MyQuire.com

The Craigslist Foundation’s Nonprofit Boot Camp this month proved a great first event for Quire. We talked to many open-minded “idea people” who were excited about MyQuire and full of insight about how to take our product to the next level.

Just as with any non-profit, a strong, engaged community is integral to our success. MyQuire’s vision is not just to provide integrated tools, it’s also to build a network where users can find new resources (volunteers, donors, and services) simply by being able to search within the MyQuire community of users. What’s a world where we aren’t all helping each other?

Quire donated two Boot Camp attendance scholarships to two non-profits whose missions are also centrally rooted in the idea of community: Good Cents for Oakland and California Revels.

Good Cents for Oakland is a non-profit whose work takes them into Oakland, California schools to guide children through a 10-week Penny Roundup Program that teaches them about community while developing their skills. At the end of a Roundup, each student votes for the non-profit organization they believe should receive the sum total of funds. Success for these children is about being a collective team. The children here of Emerson School in Oakland are being recognized for the funds they raised for the Oakland Animal Shelter.

California Revels is a non-profit that performs a stage production of ritual, song and dance each December as a way for the community to come together in celebration. Each year, the winter holiday customs of a particular historical and geographic period in time/place are re-enacted. For many, the Revels is something they look forward to participating in with their families every year. Here the Revels audience and cast are celebrating with song and dance in the lobby at intermission during the 2002 show.

As Quire’s success continues, our values are in giving back and sustaining those early adopters growing with us. We look forward to your partnership and ideas on what features will keep MyQuire the most useful all-in-one technology for managing your projects and teams!

Beginning with the original MyQuire Alpha release in late 2006, the upbeat Quire management & development team has maintained a blistering pace of revisions and updates aimed at improving the MyQuire application. Since joining the Quire team in June, I've experienced this fast-paced development cycle first-hand while working closely with both management and backend developers to improve public facing pages.

The result? Newly introduced "personas" - real MyQuire users who utilize the service to organize, manage, and collaborate on a personal and professional level. Find out how a non-profit administrator, full-time college student, and recruiter / PTA president use MyQuire.

In addition to providing examples of how MyQuire can be leveraged to help everyday and professional individuals alike, we've tinkered with the layout to make it a little easier to understand what we're doing, review features, and see where we're going.

Want to poke previous iterations of MyQuire? Check out the Wayback machine for some "historic" link love.

By the way, my name is Derek. If I'm not staring at Photoshop or TextMate, I'll be one of the coffee runners narrating the development cycle, news, and releases on the MyQuire blog. If you haven't met our CEO David S., say hi. The rest of the team will find their way on to these pages in due time.

Stay updated with development updates by subscribing to the blog via RSS. Alternatively, bookmark us on del.icio.us and spread the word. Poke, tinker, and play around with the public pages and application. Let us know what you think, features you would like to see, or a simple "I've got my eye on you".

Hello! I'm psyched to kick-start the first posting on the MyQuire blog. After weeks of banging on our computers and burning the midnight oil we have some stuff we want to show you. We're still midway through our development process and many of the core technologies aren't available yet (coming this fall…). That said, we're happy to share with you some of our early prototypes and ideas.

Before I get ahead of myself let me introduce you to the basic idea behind MyQuire. The concept is deceptively simple:

we want to provide a software-as-a-service (read: web-based software) that doesn't look and feel like the hard-to-use desktop software we've been subjected to for years.

We figure, why spend so much time making software for the internet that tries to look and feel like software on a desktop? Well, the internet is not the desktop, we might as well build a house on the moon with pulleys and cranes! At MyQuire, our hunch is that by wrapping up our core technologies in an interface that's more fun and people-centric, we provide a path for people who aren't "good" with technology to use collaboration tools that respond to real pains. The first real pain on our list we're trying to alleviate? Make running a team and a project less of an ordeal…

I'll keep this short and sweet for now. In the future we're going to use the MyQuire blog as a forum to continue our conversation with you, our user. Since our product is literally in mid-development (I don't even think we can call this a "Beta" or "Alpha", that should come in the fall), your comments and ideas will have a direct impact on our first product launch. So let us know! Of course, there's also a bit of a selfish side to this blog – it's a place where we will share with you some of the humble thoughts, ideas and aspirations that led us to the MyQuire project, along with the challenges we face as we move forward.

So, thanks in advance for your help and for getting involved with your feedback!

David Steinberg

CEO

The Quire team did it again and released a significant upgrade to the leading social project management solution on the Web: MyQuire.com.

The new version is not only significantly faster, it has also a few additional features more and many bugs less.