It’s been several months and we wanted to provide a general update as to how all things RescueTime were performing. The good news is we have many, many great customers who are passionate and vocal about our products and services, who care deeply about their productivity and their ability to manage the ever shrinking amount of time that we all have to get things done. Here’s a glimpse at some of the team’s accomplishments over the last 3 months.
Features
Rolled Out Single Sign-On Services
If you already have a Google, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn account you are in luck – you no longer have to rely on RescueTime for login credentials. You can safely use your open authentication ID and keep the password problems down to a minimum. This has been a massively adopted feature with over 28,000+ users using this service. Thanks to our CTO Brian for bringing this functionality to all of our RescueTime users.
RescueTime Goes Mobile
Deployed first iteration of our mobile solution with an Android Application that extends RescueTime’s capabilities to your phone. Our Chief Architect Mark is our primary mobile developer and with a very rough set of objectives set out to extend the RescueTime feature set to the Android OS. We are now at over 2000 installs and rising! The great flexibility of Android development allows for Call Reporting and app usage time tracking. In the next month, maybe even earlier, we will be rolling out version 2.0 of our Android application, featuring a new offline time tracking tool.
And for those still asking what about iOS/iPhone development? Mark is already working on that as I type this up.
Robust Affiliate Program for Resellers and Referrals
We launched a major revision to our referral and reselling agreements in June 2011. Our Chief Architect, Mark spent a significant amount of time in development and planning to create a proper Affiliate program that could grow with our users, while also building relationships with partners willing to beta test, like TrackLabor. Now our users and other partners can resell RescueTime and receive a significant cut of each referred account’s payment. As of this morning we have onboarded 21 new affiliates and partners, and they received their first payouts in July. This has been one of the biggest uptakes in our business and we are grateful to have such evangelical customers and affiliates.
To sign up to be RescueTime affiliate please visit: http://www.rescuetime.com/earn.
Launching Profiles
Profiles – what a great way to demonstrate to your colleagues, mentors and others exactly how you spend your time, what skills do you possess and what are the sites you most oftenly use for reference. Right now, we use this as SEO juice and to look at a high level whether a candidate may be a good fit for our Introductions program – more on this later.
RescueTime Unveils Introductions – http://www.rescuetime.com/intros
Definitely the most talked about development at RescueTime has been around launching the pilot for Introductions. Introductions is where we partner with some high profile recruiting partners and try to attract some of the world’s best Developers, DevOps folks, Systems Engineers and User Interface experts. We were fortunate enough to appear on TechCrunch as “RescueTime Launches Introductions, A Carfax Report For Top Job Candidates.” We have successfully partnered with Netflix, Dropbox, eBay, JustinTV, SEOmoz, Cheezburger and Valve on finding quality candidates for unfilled positions within each organization. This program is on-going so we’re not ready to share the numbers on this just yet, but the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.
RescueTime Trends – http://www.rescuetime.com/trends
We are just scratching the surface here, but our CEO Joe has successfully kicked off custom Trends projects with some top universities and mainstream media. More exciting announcements soon!
Small Fix for Team Accounts
For Team users, we are continuing to improve the way in which Team accounts are managed. We’ve recently added a Delete users options for those companies who had employees leave. Previously, we never had a way to delete expired users entirely and it was always a custom request to Support.
Press
- Google’s Les Paul Doodle consumes record 5.3M hours, RescueTime estimates – Most trafficked story of the day on Geekwire!
- Tech moves: New hires at Point Inside, RescueTime, etc.
What to Expect in the Next Few Months from RescueTime
- Android v2.0 – coming very soon!
- iOS/iPhone Application
- RescueTime Varsity – Program to engage college students, teachers and administrators
- Improving the RescueTime Sign up and Activation process
- Additional features for our RescueTime Solo Pro and Team users