The new features are together referred to under the Organizations rubric. They include a way to organize employees into teams; visibility for a high-level executive to see what members of all teams are up to; the ability to hide certain teams from the rest of the company; unified inboxes and task lists for people on multiple teams, and roles for IT and other administrators to monitor use and set security and access policies.

The Asana office in San Francisco.

Asana itself is small, with 40 employees. Perched on the ninth floor of a high-rise building outside of San Francisco’s busy South of Market neighborhood, it’s removed from the hustle and bustle. Working at Asana comes with perks, including yoga and skills coaching. Moskovitz and Rosenstein carry no titles other than founders.

If Asana succeeds in penetrating the enterprise, case studies might look back on the company’s way of doing things and suggest that other ambitious startups follow its lead (and, of course, use the Asana software, as Asana does internally). For now, though, the difference between the Asana setting and the corporate world is stark.

Moskovitz and Rosenstein, as usual, declined to disclose revenue, so it’s hard to assess how well the company is actually doing. To date the company has taken on $38.5 million in venture funding from Andreessen Horowitz, the Founders Fund and others. Tens of thousands of “teams” — companies or business units — use Asana, including Airbnb, Disqus, Foursquare, Pinterest, and Uber. Fewer than 1,000 pay for it.

As a freemium product, Rosenstein said, you “always prioritize gaining more users and growing the company. It (Asana’s profit-and-loss statement) looks a lot like other big freemium companies — same business model. … We want to instead take the market and have everyone use (Asana) as fast as possible. Revenue will help with that, but growth is our number-one priority.”

Everything is going according to plan for Asana, then. But as for getting boatloads of companies to pay for the service and making the company profitable, it’s unclear just how long that will take.

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The list of honorees follows below, and it’s a list packed with newcomers as well as Silicon Valley veterans. Thanks to all for voting in the nomination process, and now that we’ve narrowed it down to five candidates for each award, don’t forget to vote for which person or company you think is most deserving. Voting begins today (the voting page can be found here, and the rules are here) and closes on January 24th.

As a reminder, the Crunchies, a joint production with our friends at Techcrunch and Venturebeat, will take place on Thursday, January 31, 2013, from 7:30pm to 11:30pm at Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave, San Francisco. You can purchase tickets here.

So, without any further delay, the nominees for the 2012 Crunchies are as follows:

Best Technology Achievement
Baumgartner Jump
Google Glass
Mars Curiosity
SpaceX docks with International Space Station
Tesla Supercharger Network

Best Collaborative Consumption Service
Airbnb
Get It Now/Postmates
Lyft
TaskRabbit
Uber

Best E-Commerce Application
Fab
Hotel Tonight
Karma/Facebook Gifts
Warby Parker
Zulily

Best Mobile Application
Evernote
Google Maps
Grindr
Instagram
Square

Fastest Rising Startup
Exec
Lyft
Pinterest
Snapchat
Stripe

Best Content Discovery Application
Flipboard
Instapaper
Pinterest
Prismatic
Tumblr

Best Design
Facebook Timeline
Medium
Paper by FiftyThree
Square
Svbtle

Best Bootstrapped Startup
FreshBooks
Instapaper
Nimbus
Techmeme
Upverter

Sexiest Enterprise Startup
Asana
Box
Cloudera
Plexxi
Zendesk

Best International Startup
Hailo
Rovio
Soundcloud
Spotify
Xiaomi

Best Education Startup
Codecademy
Coursera
Edmodo
Khan Academy
Udacity

Best Hardware Startup
Lit Motors
Lockitron
Makerbot
Nest
Raspberry Pi

Best Time Sink
Angry Birds Star Wars
Buzzfeed
Letterpress
Pinterest
WhatsApp

Biggest Social Impact
Donors Choose
Indiegogo
Kickstarter
Kiva
Reddit

Angel of the Year
Michael Arrington
Chris Dixon
Paul Graham
David Lee
Chris Sacca

