter for business. In this case, the product in integrated with Harvest, so throughout the day when somebody’s updating a status about what they’re working on, they’re actually starting a Harvest timer as well,” explains Wen.

But before you think of this set-up as just a way to monitor that no moment is wasted, Wen explains that everything, even the most frivolous of office activities, gets logged. “Co-op provides the informal channel for sharing things that are interesting around the web — articles or lately it’s been a lot of animated gifs just to help people kind of kick back. You have the work updates but there’s also this layer of general cultural sharing,” and that, he argues, has been key to gluing distant members of the team together.

“We realized a lot of stuff that may happen in the office — for example it’s somebody’s birthday and we do some sort of celebration — we think is all fun and games because we’re caught up in the moment. We’re here in person, but what we don’t realize is our remote team are wondering what happened to everyone on Co-op. And it’s our job to bring that mix back into Co-op,” Wen says, disagreeing with others who have argued for keeping different streams of work-related and off-topic chat segregated.

Co-op is a virtual space for team bonding, but it’s tracking function is also a valuable way to help management allocate tasks. “One of the guys on the team recently started to train two of our younger developers,” Wen offers as an example. “Through Co-op and Harvest and having the knowledge of where the time is going. We’re started to assess just how much time it takes to train a new person. Having the knowledge of how much time is being used for something you might have initially thought is no big deal, has really helped us to have more realistic expectations.”

Talent

The Co-op-centric work style at Harvest means a facility with communicating at a distance is key to getting hired. So if you’re looking for a gig there, put a little effort in to demonstrating you can express yourself across tech channels. “When we start the process of interviewing for somebody remote, in the extreme cases where they’re building a web page just to sell themselves, to say here’s my story and here’s why I think Harvest is a great fit for me, it’s great. I think that automatically put them in a certain funnel,” says Wen.

So worry about how you present yourself, but not your location. “We just search for the people who are the best at their craft wherever they are,” Wen says. And if you do manage to get hired, don’t expect to be handed a ream of rules and regulations. “We have this really lightweight employee handbook. It states people should work the hours where they find themselves to be the most productive,” explains Wen.

Tips

Besides Harvest’s data-driven remote management style and integration of team building and time tracking, the company also relies on modern updates of old-fashioned institutions to tie distant employees together. Take the ‘Harvest Reading Club,’ for example. “We use Instapaper, where when we find interesting articles and we star them. It gets aggregated into a daily email and distributed to the team. So somebody is in New York commuting in on the subway reading an article that somebody in Montana might have found interesting the night before,” says Wen.

They’ve also adapted old-fashioned training for their spread-out team. “We’ve set up what we call the Harvest Academy. It’s basically a resource for anybody within the team to write something internally about something that they’ve learned or if they attended a conference they can share some thoughts,” Wen explains. “It is just an internal WordPress blog, but it really helps people to feel like they’re part of the team.”

All tech toys aside, Wen still feels, like many of those we’ve spoken to for Tales from the Trenches, that occasional face-to-face gatherings are invaluable. Harvest brings everyone together for twice yearly summits in New York. “We think it’s hugely important to take people offline because after those few days of getting an understanding for each other face to face, people really have a different way of bonding and therefore a different way of working with each other when everybody goes back to their remote posts,” he says.

That being said, Wen doesn’t agree with Zaarly exec Shane Mac, who recently came out against the idea of remote teams for early stage startups, saying distance is a break on serendipity and creativity. Harvest has been remote right from the start, and Wen believes the structure never stunted idea generation. “Yesterday we were working on a design for one of our Harvest branded screen wipes and I happened to be working from home but I was working with a designer that’s here in the office,” he offers as an example. “We could sketch ideas back and forth very easily using sketching applications like Paper for iPad and just using HipChat we could iterate quickly back and forth, using Skitch to show ideas to each other. For us collaborating remotely is using these tools in the right way. It’s not about the remote situation but the tools and the people that can make that process work.”

