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10000ft Hopes To Reach A New Altitude For Online Project Management

It’s not fair to include 10,000ft with other startups in a way. The company is an offshoot of Artefact, a technology product design company that has been around for six years, whose portfolio includes work with teams from Xbox, HTC, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Samsung, and Amazon. They’re definitely not B-team, or your cash-pinched, bootstrapping variety startup. Confession: I spent way too long on their home page scrolling through their past projects. This bunch must be inspiring to work for.

 

 

Yet, with 10,000ft, the company has attempted to traverse the ridge from consulting to creating a product of their own. And they have to climb up–well, maybe not from the ground floor, but below cloud-level anyway–like a whole lot of other people.

 

So What Is 10,000ft?

10,000ft is a collaborative tool for managing people and projects. Originally, the project started in-house as a way to manage Artefact’s own workload. When they couldn’t find another web tool that adequately combined resource planning and time tracking, they put their tried and tested skills to use and built their own. After beta testing nearly 300 users, including companies like Weber Shandwick, General Assembly, and Astro Studios, the software is now for lease, starting at $49/month.

 

 

What’s It Look Like?

Not surprising, the interface is visually stunning. Every icon, button, screen is easy on the eyes. Scheduling is as simple as dragging and dropping assignments. Other features include Facebook style activity feeds, analytics, as well as personalized pages for team members with adjustable levels of access and permission.

 

What’s It Do?

With real-time project status,10,000ft keeps tabs on man hours for a project. This makes the software a very useful budgeting tool. Add a person to a project, even for a day, and 10,000ft will calculate if a project can still keep within financial bounds. If you need to orchestrate large teams across big projects,10,000ft ensures that the expenditures remain visible.

 

Who’s Behind 10,000ft?

Artefact hopes 10,000ft will appeal to similar companies that have several autonomous workers. CEO and lead designer Martijn van Tilburg notes, “Today’s creative workers, regardless of the industry they are in, demand tools that foster autonomy and independence yet provide them with the guidelines and information to deliver quality work…By visualizing the critical information and facilitating the communication flow across teams and management, 10,000ft empowers organizations to democratize resourcing and project decisions to keep things on track.”

 

 

Martijn studied architecture and industrial design in the Netherlands and has a Master’s of Science in Industrial Design Engineering. He holds more than 10 design and utility patents for software products, and many others pending. In 2003, he was recognized with a Gold Industrial Design Excellence Award (IDEA) for his design work on future user experiences for Information Workers.

 

He’ll have to lace up the hiking boots at 10,000ft tight to compete with the likes of Basecamp, literally hundreds of other web project managers, or even Seattle neighbors LiquidPlanner and Daptiv.

 

I command a team of one. Sadly the budget is very easy to track. And not even 10,000ft’s design team could make my numbers look pretty. Given Artefact’s track record, there’s reason to believe the view will look profitable from where they stand.

 

Visit 10,000ft now for a free 30-day trial.

 

Photo and Video Credits

10000ft.com

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