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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EasilyDo, which is debuting Thursday on the iPhone and iPod Touch, combines more than 20 productivity apps, but it’s more than just a roll-up of existing services. Like Google Now, it anticipates when a user needs to rely on one of these services and offers to complete a task proactively at the right time. I have yet to try out the app, so I have to see if it can deliver as promised. But if it does, it could change the way we use our smartphones and it could also undercut a lot of standalone apps that take on discrete services.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company announced Thursday it has raised $4.3 million in funding to build out its app. U.S. Venture Partners, where CEO and co-founder Mikael Berner was entrepreneur in residence, and Mayfield Fund are participating in the round, which started as a seed round but became a Series A.

Here’s what EasilyDo does:

It pulls in data from Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and LinkedIn and looks at a user’s calendar and contacts. It then starts creating cards that represent tasks that a user would like to act on. For very timely tasks, it delivers a push notification to alert a user.

So if a friend’s birthday comes up, EasilyDo will send a note a few days early and offer to send their friend a gift card from Amazon, Target or Starbucks. It will also use sentiment analysis and natural language processing to scan a user’s Facebook newsfeed to pull out big news that they might miss. The app will even pre-format a comment based on whether congratulations or condolences are in order.

EasilyDo will review a user’s address book and merge duplicate contacts. And if a user emails someone frequently who’s not in their address book, EasilyDo offers to create a new contact for them.

For people on the move, EasilyDo will alert them when to leave to make their next appointment and will offer to deliver “I’m late” messages to attendees if they’re falling behind. It can also offer to text message a contact when they leave the office and head home. If a user has a conference call, the app will automatically dial in so they don’t have to mess with conference call numbers and passwords. The app can also track packages and receipts and alert users when a package has shipped.

EasilyDo was created by Berner, who sold his previous company BeVocal to Nuance and became SVP of Nuance’s enterprise devision, and Hetal Pandya, a former director at Nuance. Berner said the goal was to eat into some of the 35,000 decisions that a user faces each day and help them tackle some of them proactively. That’s what separates it from Siri, which still requires a user to begin an action, Berner said.

“If the information is there, we just put a task forward and see if a user wants to do it. Why tell Siri what your father’s birthday is? We get it and can offer it to you a couple of days before,” Berner told me in an interview. “We want to be the one that executes the task.”

EasilyDo competes with a lot of different services right now like Facebook Gifts, Slice for package and receipt tracking, MobileDay for conference calling, Twist for making it to an appointment on time. Berner said he’s not looking to replace any of those apps but if his app delivers as advertised, it could do just that.

I’m intrigued by EasilyDo because it looks pretty useful and shows how a smart personal assistant should work. We still need services like Siri to create new actions but by making a lot of our existing data available, we can let actions and information come to us. This might unnerve some privacy-obsessed users, but EasilyDo says it encrypts all of its data and keeps as little of it as possible on its servers.

And it’s not looking to sell any of it. Right now, it’s making money through affiliate fees for gift cards and Berner thinks there’s an opportunity to expand that for flights or hotel bookings. An Android version is also on the way next, though when it will be ready is not clear.

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The service allows user access to cloud-based applications in order to create, edit and share their files online without having to download any applications or clients. Nexus connects to existing online storage services including Dropbox, Google Drive, Box and Skydrive through a virtual file system, so they can tap resources and files that they’ve already stored in the cloud. Users can also access any sites that rely on Flash, Java or Siverlight through Nexus.

Nexus, which has been used by 30,000 people in its five-month public beta, works on the iPad, Chromebooks, Android tablets and any PC, Mac or Linux-based computer. In addition to creating and editing files, the service makes it easy to share them online with others, by posting a link on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ or through email.

“With our approach, you can work in the same exact way you’re used to and you can literally create a presentation from scratch and pull from online resources,” Yori Gabay, founder and COO of InstallFree told me in an interview. “This is an aggregation of all your cloud resources; it’s really a platform for creating content files and collaboration.”

What makes Nexus interesting is that it’s a pretty light-weight way to enable cross-platform collaboration, though it requires a good connection. But it has plenty of competition. CloudOn also provides access to Microsoft Office on tablets, but it requires a download of an iOS or Android application. OnLive Desktop provides users with access to their own desktop with Microsoft Office and other tools, but that too requires a download. There’s also other mobile apps that allow remote PC access, which is another option to use productivity apps on a mobile device.

