Have you noticed how everything is trademarked these days? Company and product names I get, and some taglines I understand too, but some of this stuff just seems a bit much.

A few days ago I picked up some new shampoo. I was reading the bottle and it said “The Kiehl’s Patch-Test™: Before applying…” Why does that need to be formally trademarked? Are they worried Aveda or Redken or some other shampoo brand is going to suggest you use the “Kiehl’s Patch-Test” before you try their shampoo? What exactly is Kiehl’s trying to protect?

In the end none of this is a huge deal, it’s just something I’ve been noticing more and more lately. I wonder how much of this is lawyer driven. I assume it’s a pretty easy way to send a client a bill.

A couple weeks ago we launched the new Highrise marketing site. We’re still iterating that design post-launch, and we have a big post brewing about that design process, but today I wanted to share some of the iterations we explored for the new signup chart.

The start

Here’s where we started. This was the signup chart for the previous site. You can still see the design action on the Basecamp or Backpack site.

Design A

One of the earlier design directions for the new Highrise site included a light blue background and dark highlight boxes. This was the signup chart direction we were playing with while this design was in style.

We wanted to highlight the main 3 differences between the plans (users, storage, and deals) so we darkened those boxes and colored the text blue. We also introduced a YES/NO list top right to get some key points across related to our signup policy. This was inspired by Southwest’s NO NO NO list on their home page.

A few weeks ago we posted a open survey for Signal vs. Noise readers. We were curious what people liked, disliked, what kind of organizations people worked at, how often they read Signal vs. Noise, if they thought the site got better or worse, what they’d like to see more of, their favorite posts, etc.

The survey was open for about 36 hours. 869 people participated before we closed the survey. As promised, here are the complete results.

Thanks again for taking the time to participate.

2008 is over. For all the economic doom and gloom as of late, 2008 was a good year for 37signals. We continued to grow our customer base and our revenues. That makes 5 consecutive years of double-digit revenue growth. We’re very proud of that.

We also hired four new full-time people this year. Sarah Hatter joined us full time in March (she was working on as a contractor prior to March). She heads up customer service/support. Jeffrey Hardy came on in January. He’s a remarkably talented and efficient programmer. Jamie Dihiansan joined us in September. You’ll be seeing a lot more of Jamie’s design work in the coming months. And Joshua Sierles also joined us in September. Joshua’s our second system administrator. It’s really an honor to be able to work with these people — and our whole team — every day.

We’ve also been very hard at work improving our products. Aside from some significant infrastructure enhancements to increase speed, capacity, security, billing, and reliability, here’s a list of some of the major public-facing improvements to our Big 3: Basecamp, Highrise, and Backpack:

Basecamp

• Image Grid View: Any images you upload to Basecamp can now be browsed in a thumbnail grid view.
• Post comments to Basecamp projects via email: Huge new feature. You used to have to log into Basecamp to post a comment. Now you can just reply to the message via email. Especially useful for mobile email users. Hundreds of thousands of comments have now been posted via email.
• More storage, same price: Double (or more) storage increases on all paying plans without a price increase.
• New project switcher: Moving between frequently accessed projects is a lot easier now.
• Bigger file upload limit: Moved up from 10 MB per file to 100 MB per file if you’re using Basecamp file storage.
• Much easier color customization: Brand new color picker brings color customization to the masses.
• Email replies can now include file attachments: Attaching a file to your email reply will post the file to the project now as well.
• Redesigned People & Permissions screen: All new, much easier to navigate, follow, and use.
• Comments (and file attachments) on to-dos and milestones: Huge new feature. Before only messages had comments and attachments. Now you can discuss a to-do item right on the to-do item. Same with milestones. Major productivity gains.

Highrise

• Deal tracking and a Deals API: Huge new feature. Track proposals and deals in Highrise. Keep track of deals won, lost, and pending. Keep track of how much money you’ve earned from each client.
• Advanced search: Search by location, phone, email, and more.
• Bulk delete: Top request: Delete multiple contacts or companies at once. Deleting people is no longer a hassle.
• Improved import review and undo: Review previous imports and roll-back with a single click.
• File view: Now you can just view files attached to a person or company. No more wading through all the notes and emails to find the PDF proposal.
• Major improvements to tasks: Cleaner UI, better date picker, iCalendar feed for dated tasks, and more.
• Bulk tagging: Tag multiple people or companies at one. Big request satisfied.
• Better contact filtering: Recently viewed, recently added, people without notes in 30 days, people who aren’t tagged, etc.
• Faster sidebar search: Major speed increase for the most commonly used Highrise feature.
• CSV/Excel import: Import your contacts from CSV or Excel files. Top request.
• Export all notes and emails: Now you can export all your notes and emails as well (before you could only export contacts).
• New marketing site: Total redesign.

Backpack

• Backpack Multiuser: Huge change. Backpack grows up. More intranet-focused, multiple people from your company can use the same Backpack account, share information and files and calendars across the office or group.
• Calendar strip in the Newsroom: Upcoming events now appear in the Newsroom. You don’t have to click to the Calendar to see if anything is going on today.
• Improved calendar reminders: Select multiple people to receive a notification.
• Introducing the Backpack Journal: Huge new feature. Keep track of who’s working on what and what they’ve finished recently.
• Share Backpack pages even if someone doesn’t have a Backpack account: Previously people had to have a Backpack account to view a Backpack page. Now you can just share via email without requiring the other person to have a Backpack account. Big.
• Reply to Newsroom messages via email: No more logging into Backpack to respond to a Newsroom message. Just reply to the email.
• Read-only page sharing: Now you can share a page with someone without fearing they are going to change or delete it. Big improvement for a lot of people.
• Page notifications and up-front sharing settings: Specify who can see a page when you are creating it. Before you had to adjust the sharing options after creating the page. Removed a couple of steps.

