A collection of recent news stories, press mentions, and related buzz about 37signals. If you are interested in contacting 37signals about a story, please get in touch with Jason Fried, the company’s founder, by emailing jason at 37signals.com.
There’s a reason nobody ever uses the phrase, “It’s as simple as computer programming.” But Chicago’s 37Signals has made life simpler for programmers and small businesses alike with products such as Basecamp (project management software) and an increasingly popular open source web framework called Ruby on Rails. The company ditches the philosophy of “more features, more better” in favor of simplicity and accessibility: Focus only on the most important features and make things easier to use. The company itself embodies its keep-it-simple philosophy: Fewer than 10 staffers, working from humble offices, create programs quickly and nimbly adapt them based on user feedback. 37Signals released version 2.0 of Ruby on Rails in December, which should give many programmers a happy new year.
Link
Jason Fried, founder of 37signals, maker of a popular online application called Basecamp, says that as a result, technologies have become “a lot more standardised” among browsers, making it easier to create applications that run on all of them.
Link
At 37signals, a company with just eight employees whose Web-based collaboration software is used by thousands of small businesses, there isn’t time to sit around a conference room sipping latte and deconstructing memos. Come to think of it, there isn’t even a company conference room. There are just a couple of cubicles, loads of brainpower and three simple goals: make useful business software, make it easy to run, make money selling it. Repeat.
Link
731 “Chicago’s power elite” as chosen by the Crains editors. Jason Fried of 37signals is the youngest person to make the list at 33 years old.
Jason Fried and David Hansson were awarded 2006 Crains 40 under 40 awards.
Link
“Jason is immune to dogma and has much to teach. In 37signals, he has built an elegant company with elegant products based on the idea that less is more.”—Jeff Bezos, CEO, Amazon.com, and the first outside investor in 37signals
Link
“The Web celebrates its 10th anniversary and it’s still a pain to use—clunky, slow and unresponsive. But thanks to creative small companies like Chicago’s 37 Signals, the Web is finally becoming as fun and flexible as your favorite software.”
Link
Fried’s mantra about how to be successful in business is simple: Less is more. Being a small business is better than being a big one. Having few resources is better than having unlimited resources. Having less time is better than having all the time in the world.
Link
“The best example is a new service called Backpack, located at www.backpackit.com, which has been drawing attention among bloggers who focus on productivity tips.”
Link
“9 out of 10 hearts for the 37 Signals folks—as perfect a passionate user rating as I’ll probably ever give.”
Link
The following nine companies are all impacting the Web 2.0 movement in unique ways. Find out what they’re each doing to revolutionize the future of the internet.
Link
“At the recent Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, Jason Fried created something of a stir with a talk that advised startups to do less than their competition: Spend less money, hire fewer people, work fewer hours, and—most surprising of all—offer fewer features. It’s a philosophy his company, 37signals, has taken to heart in its dead-simple Web offerings, which range from project-management service Basecamp to a group task list called Ta-da List to the Writeboard collaborative-document service”
Link
Software development is often much too complicated and ridiculously time-consuming—and the end result is bloated and buggy applications. 37signals realized it could compete with the big boys by reducing the practice to its bare essentials.
Link
“37signals, creator of Basecamp and Backpack, two wildly popular Web services that help small businesses and individuals manage projects and to-do lists. “Cool wears off. Usefulness never does.”
Link
“KEY PLAYERS: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, 37signals, Tibco Software, and Yahoo.”
Link
“Check out Backpack, a tremendous Web site that uses Ajax to make entering and retrieving data seamless and easy.”
Link
“This is why 37signal’s Basecamp is such a pleasant surprise. It’s an excellent team-based project management tool that continues to delight me the more I use it.”
Link
“It all paid off. Kennedy estimates that by using projectpath, as R.Bird calls its in-house version of Basecamp, Chelsea slashed the overall time to complete the massive redesign project from at least two years to about eight months.”
Link
“But the one LittleCo that really stood out in the Web world in 2005, based on the buzz it created for itself and its almost slavish ‘less is more’ design philosophy, was 37Signals. Their flagship product is Basecamp, a web-based project management product. Their other claim to fame is Ruby on Rails, an open source web development framework created by 37Signals partner David Heinemeier Hansson. Ruby on Rails got rave reviews from developers throughout 2005 and at one point it seemed like every ‘cool’ Web startup was using Rails!”
