Attachments.me Launches Grouping Feature

I met the attachments.me team a while back while they were still up here in Toronto, sharing office space with David Crow (@davidcrow). Unfortunately for all of us, two of Canada’s better tech guys (@jesse_miller,@ryancoe) are now down in the Valley doing their thing.

Attachments are a weird forgotten domain in the tech world. One of the worst user experiences in your life is “hey can you find that document that is attached to that email”. Even in gmail its painful – you try to remember the date, the name, the subject, etc. And attachments.me help solved that problem in a big way by making the attachments themselves searchable. Admittedly I liked attachments.me as a product, but I found it a bit novel. I needed it every once in a while, but not every day, so I sort of forgot about it and went back to my painful way of finding attachments. So I wasn’t super sure where they’d go with the product – would they just integrate with more stuff than gmail? Would they add more context to attachments they sort, etc?

Well, I never really foresaw where they were going next. I just finished using their groups feature, and I think its an awesome replacement for sharepoint and/or google docs! We all have experienced the archaic pain of file servers and sharepoint. Everything is painful about this world. Organizing documents, getting people to put documents into the system and finding them. Its all bad, bad, bad. Its even more unsolved in the family/small office space where user’s don’t have really have any solution (google docs is the closest, but then you have to use google docs and lots of folks still like MS Office). Well, attachments.me has solved this problem with a very easy to use grouping & sharing feature (see the video below for an example).

I actually just finished setting this up to create a group for sharing all the resumes I receive with my colleagues. It was a brilliant solution to the pain of constantly finding and forwarding resumes.

Here’s the attachments.me announcement:

We’ve just released a new feature that we think you’re really going to enjoy. In our continued quest to make email better, we’ve now taken a look at collaboration, and completely reinvented it.

So much collaboration happens in email, and often it’s all around attachments. Your family shares pictures of a trip. Your real estate agent and lawyer send around documents so you can buy that house. Your friends share the latest ridiculous funny dog videos.

Our new Groups feature looks to improve all of that collaboration.

Take a look at our introduction video here:

Then login and give it a shot!

As always, we’d love to hear what you think. Feel free to reply to this email and let us know what you love, what you hate, and what you’d like to see next.

Ted Livingston is insane in the best sort of way

A lot of people talked shit about the recent valuation of Kik. It all seemed a bit insane and I admit the numbers I heard seemed wild. That was until word dropped that Union Square Ventures has joined the deal alongside RRE.

Today Techcrunch is reporting that Ted Livingston is using a chunk of the money that he took off the table in the recent financing in order to further back UWs Velocity dorm/program.

Say what you want to but Ted Livingston gets it and the moment he had the chance to do it: he gave back. That is all too rare a thing. He obviously did well in the transaction that generated the extra $1million, but not THAT well. He is obviously just an incredibly generous person. I am totally inspired.

If we can continue to back and inspire entrepreneurs as passionate as Ted then we just might get somewhere.

Indochino goes big, raises $4m in capital

We first covered Indochino when they launched back in 2007. To say I was excited would be an understatement and anyone who knows me knows I have been advertising their stuff to anyone who will listen since then. The news has finally landed that they have closed a $4million round led by Madrona Ventures.

Indochino is also one of the original Boris Wertz Deals™ and was further backed by Wertz’ Burda Digital relationship.

More than anything we have seen Kyle and the team remain true to their vision over the years and while I am sure they have hit their share of bumps along the way, they have never wavered in their dedication to their concept.