Whenever we ask our users what features they’d like to see in Hojoki, the most frequently heard answer by far is “please integrate X”. What we all love about the web is that there are so many tools available. However, that makes it pretty tough for us to integrate them all. That is the reason why today we bring you a generic integration for standard RSS and Atom feeds.

Many custom-hosted apps like Redmine or Trac offer feeds that can now be included in Hojoki. As with other apps, you can decide to connect the feed to workspaces. Embedded images will be imported as well and attached to the feed item.

The RSS/Atom integration is a first step towards a public API that will let you build your own integrations. Our major goal with it right now is to learn about how you’ll use this feature and what apps you’re going to integrate. For this purpose, the integration is limited to a 15 minutes interval and one feed right now. We’ll increase the number of feeds over time.

Our second new integration, Google Tasks, has long been on our todo list. It’s a nice and simple todo list app that many of us use for the daily madness of small personal todos that pop up from GMail. Now you can add your activity from there to Hojoki. If you want, you can even let your teammates know what you’re up to by adding your Tasks feed to a shared workspace.

Let us know how you want to use the RSS/Atom integration. As always, we’re happy to hear your feedback.

Task management

Task management is the newest big feature we’ve added to Hojoki. This brings tasks to all the items from your apps. You can assign tasks to you or your team on Dropbox files, Evernote notes, or whatever you’re working on, wherever you’re working.

Here’s an example for you. I’m working on a blog post. As I’m working on it, updates come into the Hojoki Marketing workspace where my colleagues and I work together.

When I feel like the text is ready, I assign the Google Drive file to Martin and ask him to add graphics to the post. You can see how this would look below.

He gets notified about this task and sees it in the workspace. He can jump right into Google Drive from Hojoki and complete the task. When finished, he can simply check it off. After that I can go ahead and publish the blog.

It’s as easy as that. You have all your content in one platform and now you can keep your workflow and tasks in that same platform.

Dashboard

We’ve added a dashboard of your workspaces to give you a better overview of what’s going on. From one look at your dashboard, you can see what’s been happening lately. You can jump into any of your workspaces from here to see exactly what’s been going on.

You can drag and drop the workspaces on the dashboard to change the order they’re arranged in.

@mentions

We’ve also made it easier for you to discuss updates with your team by adding @mentions. This includes auto-suggest to make including your team as simple as possible.

We hope this improvement makes messaging more familiar to what you’re used to in other communication tools.

We also recently released integrations for Astrid, Producteev, and Podio. You can read more about all that here.

For a first overview, we created a screencast for you to have a quick walkthrough of the new Hojoki. Our focus was on collaboration: it’s even easier now to create shared workspaces, we introduced a dashboard view to provide an overview on your workspaces, and there’s much more you can do in a workspace now:

We have received an overwhelming number of requests for Podio to be integrated in Hojoki. For those of you not familiar with the app, it is a collaborative work platform that lets you create your own project management apps. Podio’s integration will bring all updates from Podio into your newsfeed and give you the ability to respond to comments from within Hojoki. At Hojoki we use custom-made Podio apps to handle some standard workflows like the process of planning, building and releasing a new integration.

Astrid offers comprehensive task management. It has been ranked the most popular to-do list manager by Lifehacker. With the feedback from our users and the app’s notoriety, it only made sense to have Astrid brought into Hojoki. You’ll be able to see all the tasks you and your collaborators create in Astrid in your Hojoki newsfeed and comment on them directly from within Hojoki.

The suggestion to integrate Producteev has long been on our to-do list. Producteev focuses on simplicity and now life can be even more accommodating having Producteev under the same roof as all your other favorite apps. Lifehacker rated it as one of the top 5 group task management tools and it’s easy to see why! As with Astrid and Podio, you’ll see updates in your newsfeed and can create synced comments from within Hojoki.

Thank you for all your suggestions so far and remember, if you want to have more apps integrated in Hojoki all you need to do is show your support on Hojoki’s feature requests forum.

We’ll be launching many new, awesome features so stay tuned to find out what they’ll be!

We’ll have a booth at the conference, so if you’re around just pop on by and say hello. We’re going to be demoing Hojoki for everyone interested in getting a personal walkthrough. There’s also going to be some fun games to play where we’ll be giving away all sorts of prizes.

If you would like to set up a personal meeting in San Francisco, please contact us at adam@hojoki.com.

Let’s save you time by helping you be more productive. Here are some new features and hidden tricks Hojoki has cooked up just for you:

Prioritized feed: This new mode for the webapp’s feed brings what’s relevant into focus and minimizes everything else.	Shared notifications & messaging: Create workspaces, add content from your apps, and invite others; they too can benefit from notifications and private messaging.
Customized push notifications: With our mobile app, you can choose what alerts you receive according to app.	Synced comments: Hojoki lets you handle conversations from a rising number of apps all in one place, including Box (new), Trello, Github, and Basecamp.

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Santa uses our recent sync feature to handle all communication around all his apps with Hojoki while delivering presents around the world.

This is how Santa’s Hojoki looks like:

We wish you a great time with friends and family and a Happy New Year!

Your Hojoki crew

The Hojoki team loves Christmas and loves to give out presents. And so this is our present to you: Many of you have requested that we integrate Bitbucket and Pinboard. Well, good news! We just rolled out those two for everyone in Hojoki.

Bitbucket is a famous code hosting app for developers. It gives you Git or Mercurial repositories in the cloud, combined with collaboration features. Many people especially appreciate that Bitbucket supports private repos for up to five team members free of charge.

Hojoki shows you what is going on in your Bitbucket repositories including commits and discussions. You can directly reply from within Hojoki and we sync your comment back to Bitbucket.

Pinboard is a very special bookmarking app. It’s basic functionality is similar to our existing integration Delicious, but with a special focus on speed and data security. As it is a paid service ($9.95 one-time-only fee), they don’t have a high signup count, but have a very active user base. In fact, Pinboard was on top of our feature requests list for a long time.

Hojoki provides you with a record of your own saved links in Pinboard. You can comment on it for yourself or share it with other people. Hojoki adds the social functionality which Pinboard doesn’t have in the first place.

We hope you enjoy the new integrated apps family members. Don’t hesitate to fire your feedback to support@hojoki.com.

Free 25GB + Sync accounts are now being offered by our friends at Box in light of Hojoki’s relaunch celebration! As you may have already noticed, Hojoki has announced a lot of exciting news recently and to congratulate us, Box is adding one more surprise to the mix.

Hojoki users can participate in this promotion by signing up for a new account with Box and will automatically receive 25GB of storage space plus Sync free of charge! New and old Hojoki users alike are invited to take advantage of this limited-time opportunity.

All you have to do is log in to Hojoki or sign up for free if you don’t have an account yet. You’ll find the promotion link on your Hojoki dashboard.

A big thanks to our integration partner, Box, for celebrating our exciting news together with us and our users!

After raising a seed round from KIZOO Technology Capital last year, we are proud to report that Hojoki has secured a fresh injection of capital from KIZOO Technology Capital and Creathor Venture. This seven-digit amount will be used to push product development.

KIZOO Technology Capital is a German investor focused on seed and early stage investments in the areas of SaaS, Internet & Mobile Services, and Social Applications. With more than 25 years of experience, the new investor, Creathor Venture is one of the most established European venture capitalists, having funded more than 200 companies as a lead investor and participated in over 20 IPOs.

We are very happy to have such an amount of experience on the board. Our joint goal is to build the future of productivity apps in the cloud and our recent release is a huge step towards this goal. And we have big plans, so there is even more to come next year!

Press release 29 November 2012