Users can use a free version of Nexus Basic that offers access to LibreOffice (formerly known as OpenOffice) to create and edit files; full viewing of Microsoft Office documents and access to Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, SkyDrive, SharePoint, Office 365 and other storage services. Nexus Premium will sell for $4.99 a month or $49.99 per year for an academic license per person or $19.99 a month or $199.99 a year for a standard license for one person. Premium users will get all of the Basic services along with full licensed access to Microsoft Office 2010 including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Publisher.

InstallFree, which has raised $15 million to date, is building off the work it’s done in virtualization, providing remote access to Windows applications. The company is hoping to target small and medium sized businesses with Nexus, said Gabay, but it could also look to partner with a telecom operator, who can offer the service for business customers. InstallFree Nexus is another sign of how the computer is evolving in the post-PC era, now that there are more ways to access services via the cloud. Workers will increasingly be able to do most of their work via tablets that connect to traditional desktops and productivity apps.

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After acquiring the productivity app Manymoon and relaunching it as Do last year, the enterprise giant is set to announce Thursday that it is rolling out new contacts and deal flow management features that it believes will make Do more of work collaboration platform for everyone from individual consumers to small businesses to teams within big corporations. While Do will remain a free service for unlimited users, Salesforce plans to charge people for the new deal flow and contacts management features.

“One of the challenges we’ve had at Do is that people think it’s a tasks app – and there are hundreds and hundreds of them. But, really, what we’re doing is preparing for something a bit bigger – we call [Do] a social productivity platform,” said Sean Whiteley, Salesforce’s SVP and general manager of Do.com.

With the app, users can not only manage their own tasks, but assign tasks to others, as well as share relevant materials and communicate about a project as the individual tasks are completed. With the new deal flow and contacts management features, which are launching in private beta Thursday, Do is making a bigger social play for enterprise and business clients that might otherwise use Excel sheets, deal flow management software like Pipeline Deals or Asana, the workplace collaboration tool from Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskowitz that last week raised $28 million.

Through the new contacts management feature, which integrates with Facebook, Twitter, Gmail and other platforms, users can see the entire universe of all of the people they might collaborate with, as well as set alerts that remind them to reach out to specific people periodically or on certain dates. The new deal flow tool helps relevant team members monitor all the deals in a pipeline, as well as the movement of specific deals. It lets users customize the layout, set alerts to call customers, assign tasks to other co-workers and more.

Whitely acknowledged that Do and Asana take similar approaches in providing software that helps groups of people collaborate and execute projects, but emphasized the differences.

While Asana takes a “workplace” approach that organizes the platform around projects, he said that Do scrapped that strategy for “groups”-centered approach that is more similar to Facebook in that it organizes the platform around the people involved in a project. He also said that Do integrates with multiple social platforms and email systems, so that users can collaborate with others on the platform even if they only have their Facebook information, Twitter handle or Gmail address. Additionally, Whitely said that Do supports mobile workers with an iPhone app, html5 version and an Android app on the way.  (Asana’s site says it is available as an iPhone app and mobile-optimized site.)

While Do plans to let any number of people on a team use the site for free and charge for increased usage of the deal and contacts features, as well as some admin features, Asana charges clients based on the number of work members they have using the platform.

In addition to Asana, companies like Basecamp and startups like Producteev help businesses with work flow management, and Microsoft’s Yammer also provides a collaboration tool for businesses (although it doesn’t include the task management component). But the fact that Do has been rebuilt on Salesforce’s enterprise-grade platform and can integrate with the company’s social service Chatter will likely be selling points for the expanding platform.

For readers interested in checking out Do’s new features, Salesforce.com is offering priority beta access to those who click here.

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1. Mail VIP rules

I get a lot of email. Like most people, the amount of e-mail I get that actually matters is a small percentage. Mountain Lion’s Notification Center lets you set banner alerts for incoming email. Thankfully, this makes it possible to reduce the noise. Instead of also getting notifications for Groupon and enhancement product spam, you can filter that list for people you’ve designated as VIPs.

While you can set whether the Mail app’s notifications are banners, popups, and have badge icons in the Notification Center preferences, you have to set the VIP-only notification within the Mail App preferences.

To designate a person as a VIP from within a mail message from that person, click the star next to their name. This will cause mail to notify you only if you get an email from these people, as well as place their email messages in the VIP folder in Mail.