VC of the Year
Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz
Matt Cohler
Jim Goetz
Michael Moritz
Peter Thiel

Founder of the Year
Nathan Blecharczyk, Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia (Airbnb)
Kevin and Julia Hartz (Eventbrite)
Elon Musk (SpaceX, Tesla)
Kevin Systrom (Instagram)
Nir Zuk (Palo Alto Networks)

CEO of the Year
Dick Costolo (Twitter)
Phil Libin (Evernote)
Marissa Mayer (Yahoo!)
Larry Page (Google)
Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)

Best New Startup of 2012
Coursera
Crowdtilt
Lyft
Snapchat
Waze

Best Overall Startup of 2012
Fab
Github
Instagram
Palantir
Square

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It’s a useful move for what is essentially an enterprise collaboration suite, particularly for one that boasts multinationals such as Adobe and Deloitte among its customers. In fact, it’s quite surprising that the firm got this far without branching out linguistically.

“We’re an international company with customers in 55 countries, CEO Andrew Filev told me. “The customer base has always been pretty diverse, but customers have been forcing themselves to use the English version.”

“Users can contribute translations, so there are definitely more languages coming – we have a Ukrainian translation too.”

Wrike has actually been undergoing some useful development recently. This year it introduced Google Docs-style collaborative editing, revamped its mobile apps from scratch (hello, push notifications) and, as of a few weeks ago, brought in Dropbox integration.

Despite the existence of more general enterprise collaboration toolsets such as Yammer, and despite more direct rivals such as Asana gaining traction, Filev says Wrike’s growth remains in the triple digits each year. He wouldn’t go into details about the firm’s total customer numbers, but he did say that almost 3,000 organizations are now paying for the service.

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Dropbox is the hugely popular consumer cloud storage service that has been dragged inside companies by people who want to use it at work. That trend spooks IT people who cite security issues about users accessing corporate files with their own devices. And that concern, in turn,  spawned reams of self-proclaimed enterprise-class cloud storage and file sharing offerings from Box, VMware, Citrix and others.

Benioff will not be left out of that fray. At TechCrunch Disrupt on Tuesday, he followed a panel full of startups — including Asana, Okta and Box, with news that Salesforce will take them all on.

“Next week at Dreamforce we have our Okta competitor coming out which is Salesforce Identity, we have our Box competitor coming out which is called Chatterbox, and we have our Asana competitor Do.com,” Benioff said. “So it’s competition. It’s good.”

Benioff explained that by providing these products, from single sign-in with Salesforce Identity or file-sharing with Chatterbox, the company meets customer demand for those products without requiring them to leave the Salesforce environment. But Benioff noted that Salesforce, which invested in Box.net just last year, isn’t necessarily out to kill the smaller startups, and is open to collaboration when it makes sense:

“We’ve invested in a couple of them, we compete with a couple of them, we partner with a couple of htem, and that’s kind of the nature of the industry,” he said. “Our industry is not about the Hunger Games. I don’t look at our industry as a zero sum game.”

There’s no question that a major push from Salesforce, whose products are used by companies like Facebook, to integrate changes into existing software could challenge the startups making tracks in enterprise. But before Benioff spoke, Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie spoke passionately on the startup advantage in a world dominated by older, larger players:

“They want the thing that’s going to take them into the future faster, and they’re not biased toward one vendor or another,” Levie said of the modern enterprise customer. “And that gives startups an unfair advantage that the legacy players don’t have.”

And even after Benioff’s announcement, Levie remained characteristically optimistic:

A startup without competition is like a rapper without a rival. It's just awkward.—
Aaron Levie (@levie) September 11, 2012

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Moskovitz, who started Asana in 2009 with Justin Rosenstein, said the funding round was engineered to get more participation from Thiel, who was previously an individual seed investor. Thiel will now join Asana’s board and will help shape the company’s goal in improving the way work teams cooperate and execute together.

