The First Jott Users Group

Living in Seattle has some really nice perks. We are close to the mountains, which are supposed to get 26 inches of snow tonight. Seattle is a big city, but with less crime, less traffic, less pollution, less of the bad stuff.

But one of the cool things is that Seattle is one of those startup centers. Okay, its not the Bay Area, but lots of really cool things have come from or are going on in Seattle.

One of those is Jott.

Being a Jott user in the vicinity of their headquarters, I got invited to the First Jott Users Group and I got to meet some of the cool people from Jott, check out their digs, munch on some hummus and spinach dip, give some feedback and learn about what they have in store for the future.

We were asked to keep most things confidential, and I will. You won't be able to get it out of me; I'm pretty tough that way. But what I can say is that the Jotters are doing a great job keeping it simple, making it better , making it fit into people's work flow and then adding slick functionality on top of that. They even talked of "hyper-cool" things that they couldn't even tell us, they were so super secret. They've got lots of cool things coming.

Jott is a great company and product. With their voice recognition, you can cross the boundary from your voice conversation to text message or to an email. As more and more states pass laws against texting while driving, this will be a valuable function for many people. With Jott Links, I can Jott to Zillow, my Google Calendar, find products on Amazon or most importantly to me, add tasks to my Remember the Milk to do list. You can even make reminders out of your Jotts. It was neat to learn how some of the Jott team wants reminders on time and others early (I'm in the on time camp, btw). The company is also very focused on the customer. It was cool to meet the people that actually read and respond to my Jott Feedbacks. They really care and want to make a product that people need and can use, not just one that is cool.

Another thing that was cool was to be able to meet other Jott users (Jotters are people that work at Jott, so we'll have to figure out something else to call the rest of us). It was neat to see how some people were all about the web interface and others about links and others about getting collaborative, corporate teams to use the tool. We got to see how people use Jott, their hacks and more importantly, learn about some of the old skool, almost forgotten Jott techniques.

Since these are not secret, just lost, I will share them here. At the "Who do you want to Jott," prompt pressing 1 will automatically create a Jott to self. This is helpful in a noisy environment when you can't get past the voice recognition. Pressing # will end your Jott, again useful in a noisy environment. As voice recognition became better and noise canceling headsets were more prevalent, the old style of Jotting was lost.

Check out Jott. Sign up for Jott. Tell them I sent you.