Michal Marek An event called GeekCon is held every year in the premises of the Israeli sports center Wingate Institute. It's an invite-only event, and as the name suggests, GeekCon attendees are exclusively tech enthusiasts. The author and patron of the project is Eden Shochat. He also visited the Wingate Institute in October 2009 and watched with interest the flood of amazing and completely pointless technical creations of the participants.
The strongest first impression on Shochat was made by Alice - an intelligent sex virgin who could speak and even respond to her owner. As Eden Shochat soon learned, Alice was created by a team led by twenty-five-year-old hacker Omer Perchik. Shochata Perchik was immediately interested. He appreciated his engineering, but above all his leadership skills. Omer Perchik was able to assemble an all-star team for even the most stupid project in the world. The two men stayed in touch, and after a few months, Perchik shared his plans for another project with his new friend.
This time it was a much more serious project, the result of which was to create a set of mobile applications for productivity. First on the agenda was a progressive to-do list. The beta version of Perchik's software was already being tested by hundreds of thousands of Android users at the time, but Perchik wanted to use his newfound experience to start over and completely rewrite the app. But of course, it takes a bit of money to create the perfect to-do list and bring a whole new perspective to mobile productivity tools. Their source was supposed to be Shochat, and in the end it was not an insignificant amount. Perchik hired a team of military geniuses for the project from the Israeli military Unit 8200, which is essentially the equivalent of the American National Security Agency. And this is how the revolutionary Any.do task book was created, which has been downloaded by millions of people over time and whose appearance was noticeably inspired by iOS 7 as well.
Unit 8200 is a military intelligence service and has national security protection in its job description. For these reasons, the members of the Unit, for example, carefully monitor and analyze data from the Internet and the media. Unit 8200, however, is far from limited to observation and even participated in the creation of the Stuxnet cyberweapon, thanks to which Iran's nuclear efforts were destroyed. The members of the Unit are almost legends in Israel and their work is admirable. They are known to basically look for needles in haystacks. It is instilled in them that they can accomplish anything and their resources are vast. An XNUMX-year-old member of the team tells his superior that he needs a supercomputer and will get it within twenty minutes. Barely grown people work with data centers of unimaginable capacity and work on the most critical projects.
Perchik basically got his connection to Unit 8200 already during his student years. He regularly went out for fun with his friend Aviv, who got into Unit 8200. In a typical drunken start before going to the dance club, Perchik found himself at Aviv's house and told him that he didn't just come to drink today. This time Perchik didn't plan to go to the dance, but he asked Aviv for a list of his colleagues and decided to go around and check them out. He started recruiting team members for Perchik's project.
Before the plan for the Any.do project was born in his head, Perchik studied business and law. He made extra money creating websites and doing search engine optimization for small businesses. He quickly became bored with this job, but soon became excited by the idea of creating a smart, fast and clean tool to manage his tasks. So in 2011, Perchik began to assemble his team with Aviva's help. It now consists of 13 people, half of whom come from the aforementioned Unit 8200. Perchik presented his vision to the team. He wanted more than a pretty looking to-do list. He wanted a powerful tool that not only organizes tasks, but also helps with their completion. For example, when you add a product to Perchik's dream to-do list, it should be possible to buy it directly in the application. When you use such a to-do list to schedule a meeting, you should be able to, for example, order a taxi from the app to take you to that meeting.
To make this possible, Perchik had to find experts in the analysis of written text, as well as someone who could build an algorithm according to his requirements. Meanwhile, work on the user interface has begun. Perchik initially decided to favor Android because he believed that he had a better chance to stand out and appeal to the masses on that platform. Right from the start, Perchik wanted to avoid any hint of skeuomorphism. The vast majority of exercise books on the market tried to imitate real paper pads and notebooks, but Perchik decided on an unconventional path of minimalism and purity, which corresponded more to the Windows Phone operating system at the time. Perchik's team wanted to create an electronic gadget for everyday use, not an artificial imitation of office supplies.
The main currency of the current version of Perchik's Any.do task book is the "Any-do moment" function, which will remind you every day at a set time that it is time to plan your day. Through "Any-do moment", the user should get used to the application and make it his daily companion. The app is also full of touch gestures and tasks can be entered by voice. Any.do was launched on iOS in June 2012, and now the app has more than 7 million downloads (on both Android and iOS combined). The flat, clean and modern design of the application also caught the attention of Apple. After the forced departure of Scott Forstall, Jony Ive got to head the team that was supposed to create a new and more modern version of the stagnant iOS, and Any.do was said to be one of the applications that told him in which direction the look of iOS should go. In addition to Any.do, experts consider the Rdio application, Clear and the Letterpress game to be the most inspiring design products for iOS 7.
When iOS 7 was introduced in June, it shocked with big changes and a complete departure from the previous design philosophy. The currency of iOS 7 is "slimmer" and more elegant fonts, a minimum of decorations and an emphasis on minimalism and simplicity. Gone are all the substitutes for leather, paper, and the green billiard cloth known from Game Center. In their place, monochromatic surfaces, simple inscriptions and the simplest geometric shapes appeared. In short, iOS 7 puts the emphasis on content and prioritizes it over fluff. And the exact same philosophy was previously held by Any.do.
This June, Perchik and his team released a second iOS app called Cal. It is a special calendar capable of cooperation with Any.do, which in terms of design and use follows all the routines that users have come to love with the Any.do task list. The team plans to continue building productivity apps, with email and notes apps as another planned tool.
If the team behind Any.do reaches out to a wider user base, they will surely find a way to monetize them, even though both of the already released apps are available for free download. For example, one of the ways to profit can be cooperation with different merchants. Such cooperation has already begun, and it is now possible to order taxis through Uber and send gifts through Amazon and the Gifts.com server directly from the Cal app. Of course, Cal has a commission on purchases. The question is how much people want apps like Any.do. The company received one million dollars from the aforementioned investor Shochat and other smaller donors back in 2011. Another $3,5 million landed in the team's account this May. However, Perchik is still trying to find new donors and even moved from Israel to San Francisco for this purpose. So far, it can be said that they are celebrating success. Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, YouTube founder Steve Chen, former important Twitter employee Othman Laraki and Lee Linden working for Facebook have recently become strategic supporters.
However, the market potential is still uncertain. According to Onavo's surveys, no to-do app is successful enough to occupy at least one percent of active iPhones. This kind of software just scares people. As soon as too many tasks accumulate for them, users get scared and prefer to delete the application for their own peace of mind. The second problem is that the competition is huge and basically no application of this kind manages to gain any kind of dominance. Developers at Any.do can theoretically change the situation with their planned e-mail and notes applications. It will thus create a unique complex package of interconnected applications, which will differentiate these individual products from the competition. The team can already boast of a certain success and the great importance of Any.do for iOS 7 can warm its heart. However, creating a truly successful productivity suite is still an unconquered challenge. Developers have big plans for their apps, so let's keep our fingers crossed for them.
So the task list created by the Israeli NSA. Amazing.
Nicely and engagingly written article. I tried the app and in my opinion it doesn't add much even against the weak internal calendar and reminders. Maybe someone will correct me...
The only advantage of this application is the ability to delegate tasks. Some competitors (papirius, Flow, Wunderlist, ..) offer delegation, but only for an annual fee. A simple to-do list with the possibility of delegation would be enough for me. Easily paid, but without annual fees. Does anyone know of one?