Asana captures all the email, documents and notes on projects and keeps them synced for workers, who are notified when changes are made. It’s almost designed to help workers read their co-workers’ mind so they can act quickly and cut down on inefficiency.

Asana took another step toward that goal last month with the introduction of an email tool called Inbox that aggregates only the relevant files and messages about given projects and task lists. Asana has also opened up a paid product in April for companies that have more than 30 employees working on the service.

Asana, which previously raised $10.2 million, is far from the only competitor in this space. Social enterprise services such as Yammer and Chatter provide collaboration tools and other startups like Producteev along with more established players like Basecamp, also serve this market. But the sector is clearly heating up with the recent $1.2 acquisition of Yammer by Microsoft. Asana is reportedly valued at $280 million after its latest funding though Moskowitz recently said he believes the company could be worth $100 billion if everything goes well.

So far, Asana is off to a solid start. The service is now helping tens of thousands of teams coordinate projects. It is also tracking 18 million tasks, up from 9 million four months ago. The latest funding will go toward hiring more engineers and designers. Moskovitz believes Asana has the ability to not just save some time, but solve bigger world problems and improve the human condition.

“We believe that if Asana can increase an organization’s capacity to achieve its potential by only 1 percent, let alone double or 10x it, that’s a really leveraged opportunity to help the world. It’s still early, but we’re encouraged by the progress we’re seeing,” wrote Moskovitz in a blog post. 

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Asana, the company that wants to help workgroups collaborate efficiently, is adding a new feature to attack what it calls a huge productivity suck: email. And it’s doing so with a new feature ironically called Inbox.

Inbox is a central place for an information worker to aggregate only the relevant and requested files and messages about given projects and share task lists etc. Users subscribe to and unsubscribe from the feeds as they want to see them

Four-year old San Francisco-based Asana, co-founded by Facebook veterans Dustin Moskowitz and Justin Rosenstein and backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Benchmark Capital, is betting that social networking tools transformed for the enterprise will not fill the bill. It claims big customers, including Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter, use the service to minimize extraneous meetings and to cut down on distractions.

“We don’t really see things like Yammer, SocialCast and Chatter as competitors but we also don’t see them as particularly useful. They just took something popular in the consumer space and ported them over, but research shows many people don’t see the value in them. We’re about a work graph, not the social graph,” Rosenstein said in an interview Tuesday.

Inbox gives users the information about the projects they want to see. “If you click on a message in Inbox, you get all the associated context and information surrounding it,” said Rosenstein. “Inbox keeps your communication directly connected to the shared record of what you’re working on.”

Asana’s service is free for up to 30 users and then is $100 per month up to $800 per month depending on number of users. For more on Asana Inbox, check out this company blog post.

In some ways, Inbox reminds me of what Lotus Notes (now Domino) started out as — a way for workgroups to keep their project information together and communicate about it. Rosenstein agreed with that comparison. “Lotus Notes was ahead of its time. That time has come,” he said. Mitchell Kapor, co-founder of Lotus Development Corp., is an Asana advisor.

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Apparently, he’s not the only UK-based entrepreneur with a fast-growing company and a remote team across the pond. Ryan Carson, the founder of coding tutorial site Treehouse, recently took to his blog to explain how he manages his widely dispersed team of 40, including a main office in Orlando and remote workers across America, from his home in Britain.

And this dispersed structure seems to be working for him. “I’ve managed the company for almost two years from another country with up to an eight hour time difference. We’re doing $3,000,000+ in revenue with over 11,000 paying customers and growing fast, so we must be doing something right,” he writes, before offering the following tips on how he makes it work:

Outsource HR. We use TriNet to do all of our HR (payroll, insurance, employment taxes and pension contributions). If I had to administer this, there’s no way I could’ve scaled the Team remotely this quickly or effectively.

Don’t do your HR in-house. There are a ton of legal requirements and logistical details to make sure you take care of your Team properly and it’s a huge time suck. TriNet costs roughly $100 per person, per month and it’s worth every penny. The UX on their web portal is terrible, but it’s very powerful and has all the functionality you need.