Image courtesy Flickr user VanDammeMaarten.be

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Today the folks at TechSmith announced the availability of a Pro version with features aimed at the video capture crowd. For a paltry $14.95 year they have beefed up the service to allow higher quality HD videos, enhanced integration with video sharing sites including a direct upload to YouTube, and removal of any Jing branding.

With the ability to capture H.264/MPEG-4 AVC in addition to the SWF files of the free version, Jing becomes a more flexible option for your video capture needs.

If you’re doing heavy duty video capture, you’ll probably want to consider an upgrade to Camtasia or similar, but for an easy to use screen capture / screen cast solution Jing is a great choice.

Jing is available for both PC and Mac, and is now available in both a free and pro version.

What do you use for screen capture?

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Skitch – and it’s Web-based, cross-platform counterpart Skitch.com – is positioned as a “fast and fun image sharing” tool. With its compact Mac app, Skitch makes it easy to take a snapshot of a Web page and share it with others in all the ways you might share an image.

What hit me the moment I watched the short video demo of the application was how incredibly useful Skitch.com could be for the Web development process.

Right away I can see how handy having Skitch at-the-ready for aspects of my Web work that heretofore required wrangling with PhotoShop (I’m not really a graphics person) to manipulate screenshots. Skitch could help me take, modify and send or post screenshots for:

• making recommendations to new clients about their sites and modifications I’d recommend making;
• pointing out elements of good Web design on other sites to my clients;
• making comments about specific site design and development elements so my requests to my designers are unquestionably clear;
• before and after images of client sites after my team conducts a redesign.

The Skitch app does more than take a screenshot. It also provides editing and markup tools to draw and type “on” the image without actually modifying or ruining the image itself.

The first snapshot I took was of the upcoming redesign for my personal Web site. I wanted to show my designer what text I needed to change. All I had to do was take the snapshot, select the text tool and type my message on top of the image and then use the box tool to draw a box around the text I was referencing.

When I made a mistake drawing the box around the text, I clicked on the eraser tool and was able to remove the box without affecting the snapshot in any way.

The next images I took were of the original home page and redesigned home page of one of my past clients. On the before shot, I added some text about a few of the key goals I had set forth for the project. The after shot showed the end result of the work from the team I put together along with my comments. These shots could work well on my new site redesign as an example of what I do, and they took less than five minutes to create.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

To get these images into this blog post, I used a built in share function on Skitch – the “Webpost” button. With this feature, I was able to grab the code quickly and easily to embed images here. And I had the option to share a link to my personal page on Skitch.com or provide a direct URL for a smaller or full sized image.

I can also choose to make my Skitch page Public, Secret – for only people who know the URL, or Private and password protected.

Every image I took while testing out the app was automatically saved into my Skitch account which is a great feature for someone like me who is so forgetful about everything including saving files. I could save a screenshot without sharing it but also choose to modify, share or delete any image later since they were all archived in my account. This feature will automatically give me a nice archive of screenshots as I take and send them to clients, colleagues or vendors so I’ll be able to track down any shot in the future.

While I see the immediate value of Skitch for my Web work, I can’t ignore the fact that it is really, really fun to use. Skitch is one of those apps that will seamlessly cross over from my life to my work and back again.

P.S. – I was able to get ahold of Cris Pearson, co-founder and CEO of plasq, creators of Skitch, and while he didn’t reveal anything earth-shattering, here’s what he had to say.

WWD: Why is the site still in Beta? Isn’t a year a really long time for beta testing?

Pearson: It is a long time. We have not been sure what route to take business model wise. There are many options. Paid VS free, Freemium (a free and a pro version) & subscriptions models are some of the ones we have been pondering. Down side is some customers don’t like to wait to find out pricing etc. Up side is you can experiment more and gather data while you decide.

WWD: When is the Windows version of Skitch going to be avail or is it even in the works? Last I saw it mentioned was March.

Pearson: A windows version is in the works, yes. I’ll stick to the ‘soon’ time frame :)

WWD: Anything else on the horizon for Skitch that would make it fresher and newsier?

Pearson: We plan to beef up the skitch.com features over the next few months. A new dashboard like home screen is one feature we are working on.

We also are looking to add upload support for some other services.

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