Stikkit (parent company is values of n)

Founded: 2006

Sector: Office 2.0, organization

Headquarters: Portland, OR

Management: Rael Dornfest, Founder and CEO, Lead Programmer, also program chair for the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference

Funding: Angel investors led by Ram Shriram of Sherpalo Ventures.

Secret Sauce: A big part of getting organized is clearing your mind. A good way to do this is to write things down. Or type things out. Get rid of the clutter. There are quite a few web apps floating around that attempt to emulate the sticky note – the yellow square format is still very popular. Most of them work with the web to save bookmarks and text snippets and almost all of them are free offerings.The result is a bit of healthy competition, with each surviving app evolving itself in different directions and adding features left and wrong. My browser is a mess from testing them all out and I don’t feel any more clear in my mind. What gives?

Of all the stickers/bookmarking/annotation/note-collecting apps we tried we think we picked the most useful tool in this space by choosing Stikkit to present at UTR. Stikkit has a very clean UI and some nice features you could actually use in an office setting: tagging is easy and intuitive, including ‘magic words’ that direct your stikkies to go where you want them to. Stikkies work as to-do items and the calendar feature is accessible in several easy ways. You can also manage contacts (aka ‘peeps’) and import contacts from anywhere that uses the vCard format. It’s also about “me-first” meaning you can keep your stuff to yourself, you don’t have to (but you can) share everything with the outside world. It’s not networking, it’s working, people! They also have an open API for people who have less to do than I do and want to trick out their stikkies. I had some problems with Stikkies getting “stuck” that I think I can prevent by telling the app not to “think”, I made a to-do note about that but I haven’t done it yet.

Seen and Heard: MOMB says some stuff I forgot to mention: “As you type, Stikkit watches for appointments, to-dos, people, bookmarks and more, magically extracting and organizing the important details. It’s like having a personal assistant following along after you.” And oh ya, Mashable reminds me that “You can also enter a name and email and have that info automatically added to your contacts list… Stikkit is particularly well made and very useful.”