DEMO: MyQuire Launches Simple Project Management Tool

Another company launching at DEMO is MyQuire. I sat down with VP of Business Development Michael Dawson for a demo of the MyQuire application in San Francisco. MyQuire was created to let people work the way they want to work. It's a project management tool that strives to be simpler than the others by allowing you to manage your projects and time on your terms.

Currently MyQuire combines project management and real-time conferencing tools. They are currently working on the next step which is to create a virtual place to work together. The goal is to be the place where you can pull in your relationships, do your work, manage others work and then deliver the final product. Michael noted that their core belief for success is having MyQuire be incredibly easy-to-use and not force people to work in a certain way and lastly that the app feels human. Michael says their biggest competition are those workers who use Word/Email as a project management replacement.

The pricing model is based on premium subscriptions where the first five projects are free and unlimited projects are $9.99 a month. The team is privately-funded and the round will take them through next July.

MyQuire is well designed and the usability is high. I think the idea and concept for MyQuire is good but it seems to be missing some important functions. It doesn't tie into LinkedIn or the other services, it's a closed system so feedback left for another person stays inside MyQuire. Since the MyQuire team talk about facebook and MySpace and the others, they need to import/export from them as well.

The other concern I have is that you can't manage pieces of work individually - what I mean is that you can't report that a job is 25% done, instead you have to create multiple tasks within a major task and then hope the other workers report as each one is complete. It almost seems as if they made it too simple. I guess it will work for a simple "item-finish" scenario but I can't understand how it would work for say a web team of five trying to create a client Web site. You would need to micro-manage the project just to know what's going on.

CEO David Steinberg says, "We've been offering a very preliminary version of our product – about half of the functionality we’re debuting at DEMO – for nine months now. Even as a prototype, thousands of people are using it. We’re really excited that we’ll be able to start offering people the product we’ve always wanted to deliver – a tool that will make a difference in their lives". So maybe I am wrong. What's your thoughts? Give the product a try and please report back.

Sample screenshots: