Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Basecamp
Basecamp translations now available
Basecamp is now available in Spanish, French, Italian, German, Finnish, Greek, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Japanese, Russian, and Hungarian.

New in Basecamp: Project templates
Now when you click the Templates tab, you’ll see a new option: Project templates. Project templates let you set up a standardized project with to-dos, milestones, and messages. You can then use this project template to create new projects. A new project created from a project template will be auto-populated with all the to-do lists, milestones, and messages from the template. A huge time saver that’s especially useful if you do lots of similar projects.

UTS Motorsports builds a race car with Basecamp
“Our most recent development is a ‘Panic Board’ (below) which uses the Basecamp APIs to constantly show upcoming deadlines and milestones on a monitor in our workshop. This allows team members to see upcoming dates at a glance and serves as a constant reminder of our time frame. Basecamp has facilitated effective communication and been instrumental in the development and management of the team.”

Panic Board

Basecamp becomes more finger friendly
We just launched a new feature which makes Basecamp more finger friendly for the iPhone and iPad.



Using Basecamp as an alternative to course management software at the Urban Planning Department of UCLA
“I use messages and milestones the most. I use these every day on projects with very diverse collaborators. I appreciate being able to embed video and other media in the message and the ability to see visual assets. This works great for students, websites, and any visual production effort.”

Basecamp helps graphic novelist stay on schedule
“I use Basecamp to make sure I keep on schedule writing and drawing my graphic novels—Machiavelli and the upcoming Marlowe. I use weekly milestones for pages with attached to-do lists (from templates) for the individual steps I need to take to complete a page: rough pencils, finished pencils, inks, paint, and scan. Templated to-dos are really useful because I’m doing the same steps—albeit for different pages with different artwork—over and over. I also use it to schedule my uploads to my web site.”

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Highrise
EmployFlex uses Highrise to track companies offering flexible work options
“Highrise helps us out daily! For example, we certified Honest Tea and so created a Deal and linked it to our email notes. As I mentioned, we work remotely and at different times of the day. Honest Tea had a question that needed to be answered and because of Highrise and the Deals functionality we can transition staff in and out of the software and keep service consistent.”

Guiding investors with the help of Highrise, Formstack, and Newsberry
“I’ve tried every industry-specific CRM out there and abandoned them all because they made my life harder, not easier. And then Highrise.. It’s lightning-fast and ultra-efficient with clicks. It makes you want to use it. I don’t need a complicated relational database so that I can run client-wide reports sorting on pet’s names. Highrise lets me reference notes, emails, and important information quickly and easily.”

Combining Highrise and Twilio makes recording calls and taking notes later easy
“I’ve developed a system that combines the two to record phone calls and place appropriate notes within the highrise system for select callers. Here’s how it works…”

Turn your business card collection or Rolodex into Highrise contacts with CloudContacts
CloudContacts has now added a new export option which allows for a direct import into Highrise.

Campfire
Use Notifire to get an IM or text message whenever someone enters a Campfire room
“Quickly set up a robot that watches your room, and get a normal Instant Message or text message when someone enters. It’s the easiest way to add chat support to your website.”

How the engineering department at ShermansTravel Media uses Campfire to communicate
“We recently cut over ISPs and in order to achieve this, we needed everyone in the same place at the same time. We could have had a conference call, but that call would have involved nearly 15 people all with their own issues all fighting to get a word in. So we went with Campfire and opened it up publicly. We had our internal 8 team members there along with representation from our new ISP and our database managed service providers.”

Multiple products
Pemba: “Working from the Cloud makes us more collaborative and effective”
“For some of the “extra” stuff that’s part of the PEMBAway (our blog, newsletters, forms and surveys) we use WordPress, MailChimp, and FormStack. These all integrate seamlessly with each other, and with Google and 37Signals, too. For example, do you want to schedule an appointment with us? We have a webpage for that, that shows our availability via Tungle; pick a time and it drops into our individual Google Calendars, and sends a confirmation to everybody via Gmail, which is then easily logged into Highrise and/or – as needed – Backpack. All of this happens more or less automatically.”

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