Moredays: A Pretty Startup with Potential

Somewhere on the web, someone just gave up on a productivity tool. How can anyone be more productive, enjoy using organizational tools or platforms, if the whole process is too complicated? A San Francisco startup, which just opened in public beta, may have some solutions.

The development team at Moredays has created what they believe to be a better way to plan, organize and record one’s life. The bootstrapped San Francisco startup streamlines and beautifies organization, and adds in a dash of fun. A combination scrapbook-calendar, Moredays promises a lot, and has to go a long way to deliver.

Ups & Downs of Scrapbook Organizers

Filip Molcan, co-Founder and CEO of Moredays, describes his team’s mission best. He says, “Moredays solves a user’s pain by being far less complex, and a lot more fun than other calendars and productivity tools.”

Looking at Moredays’ design, it is easy to see aesthetics and a feel for art are prevalent. As the screenshot below shows, this development is heavily design-centric. This is true in the user experience as well. From “skinning” your personal dashboard to easy navigation, the development is relatively painless to adopt, minus some beta bugs inherent to any beta startup no matter how advanced. Remember that Google kept Gmail in beta for years before being confident enough to take the beta label down.

Aside Moredays’ artsy look and feel, the combination digital scrapbook-organizer & calendar is easier to use than more complex services and products like Evernote, Outlook, or similar, and somehow makes more sense.  Scheduling events, synchronizing with your Google Calendar, interacting with contacts, and so on, make the potential for effective time management possible.

Add in cool stamps, image aspects, and even sketching (drawing) options, and Moredays is a unique tool many will enjoy using. The screen above also shows uses for Google maps in conjunction with calendar options.  Moredays’ tabs provide access to; sketcher, calendar, tasks, notes, contacts, inbox, and maps. Meanwhile, the image below shows notes on a trip to the Roman town Augusta Raurica, with images, Google map aspect, and specifics of the annotation. This element in turn, integrates with a user’s other notes and subjective tabs. Google Calendar and contacts synchronization takes the service to the next level.

Moredays’ positive aspects far outweigh the startup’s negative ones, at least for an early stage development. Bugs like map quirkiness, navigational dead ends, and other aspects related to profile preferences not working yet, make the tool a bit clunky for less savvy users. Overall, I found quite a lot of missing or conflicting feature utility.

 Listed below are the basic feature additions and coming ones we were appraised of:

• Moredays is now open to everyone, no more invitation-only beta
• Google Synchronization – Synced with Google Calendar and Google Contacts
• New stamps, sketches and backgrounds
• Mobile apps (iPhone and iPad) coming in January
• Android and Windows Phone 7 apps in early 2012
• Next features – social networks support, Evernote synchronization, iCloud support, video, and more
• Many fixed bugs and enhancements over the private beta version

Pretty Is As Pretty Does

Put simply, Moredays is an easy-to-use digital organizer, but with more attention paid to user experience, creativity, and aesthetics. Using the app is a lot like scribbling in one’s own Moleskine folio, unlike using a cloud tool or enterprise platform. This makes Moredays a natural for Mom’s diary, a teenager’s photo scrapbook, and so forth. Where some life scheduling tools are austere and clinical, Moredays is very personal.

This development launched just a few weeks ago into private beta via TechCrunch Disrupt. Last week Moredays’ development team opened the doors to allow everyone access.  In addition, to celebrate adding nearly 10,000 users in an amazingly short time, the startup is giving away some tools best suited to Moredays’ coming utility. iPad and iPhone flexibility are coming soon, so user 10,000 gets the iPad2 all set to maximize their fun using the service.

So far, the web’s first time management tool based on images and graphics has a lot of potential. However, fixing bugs (and there are quite a few) and delivering on promised features will make all the difference for this unique project. If current user numbers say anything, people are adopting Moredays quite quickly, but as the saying goes, “pretty is as pretty does.” 

Phil Butler is editor-in-chief of Everything PR and senior partner at Pamil Visions PR. He’s a widely cited authority on beta startups, search engines and public relations issues, and he has covered tech news since 2004. You can follow Phil on Twitter: @Philbo.