For those who didn’t catch it the first time, Carley did an awesome writeup on Passpack a few months back. SO awesome we jumped at the opportunity to have her represent us at BlogHer. Here’s just one of the videos she did up for the conference:

Check out the all three Passpack videos on Carley’s blog.

Carley is a life coach who helps frazzled families embrace technology and simplify life. So if you’re in NY this week, look up Carley at BlogHer – she’ll be the spunky girl geek defrazzling her fellow event-goers while demoing Passpack on her shiny new iPad.

… hey wouldn’t it be really cool if Passpack unveiled it’s mobile version at the show? Hmmm….

Pre-populated Accounts

Having a hard time getting staff on-board? This idea is for creating shared accounts for them, from inside your paid administrators account. No more waiting for replies to invites.  Vote for it here.

(tip: Download the Getting Started Guide for Administrators PDF)

Suspicious Activity Alerts

Get an email or sms when someone logs in from outside a designated IP range. Vote for it here. If you like this, you might also like the Logs & Audit trail idea.

Password Reminders

Set an email alert when it’s time to change a password or for other “things to do regarding this entry”. What do you think? Let us know how you would use a feature like this.

Account Beneficiary

Delegate a person (or people) that can recovery your account in the event you get abducted by aliens. A fancy alternative to saving a print-out of your Passpack login. Vote for it here.

Passpack OpenID Provider

So you have some OpenID accounts, each with it’s own password, which are stored in your Passpack. Cool. If Passpack were an OpenID provider, would that save you some clicks? Vote for it here.

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Now you folks go off and vote. It’s head’s down working on the mobile version for me. Coming soon to a smart phone near you.

You can access the forum directly by connecting to Uservoice. Or from the Suggestions & Feature Requests link in the Help Center, or from the Feedback tab on the main website.

Your Votes Are Counted

We surveyed all the suggestions you’ve made to date, across our various systems – suggestions box, help tickets, personal emails. The votes you’ve cast have all (hopefully) been migrated. No need to re-vote.

Guess What, We Do That Already

The main reason we opted to switch was so that we could actually reply to you about your ideas – especially when you suggest a feature that Passpack already has. Here’s a few ideas that we didn’t migrate over to the new system.

“It would be nice to be able to organize passwords in folders or something” – “organize password in a multi-level folder tree” - “create password categories”

No folders, we have tags. We even have related tags for an easier drill down. You can view them as a cloud, or a list, or inline in your password table. This should cover all your folder and sub-folder needs. Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi!

“Allow import of tab-delimited text files”

You can use the CSV import option. On the second screen, change the Choose the field separator option from “comma” to “tab”. And you’re ready to go. We’ll change the term “CSV” to make that a clearer.

“On the startup options page, if I choose Password as my primary tab, please add a sub option: Show only Favorite entries. “

Um, that’s there.

“Create a user voice site for Passpack”

Done.

Have Mercy!

We take all your suggestions seriously into consideration. Serious consideration takes lots of time, and planning. We are a two person team and sometimes get bogged down. So bear with us: we’re listening, working and will keep truckin’.

Thanks everyone for all your support and suggestions! You folks are truly fantastic.

For the past 5 months or so I’ve been traveling, while Francesco has been preparing some important Passpack changes. Let’s ignore the traveling since you can read all about that on my personal blog, and jump right into the exciting new stuff.

“Groups”

Just one small word, but chock full of Passpack power. The next update you’ll see to your account is the ability to share not just with single people, but with entire groups. This is incredibly useful for provisioning passwords, for example, to an entire department.

Right before the official release, we’ll stock up the Help Center with how-to articles for you. But here’s the gist:

• Add a shared user to a group and their account gets populated with all the password entries that have been previously shared with that group.
• All changes are automatically propagated across the group.
• Remove someone from a group and all group-shared password entries will disappear from his/her account.

Localization Tool

For those of you wishing you had Passpack in your own language – your moment is coming.

Following the Groups release, we’ll be finishing off a few smaller features to round out the both the free and business packages. The next big thing you can expect though will be a localization tool. We build the tool, and you (the community) can translate until your hearts delight.

Until then, welcome me back, and get ready for 2-3 months of intensive development.

Since you won’t get any reply when you leave a suggestion – write into the help center if you need a reply – but here are a few interesting things we caught in there that I wanted to respond to:

Please allow sharing of logins/passwords with multiple people for free.

We do that! The free account allows you to start active sharing with 1 person AND you can receive passive sharing from an unlimited number of people. Read this article for a how-to.

The mobile app (for the iPhone) should be free.

Hm, well, we don’t have the mobile interface rolled out yet – but it’ll be free.

When I register at a new site, I want save it to Passpack at the same time, rather than having to go back and retype all the info into an entry.

Yup. That’s coming in soon with Auto-login 2.0 (in private Beta testing now).

“Copy password to clipboard” button for logging in to sites without the standard auto login.

You can do that now from your password list, here’s how. Also, the Auto-login 2.0 will extend that feature greatly.

Also, don’t forget that we use the number of votes a feature request gets to help us prioritize the development schedule. Right now, the mobile versions and Desktop improvements are leading the pack – so use the checkboxes on to vote for your favorites.

And we were chosen as a Red Herring 100 Europe finalist.