There have also been some big developments in the world of Ruby on Rails including the merging of Merb into Rails 3.

We’re working on some very cool stuff for 2009. We’re looking forward to getting it in your hands just as soon as we can.

Thanks again for reading our blogs (Signal vs. Noise and the Product Blog), following our company on Twitter, buying our Getting Real book, posting jobs on our Job Board, and, of course, using our products. Thanks for being our customer. You make it all possible and worthwhile.

Wishing everyone success in 2009!

I’ve been a happy Sirius Radio subscriber since the day Howard Stern went Satellite. I think I’d miss Sirius more than I’d miss cable or any other entertainment subscription I have.

I was thinking about buying another radio recently, but I figured I’d check to see if I could stream Sirius over the net instead.

It turns out Sirius has two internet streaming options. You can stream for free at 32k, or pay $2.99/month (if you already pay for Sirius) to get 128k “CD Quality” sound. $2.99 ain’t bad, so I signed up for that. If you don’t have Sirius, streaming at 128k costs $12.99/month. Sirius doesn’t stream every channel due to some licensing issues, but they stream about 90% including every station I listen to.

StarLightXM

In order to stream you have to use their web-based player which is pretty crufty. So I did a couple Google searches to see if I could stream it through iTunes or some other Mac app instead. That’s where I found StarLightXM.

StarLightXM is a lightweight app that streams Sirius or XM through a native player instead of the crufty web players. You just enter the same login credentials that you would with the online players, and you’re all set. The UI is simple and compact. It’s free (donations accepted) and works great.

So now I can stream Sirius to my desktop. That works. But I wanted to stream the audio to multiple speakers in my house. I have three Airport Expresses set up to play music from iTunes in multiple rooms, but Airport Express can only stream music from iTunes. That means I can’t natively stream audio from the StarLightXM app to my remote speakers.

Airfoil

Enter Airfoil. Airfoil allows you to stream any audio from any program on your Mac (or PC) to your Airport Express-connected speakers. You can stream all system sound or just sound from a specific app.

The way I have it set up is to just stream sound from StarLightXM to my remote speakers. This way I only get system sounds (beeps, new mail, etc) on my desktop, but Sirius plays on my desktop + my remote speakers. It’s a simple setup that works beautifully. Airfoil costs $25.

Airfoil allows you to set volume for each location independently or you can fix volume to system volume. If it’s fixed to system volume you can use your computer’s volume to raise or lower volume in different rooms. If it’s not fixed, you can change your computer’s volume and not affect the volume of the speakers in other rooms. Nice flexibility.

A great way to save

Streaming Sirius over the net is a great way to save some money too. I currently have Sirius radios at home and at the office, but now I can cancel Sirius at the office since I can just stream it over my computer instead.

So for $2.99/month my MacBook turns into a portable Sirius Radio. Plus, I can broadcast to multiple rooms with just a single stream. So instead of paying for radios in multiple rooms, I just pay $2.99/month to stream and point the sound to whichever room(s) I want with Airfoil.

Software is amazing.

UPDATE: Rogue Amoeba, the folks behind Airfoil, have released Pulsar, a Sirius/XM client for the Mac.

A couple of days ago we launched the new Highrise marketing site. We’ll be posting a lot of design-related articles about the design process — including the unreleased versions — over the next few weeks.

A peek behind the scenes

Today I wanted to give you a peek behind the scenes at an app we built to help us maintain the “Fresh News & Buzz” strip in the sidebar. This element is called out in red below:

Extra Extra

One of the things we wanted to do with the new site was to have a place where we could display current comments, ideas, and conversations going on around the web about Highrise. We’ll be rolling this out to the other product sites as we redesign them as well.

To do this, Sam built an internal app called Extra Extra. Sam will be talking about the technical aspects of Extra Extra next week, but for now I just wanted to show you how it looks and how we use it.

This is what it looks like:

Extra Extra scours the web and Twitter every hour or so for keywords including 37signals, Highrise, Basecamp, etc. It displays matches in a list view. We can then review the matches and select which product sidebar gets which blurb by just clicking the icon.

Some blurbs may be appropriate for multiple sites, so multiple icons can be clicked. You’ll notice the fourth one is selected for both 37signals and Highrise. Once an icon is clicked the entire row turns yellow so it’s easier to spot which ones have already been published. Blurbs that aren’t appropriate are just ignored.

Once an icon is clicked, the item gets published to the appropriate product’s feed. Right now the Highrise site is the only site with the sidebar, but we included all products and the 37signals logo (for the 37signals site) so we can get into the habit of selecting content for those sites too. Once the new sites launch we’ll already be ready with content.

If we spot something on the web that Extra Extra doesn’t pick up we can add it manually by clicking the “Add a news item” button at the top.

How it works on the sites

In the sidebar we pop in a DIV with some Javascript that looks like this:

      <div class="extra_extra_news" count="8">
        <script type="text/javascript" src="http://news.37signals.com/feeds/highrise.js?no_expire"></script>
      </div>

The Javascript pulls the appropriate feed from the Extra Extra app and the count=”8” tells it how many entries to display.

More soon

We hope you enjoyed this little peek behind the scenes at Extra Extra. Sam will be following up with technical details soon and we’ll have a lot more design related posts about the new Highrise site soon.

We’d like to hear what you think about Signal vs. Noise, what you like and don’t like, and your ideas for improving the site. We’ve put together an anonymous survey to gather your feedback.

It’s not too long and all questions are optional, so if you have a moment we’d love to get your feedback. We’re planning on sharing all the responses once we’ve reviewed them.

So please take the survey! Thanks!