Hire a Financial Controller / Office Manager. We hired Rich Pettit as our Financial Controller and Office Manager. I sit 4,247 miles from our office in Orlando, and there’s no way I could run the company without a reliable and hardworking Team Member looking after the day-to-day operations.

A lot of you will think you can’t afford this person early on, and you’d be right. Don’t hire this person until you are comfortable from a cash-flow perspective. But as soon as you can, hire this person. I think Mark Suster is really smart (which is why I invited him to invest in Treehouse and thankfully he did) and he agrees.

Use Campfire for company chat. When you’re separated physically you need a place to hang out and talk about random stuff or ideas. We use Campfire and it works great. We have a bunch of different rooms setup like: Chiggity Chillin (company wide hangout), Product Team, Dev Team, Firehose (commits to the Treehouse GitHub repo and deploys to Production).

Organize visually. We’re now using Trello for all our company projects. We switched from Asana because Trello is more visual and it’s a little easier to see how things are progressing. They’re both great tools – we just found the left-to-right kanban-style layout of Trello very easy to parse quickly. Each card is an atomic to-do and you can see it moving through various stages to completion. Above is a screenshot of our actual “Product Team: In Progress” Trello board.

For more tips and Carson’s generally interesting thoughts on start-up life, check out his blog.

Do all of Carson’s tips make sense to you? 

Image courtesy of Flickr user Christian Haugen. 

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“There’s people at the bottom of the market that have products like Do.com, online to-do lists, and they’re useful but they don’t have automation. They don’t have analytics. At the other end of the spectrum, you have huge BPM tools that can do workflow with automations, but it’s like trying to use a sledge hammer to drive in a tack,” explains Michael Weir, Sparqlight’s CMO. “Those [tools] are for companies with rigid industrial processes and everything that could possibly happen is built into the system. Our product is for what I call the big fat middle — people who need workflow, transparency, templates but who also live in the modern world where they collaborate with anyone, anytime, anywhere. They need it to be improvisational.”

Sparqlight was founded in 2010 to address this market segment and has thus far been entirely bootstrapped. It launched its public beta at SXSW this year, attracting more than 1,000 companies so far, from HR departments to engineering firms. Now they’re announcing the public launch of their enterprise solution. Like many of its competitors, Sparqlight has opted for a freemium model, offering a free, stripped-down version for individuals and small teams and from today a beefed up product for paying enterprise customers priced at $20 per user per month.

So what sets this product apart from other collaboration tools and allows it to target the “big fat middle”? In short, easy automation through templates. The base of the product is a to-do list and task tracking system that lets you assign work to yourself or others — either internal Sparqlight users or external non-users via email — setting due dates and reminders, commenting on tasks, and allowing you to track what’s outstanding and which steps have been completed. The result is an activity stream that can be filtered by project, importance, person or due date. So far, pretty similar to, say, Asana in its focus on following tasks rather than people and building a product that’s more about getting stuff done that breaking down barriers to information sharing.

The difference is a slightly more complicated set of enterprise-friendly additions like templates and analytics. Say you’re an HR person who routinely has to go through a checklist of activities for each new hire, from contacting IT to set up a new workstation, to putting together a benefits package. Sparqlight allows you to set up a template for that routine which, each time you use it, automatically inserts the relevant to-do items in your stream as well as the streams of collaborators—so in our hypothetical HR case, IT (either the group or a specific individual) would automatically receive a to-do item telling them to sort out the new hire’s tech tools. It’s also possible to automate workflow steps with Sparqlight. So after IT marks their task as completed, you can specify that a request be sent automatically to facilities to wheel over a comfy new chair, for example. Sparqlight also offers simple analytics that track how well users are doing at getting their tasks done in the free version and a heftier set of analytics tools, including key performance indicators for management, in the enterprise version.