US Tour

From Boston to San Francisco, it’s been a whirlwind tour pitching, demoing and meeting great people. I actually lost my voice!

The event that spurred all this on was Passpack having been chosen as a finalist to pitch at Mind the Bridge. Special thanks out to Marco Marinucci, Elisabetta Ghisini, Matteo D’Aste and Fabrizio Capobianco — great people, doing wonderful things for the Italian business community. Also congrats to fellow startup Zooppa for taking home the grand prize!

Still a meeting or two to go, then I’m back to HQ to get Passpack 7 wrapped up.

Passpack 7 Testing

We’ve been incorporating feedback from the testers  little by little and are finally beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I can’t thank these guys enough – really an active, constructive crowd.

What’s left to do? A few more usability items that have been waiting for attention (yes, I’m personally the bottleneck on this one) need to be taken care of. Then updating the help materials and… launch!

Hold onto your seats.

Some of you have asked me on twitter and facebook how things are going at Passpack. I know, the underlying question there is really “Will you guys still be standing?”

The short answer is: Yes.

How We’re Riding Out the Recession

1. We Sell

The Pro account release added a revenue stream to help support the company beyond our funding. Break even wasn’t planned for at least another year, but we’re quite happy to be spot on the forecasted free/paid ratio.

We’re also bumping up the release of a Black Box appliance for small enterprises originally planned for much later in 2009. This is still under construction, but go ahead and ask me for more details if you’re interested in beta testing or a taking part in case study.

2. We’ve Cut Spending

Back in late December, we made some tough choices, moving our staff from full-time permanent positions, to on-call and consulting work. Only recently has our new formation stabilized: Francesco full-time on the product, Dani part-time on customer support, Olga part-time for the administrative tasks, Louise chipping in on the blog and me straddling the fence between product development and general administration.

I’ll be pruning the company page over the next couple of days to reflect this.

3. We’re Aiming for Slow & Steady

Rather than pouring resources into trying to get “magic traffic spikes”, we’re focusing inward on the product instead. It’s the better investment.

Right now we’re working on improving the experience for new users just getting started, and on completing those key developments we’ve already got underway. Are we going as fast as we originally wanted to? No (especially given #2). But slow and steady, we’ll win the race.

In other words… it’s a mess [smile].

So we’ve built a new blog! (sneak peek here).

And I’m cleaning things up during the move. Here’s the idea:

• No more support articles. Those go in the knowledge base.
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• The basics, and intro to password articles go in the library (also new) so that (1) we can modify them at will without stomping on basic  blog etiquette and (2) your RSS doesn’t get smothered as we publish more.
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• News-ish post. Basically This Week in Privacy and the occasional comment. Strong personal opinions in the personal blogs only. Mine’s here (I rarely post).

What To Do with the Old Blog?

I LOVE throwing things out. So I’m trying very hard to avoid mass historical revisionism.

The posts on wordpress.com will remain as-is, with commenting closed. But I’m concerned about folks who stumble across old help articles, and get outdated information.

There is, I admit, one temptation I couldn’t resist.  I changed every PassPack to Passpack on the new blog (the fact that it remains unchanged on the old blog irks me… but I’m resisting further temptation).

Can You Help Me Out?

First, what do you think of that shiny new blog ? (I’m still working on it, so comments, pinging etc. are closed for the moment)

And can I (pretty please) replace the help articles here wordpress.com with a simple link to the Help Center?

Anything other ideas for building a better blog?

A Walk Down Memory Lane

We started 2008 with the announcement of Sharing and we’ll start 2009 with the release of Sharing (hooray!). We started 2008 introducing the help ticketing system and 2009 will start off with some self-service help and  automation. That should make things faster!

What Else?

Here are some highlights of everything in between. In 2008 Passpack:

• got funded and came out of Beta

• released an open source host-proof hosting library

• dropped the capital P in PassPack and changed the logo

• got chosen as a Cnet Webware finalist

• released Secure Messaging

• turned 2 years old!

Right now, while the recession raves on, Passpack like every other business world-wide is forced to cut back drastically on costs. So while we may be (alas, I know) running later than expected, we ask for a bit of patience on your part. So sit tight.

What’s in store for 2009?

You guessed it – milestones, challenges and of course more releases. We have a 2009 full of new stuff to roll out, especially during the first few months. We take all our user’s requests into consideration and the majority of them are great ideas but keep in mind that start ups need time to grow.

Passpack Holiday Tip

Start thinking of your New Year’s resolutions ahead of time and while you’re getting your last minute holiday gifts, don’t forget an important one this year…

A top highlight for me was having the chance to ask Tim O’Reilly “Don’t you think there’s a need to keep relevant information private in Web 2.0, or at least to share it with people you really trust?”

Tim answered with a firm“Absolutely”. Thanks, Tim! We think so too.

A few hours later I got to take part in another informal, unexpected event: a 60 second TechCrunch Pitch! improvised by Mike Butcher. Adrenaline was high when Mike invited ten startups to pitch via Twitter. My voice is at minute 12 or so. Thanks again Mike.

If we did or didn’t get the chance to meet in Berlin, I’d be happy to hear your thoughts on the event.

[Photo credit: Luca Sartoni]