Link
“Once Budnitz is satisfied with the initial designs, his team uses Basecamp to share Illustrator files with engineers in China who transform them into clay or wax models. One week later the models arrive in New York. With Basecamp acting as the messenger, the two sides repeat the back-and-forth until the toys meet Budnitz’s approval. The final design—along with specs for paint and form-fitting packaging—is then uploaded to Basecamp, and 30 days later finished toys march off production lines in China. “I can have as many as 40 toys in various stages of production at one time, and we can still manage all of these projects with just a few people,” Budnitz says. “It’s stupid simple.”
Link
“Have you ever wanted a web-based word processor where multiple people can login and share ideas? Writeboard does that and a whole lot more. You can start a board very quickly and easily and invite your co-writers to join in and help brainstorm with you. RSS updates are available for your board so you know when changes have been made, a very nice feature. Another great feature is the ability to have multiple versions of a document so you can roll back if needed. You can export your board into a text file or e-mail, too, for quick access and sharing.”
Link
Few are currently making money, and it’s a given that many will fail. But it’s equally likely that somewhere within this group lurks the next Google or Microsoft or Yahoo—or at least something that those giants will soon pay a pretty penny to have.
Link
I’m becoming a huge fan of the web-based tools provided by 37signals. As I mentioned earlier, my company recently started using Basecamp to manage projects and clients.
Link
Compelling offerings from Salesforce.com and 37signals in particular are making people take notice with head turning features and ease-of-use. And while exact adoption numbers for online business software is still not clear yet, last week’s SaaS Summit in Napa Valley gives us some good indications that it’s poised to take off this year like no other.
Link
My new favorite Web-based service is this brilliantly useful thing called Basecamp… Seriously, it’s an elegant, powerful, revolutionary thing.
Link
Basecamp, Backpack, Campfire, Ta-Da Lists and Writeboard by 37signals allow you to collaborate via the web in a manner that was only a dream a few years ago. Each web-app has a free component and are priced in such a manner as to allow for scalability. I’ve integrated some of these web-apps into my daily routine and can’t say enough cool things about them.
Link
If it all sounds too geeky, don’t stop reading yet. You’ll be amazed at the ways a program like that can help people with no technical aspirations. Five programs comprise 37signals’ suite: Basecamp, Campfire, Backpack, Writeboard and Ta-da list. The idea behind all of them is to let people in different places using different equipment work on the same files.
Link
[David Heinemeier Hansson, partner at 37signals] Programming a website isn’t quite child’s play—at least not yet. But thanks to Hansson, it’s no longer rocket science either. Hansson is the producer of Ruby on Rails, an open-source tool that makes it easier to use the Ruby programming language. RoR has made it dramatically faster and cheaper to build dynamic websites—a transformation that’s done much to help make today’s crop of Web 2.0 startups so successful. But it’s not just software developers who appreciate Ruby on Rails; Hansson also used it to create 37signals’s simple-yet-powerful Basecamp, Backpack, and Ta-da Web-based organizational tools. The future of software looks a lot less cumbersome, and for that we have Hansson to thank.
Link
Last summer, Ruby on Rails helped a small team of programmers at EarthLink to contribute to the New Orleans relief effort after Hurricane Katrina slammed into the city. Tasked with building a Web site to help survivors reconnect, the team had less than a day to get the application up and running.
Link
37SIGNALS With its vaunted collection of Web-based collaboration and shared productivity tools (to-do lists, calendars, and so forth), 37signals offers the most genuinely useful service here.
Link
Why have an application to run in your browser? Because for tasks shared between people at different locations, it makes sense to access password-protected sets of work. 37signals offers Backpack (note the domain is backpackit) for simple tasks and the bigger Basecamp for grown-up projects. Tadalist is simpler, being just to-dos (but isn’t that what it’s about?)...
Link
Watch out Salesforce, the popular CRM software. 37signals—named for the 37 unexplained signals from outer space intercepted by the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence project—is tuning in on your frequency, for the small business segment anyway.
Link
The founder of 37Signals, a Chicago-based, web-hosted software company that is not afraid to spill its secrets in a very public way, Fried hopes 37Signals will shatter the taboo about sharing business formulas. The company has disseminated its knowledge through a self-published book titled Getting Real, a well-read blog (Signal vs. Noise), and occasional seminars.
Link
Published with Backpack. This page is subject to the terms of service.