Pingpad – A Collaboration Tool To Boost Your Productivity

There are a variety of productivity apps making the rounds lately including offerings from Trello, Slack, and a few others. One of the newest players in the game is Pingpad.

The app originally launched in September 2015. It’s a social collaboration tool to help users communicate during the length of a project. A recent update introduced task management features, giving users yet another way to remain productive.

The task management support also puts the Pingpad app more in line with the competition, namely Trello. The new features allow teams to coordinate and organize efforts across a project by updating goals, tasks and completion status.

Staying Productive Throughout the Day and Night

Ross Mayfield is the CEO of the company responsible for Pingpad. He explained that the Kanban logical control system is the main structure of the service. The idea behind the app is to help users remain productive at all times “no matter whether you’re at home or at work.”

“There’s a big shift because of mobile and social,” Mayfield said, discussing the reason his company created Pingpad. “There are new platforms, devices and user expectations. What was lacking is something that served the need for communicating, collaborating and coordinating.”

They designed Pingpad with one core element in mind: that a majority of users will shift to mobile devices. The team wants its core audience to be able to use the app to get everything done.

In other words, it hopes to eliminate the need for keeping a laptop or desktop nearby. Not that it’s going to single-handedly make the computer market defunct, but it wants users to have a choice between the platforms and not feel the need to migrate to a computer to finish complicated projects.

How Is Pingpad Different?

Unlike Trello, Slack, Asana or similar platforms, Pingpad is simple, and just about any team can use it for any project. Sadly, there are no built-in features that support versioning, dependencies or strict deadlines. Essentially, it’s not meant to be a corporate- or enterprise-centered productivity app. Instead, projects are broken up into individual segments or tasks. These tasks are organized into one of four different categories: To Do, No Status, Doing and Done.

As the team completes each task, it can effectively mark it with the appropriate category, letting everyone else know the current status. In this respect, it’s not meant to be relied on by professional project managers or enterprise users — as we already mentioned.

Pingpad is designed for the folks who just need a little more help organizing personal projects, goals or achievements. It’s great for students, teachers or smaller teams who just want to remain updated on the current status of a task or project.

That doesn’t mean it’s not a powerful collaboration and organization tool, however; on the contrary.

Pingpad offers shared notes and lists, which multiple users can collaborate on simultaneously and in real time. You can compare it to Google Docs when multiple users are collaborating on a single note. It also offers a robust communication and messaging service, with integrated photo and link sharing. Finally, the productivity features added in the recent update allow users to organize and keep track of individual tasks and projects.

There’s no question about it, Pingpad has everything you need to remain productive and on task, whether it’s for a personal project or one you’re working on with a group. It’s available for desktop and both iOS and Android phones, too, so no one’s left out in the cold. Mayfield even discussed future plans to bring Pingpad to Mac OS X, but as for when that’s going to happen exactly, it’s “a matter of time and resources.”