2. Notes

I don’t really use Notes for capturing information. These days, I still find paper and pen the easiest way to quickly jot down notes in a meeting. However, I do use Notes to store information I will want to refer to often. For example: all of my dial-in meeting and leader codes are stored in Notes. I have a guitar amp that does modeling, so I store my favorite settings for reference if the amp needs to be reset. The best part is Notes also syncs with iOS Notes, so I’ll have them with me always.

3. Reminders

Thankfully divorced from iCal, tasks are now stored in a standalone app, Reminders. While I still use OmniFocus to do the bulk of my heavy task management due to its easy handling of repeating tasks, I’ve found Reminders excellent for important one-off tasks. Since Reminders also uses Location Services on Mountain Lion, I will often set a reminder for a task I need to complete when I get home. Like Notes, it’s likely that users of both iOS and OS X will get the most value out of this, but now that it’s a standalone app, OS X users who hated iCal may find more value from it.

4. iCloud Preview

Preview is the latest app to also support Documents in the Cloud. While there’s no iOS version of Preview currently available, I’ve found a couple of uses for Preview and iCloud: storing PDFs I want to reference on more than one computer, and yet another backup of crucial PDFs. I’ve got copies of agreements, my fishing licenses and the like also in iCloud. This makes it easy to get my computer up and running quickly after a hardware fault, as well as prevent against accidental deletion of local files.

5. The return of Save As

One of the most criticized “improvements” in Lion was the removal of Save As, forcing users to Duplicate, then Save any file they wanted a second copy of under a different name. Thankfully, Save As is back with Mountain Lion. The bad news? It seems the only way to invoke it is with a keyboard shortcut, command-option-shift S. Better put that one in your Notes. No, I don’t know why it’s not a menu choice, either.

These are 5 tips I’ve found that improve my Mountain Lion experience. As always, feel free to share any of yours in the comments.

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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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Teamly, which produces tools to help workers prioritize different tasks, has raised funds from Elliot Loh, a co-founder of Geni who worked on the early versions of Yammer, as well as Ayaz ul Haque, a partner at Exalt Capital. Already part of the 500 Startups program, it hopes to finalize its $500,000 angel round in the next couple of weeks.

We’ve covered Teamly, which was founded in London, before. It positions itself as a performance management tool, helping employees keep track of their tasks and keeping managers in touch with how staff are progressing. It came out of beta last year and introduced a paid version.

Since then the small team has been working on improvements, and is now launching an enhanced version with a new UI, email integration, mobile access and integration with Yammer. More connections are on the way, including Google Apps.

So is this the Yammer effect in action? Does Microsoft’s involvement mean we will see more startups part of a landrush to support Yammer? After all, there are millions of reasons for hooking in to Yammer that weren’t necessarily there before — both in terms of growth as Microsoft pushes uses towards Yammer, but also the potential for an exit. This could be the beginning of a whole raft of startups aimed at filling in those smaller gaps in Yammer’s offering.

When I asked him how Teamly compared to a service that offered the full stack, Allison played a pretty dead bat.

“Yammer is a general purpose communications platform,” he said. “Teamly is focused on making it easier for manager to track and review their employees, saving them time on meetings, updates and reviews.”

Well, that clears things up.

Photograph of Scott Allison, used under Creative Commons courtesy of Joi Ito

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“Facebook ‘likes’ can be valuable for people seeking recommendations from friends who share similar interests, but today they’re not discoverable,” CEO and co-founder Jeff Chow said in a statement. “The persistent and enhanced nature of Springpad’s notebooks and powerful filtering capabilities cut through the social clutter to make it easier for you to make better decisions filtered by interest and those you trust.”

Once placed into the appropriate notebook, Springpad embeds information about the artist, movie or restaurant drawn from its content partners. It embeds review data from Rotten Tomatoes, restaurant hours and reservation links through Open Table, and consumer goods pricing and availability alerts through online retailers. Springpad users can access these shared notebooks, and notebooks can be made public for the Web to see. Or the notebook’s creator can post them back on Facebook as a single “movies I like” timeline entry. The Springpad app is available through Facebook’s App Center.

As I wrote in April, Springpad is evolving from a note-taking, online-information-capture service into a quasi-social network – sort of a Pinterest with a lot more organization tools. The interesting thing about these new Facebook features is that Springpad seems to be acknowledging it will never replace a Facebook or other mammoth social network, but it can work within those networks to layer on context and organization features to the stuff consumers are already sharing on their social graphs.

