Aiming to “make everything taskable” across any platform, device service or channel, cross-platform task management provider Producteev is really spreading its wings.  Their service is now available as a web app, iPhone and Android mobile app, and Windows and Mac desktop app, in order to become more flexible and hyper-connected through social media, cloud services and mobile devices. Incorporating 7 million tasks on its platform, Producteev looks forward to enabling a universal task manager that allows people to create and store tasks across the range of platforms, devices, services and locations –from email, to IMs, voicemails, and notes, as well as cloud services, sites on work-based PCS, personal laptops, tablets and mobile phones.

“We’re very pleased to have more than 1,000 paying business customers choose our product over the many others out there. Additionally, we’re thrilled to see the growing adoption by thousands of businesses and individuals selecting Producteev every month. We’ll continue to focus on meeting the needs of our customers by delivering the best product available in the market that provides an exceptional user experience,” stated Ilan Abehassera, Producteev’s co-founder and CEO.

“Producteev’s new offering brings task management one step closer to being universal. Much like Evernote has done for notes and DropBox has done for files, Producteev will do for task management.”

Producteev is one of the only task managers that integrates complementary and competing services such as Google Apps, Google Tasks, Remember the Milk, Astrid, GMail, IM clients and many more. The task manager is also the first to fit in TaskRabbit’s newly launched API, allowing users to to outsource any task from Producteev to TaskRabbit with just a click. Producteev’s services are important for today’s growing number of businesses and individuals tapping into their larger social graph of friends, family and local community or the general public to get help, retain services, or employ specialized skills in order to complete tasks. According to a recent study by Daily Crowdsource, there is a 400 percent increase in crowdsourcing and 2011, and it’s expected to increase by 355 percent more.

Appealing to the platform gods

In branching out across all major platforms, Producteev realizes the true demands behind accessibility in this day and age.  It’s a challenge for any business to create interfaces for the web and mobile devices, but Producteev takes things a step further in offering a unified experience through its user interface, while also synchronizing across dozens of services.  But it wasn’t an easy journey.

“We have an iOS guy, a Windows guy, an Android guy and a web developer,” Abehassera admits.  “And we have a user interface specialist who’s also working with us in house on all the apps to ensure a common experience.  But we didn’t start this way.  We started with the iPhone and the web, the rest was outsourced, and this didn’t work long term.  We tried a lot of solutions for our first Android app and each of those were a total failure, so we decided to hire in-house.

“When you’re launching things like sub-tasks and printing, you need to port them on all your apps.  This is the biggest challenge and we just made sure our product had a very clear roadmap on when we should issue new versions on which platforms with which features.  We want all features across all apps.”

Competition and the future

Producteev isn’t without its competition.  The mobile boom has presented a huge opportunity for productivity apps and services, bringing the field into the limelight as one of the most popular app categories on iOS and Android marketplaces. One area the competition will really heat up is the enterprise. In fact, a similar service called HiTask just rolled out a software update a couple of days ago, to improve task management and workflow for businesses.

While Abehassera insists that most of his competitors focus on building a good web app with a mobile companion, Producteev is focused on “building the best on each platform, with mobile becoming really important in enterprise and task management.  Moving forward, the enterprise will certainly be a poignant sector for growth, and Producteev will incorporate this into its marketing strategy for this year as its newer clients tend to be larger organizations.  But the consumer sector is still important for Abehassera, with another goal of consumerizing task management for the masses.

Contributors: Kristina Farrah