Though Weir says individuals “see a lot of value just in creating to-dos and goals with associated to-dos and using templated workflow,” he concedes that the product “does start to add a lot of exponential value if you have other people on the system.” The product, in other words, is very much an enterprise tool that seems most useful when broadly deployed within a company. Sparqlight is planning on reaching out in the future to actively sell it to businesses rather than just rely on viral growth and small team adoption, Weir says.

The central premise behind Sparqlight — that routine work is boring and time consuming and automating these tasks frees up time for actual constructive and creative work  — will be immediately compelling to most knowledge workers. Who likes repetitive donkey work after all? To accomplish this goal, though, Sparqlight needs to be adopted, and whether the product is both powerful enough for enterprise and pleasant enough for individual workers to actually use remains to be seen.

Has anyone out there given Sparqlight a try, or if not, does this sort of automated workflow sound appealing?

Image courtesy of Sparqlight.

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The company announced today it has reached one million users, about 75 percent of which are students. The company also announced it is piloting a new premium service that allows clubs and other groups to apply their branding to Wiggio (pictured) and offers an administrator level with custom analytics. Previously the product was free to all users, but having decided against adding advertising, Wiggio has landed on this route to monetization.

So how did the company, founded by a team of Cornell grads in 2008, gain its sizable following? CEO and co-founder Dana Lampert explained that their approach is to make users’ lives incredibly easy and then set up the product to grow virally.  ”Students are kind of a different beast,” he told GigaOM in an interview. “If they have to learn anything, if they have to read anything, if they have to watch a video even, they will be completely turned off by the tool. And, if I’m in a group of ten people and only eight of them really get it, it’s completely useless. From the very beginning we’ve been really focused on streamlined simplicity.”

Lampert explained Wiggio uses a powerful testing technique to ensure the product is incredibly easy to use – they give it to fourth graders. “I took one of our features to a fourth grade classroom and I said, ‘how would send a text message using Wiggio?’ Basically we adopted the mentality that we wouldn’t put the feature out until these fourth graders can use it easily,” he said, though the technique has run into trouble recently. “Fourth graders are getting pretty tech savvy,” he joked, saying he’s had to call in less tech-skilled family members for testing reinforcements.

So once Wiggio decided to focus on simplicity and ensured their product met this goal, how did they spread the word? “We raised a Series A round about two years ago and we made the decision to use that money to focus on product and not distribution, so our growth has mostly been natural,” Lampert said. “What we found is if we can demo the product to some student and faculty leaders at a university they find it really valuable and they’ll end up doing a lot of promotion for us. We often times have schools and leaders on campus evangelizing the product and bringing it out to the groups.” Growth happens naturally from there, Lampert said, as “the average person is inviting about 20 new people onto the platform.”

Students graduate, though, so what happens to Wiggio fans after they get their diplomas? Lampert hopes they don’t leave Wiggio behind along with their black light posters and dorm room mini-fridges, providing the product with a stealth way into the grown-up collaboration market. “We try to promote bringing it into your jobs, which is how we have some traction within businesses,” said Lampert, noting adult social groups and alumni associations are also using the tools.

According to Lampert this softly softly approach seems to be working, but his company is playing in a very crowded space. How does he see the welter of collaboration options fairing long-term? “From what I’ve seen, a lot of players are trying to become best of breed of one certain feature. Asana has beautiful task management. Dropbox is awesome for file sharing,” Lampert said, but also argued that there is room for tools that do a little bit of a lot of things. “For some organizations and groups with more tech-savvy members, it’s very easy to have them all create accounts and get access to these one-off tools. At least for the groups we serve — the less savvy consumer groups who just need to get things done — I think consolidation is the trend. I’m not saying us, but in general though the tools that bring together what I need into a one-stop shop are the ones that are going to see themselves win this space,” he predicted.

Which collaboration tools do you see winning the war of attrition – narrowly specialized offerings, suites that pull together lots of features or some of both?

Image courtesy of Wiggio.

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