We’re starting to see other examples of companies utilizing social media content rather than trying to replicate it, for instance Silicon Valley food startup Say Mmm. Instead of requiring customers to save their recipes within its portal, Say Mmm is organizing the recipes you store in Evernote and like on Facebook into an easy-to-use interface, where it provides meal planning and cooking tools Evernote and Facebook simple weren’t designed to supply.

The big benefit for Springpad is referral revenue it gets from all of this cross-platform sharing. If a friend finds a restaurant you liked on Facebook in a Springpad notebook and then books a reservation through the convenient Open Table link, then Springpad collects a commission. The more traffic it can generate between social networks and its notebooks the better off it will be.

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Evernote started out as a note-taking application but over time, it’s built up a portfolio of products through acquisitions and internal development. Now, it’s increasingly looking at how to educate people on the many uses of Evernote and its family of products. That’s one of the big themes of Evernote’s second annual Trunk Conference, scheduled for August 24.

While the inaugural conference was dedicated to developers, this year’s agenda is split between developers and users, who can attend a “Life Series” track. The lifestyle track will be led by Evernote’s ambassadors, a group of leading users across a number of areas who were first announced last October.

The idea is to further educate users about the way they can apply Evernote in their real lives. And it helps expand Evernote’s audience to more mainstream users, who now have more tools to use to organize their lives. Evernote in December released mobile apps Evernote Hello and Evernote Food to help people remember contacts and past meals respectively. Evernote also bought services like image-sharing app Skitch last August and handwriting iPad app Penultimate last month. Here’s what CEO and founder Phil Libin had to say:

People feel they’re not using Evernote to its full potential. There is an appetite for people who want to get the most out of it. And there’s definitely more opportunity because Evernote is much bigger now. The goal has always been to make you smarter and more productive but the ways to do that has definitely increased. We want people to learn all the ways you can use Evernote.

Libin said the first show sold out immediately last year with more than 400 people attending and expectations are for this year’s show to attract double that number. Despite its developer focus last year, the conference attracted a number of regular users interested in finding out more about the service. He said by creating dual tracks, he believes the two groups can help spur each other on.

The developer track will also teach people how to use Evernote’s APIs, will showcase top apps on the Evernote platform and will give attendees a sense of where Evernote is headed in the future. Developers can also compete in a $100,000 Devcup competition. There are already 2,000 submissions for this year’s competition, double that of last year.

Evernote continues to steam along toward Libin’s goal of creating a 100-year company. The start-up raised $70 million last month, increasing its total funding to more $160 million to date. Libin said the company is still preparing to be “IPO ready” by the end of 2013, but will likely hold off on going public as it continues to innovate and take risks.

For GigaOM readers interested in attending the Trunk Conference, there’s a 50 percent discount code for the first 25 people who sign-up. The code is: ETCGIGAOM

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Microsoft appears reluctant to extend its productivity powerhouse Office to other mobile platforms before it can cut the software’s teeth in its own Windows 8 ecosystem. Google may be looking to take advantage of Microsoft’s hesitance, filling in the office hole in Android and iOS with its own productivity suite before Microsoft can pounce.

In a press release, Google said the Quickoffice team would help it achieve success with Google Apps on mobile platforms:

Today, consumers, businesses and schools use Google Apps to get stuff done from anywhere, with anyone and on any device. Quickoffice has an established track record of enabling seamless interoperability with popular file formats, and we’ll be working on bringing their powerful technology to our Apps product suite.

Quickoffice has mobile file-sharing apps that allow users to create, edit and view Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents on their phones. Quickoffice has apps for the iPhone, iPad, Android, as well as webOS and Symbian operating systems.

Quickoffice announced their acquisition by Google in a press release today:

When we embarked on our mission to become the world leader in office productivity, we knew we were taking on a huge challenge. We worked very hard to build Quickoffice as a user friendly, seamless and yet powerful way to view, edit, sync and share documents anywhere, anytime. It’s been a very humbling experience to see this vision embraced by our users. Now, we are ushering in a new chapter with Google. By combining the magic of Google’s intuitive solutions with Quickoffice’s powerful products, our shared vision for anytime, anywhere productivity can only grow.

Quickoffice struck deals to have its apps pre-loaded on Android phones and tablets, and recently saw a jump in users corresponding to sales of the Kindle Fire, GigaOm’s Ryan Kim reported last year. The company reports that its product has been downloaded on 300 million devices so far in 180 countries.

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