Podio, a beautiful work platform

Podio is currently offering invites, so you won’t be able to signup immediately. But it’s well adding yourself to the invite list if you run a business with a small number of employees. This is the most beautiful web based work platform I’ve seen. Truly a pixel perfect creation that’s a joy to use. All these looks do detract from the actual function of the product, after all it is designed to help you work.

It has all the usual functions of a product of this type, activity stream, calendar, tasks, contacts and messaging. But what sets it apart is the ability to add additional apps and even create your own,

“Podio is a work platform with the ambition to change how we all work. We are developing a new and radical take on work tools: you build it yourself.”

Podio is headed by CEO Tommy Ahlers. The Danish entrepreneur sold his social phonebook business, ZYB to Vodafone in 2008 for €31 million.

The app store is fantastic. An easy example is “Babies”, so essentially it adds another tab to your account and allows people in the company to post their newborn baby. This is just an example, I’d imagine only very cuddly companies would introduce this app. These apps can be added to the company or just specific spaces.

Tasks is a standard feature, but is one of the best online calendars I’ve seen and would be a great app in itself.

The app store and ability to create and share your own apps is what sets Podio apart, I can definitely see it working it’s way into the business world once in full flow and becoming the virtual office of choice.

Clearly an incredible amount of hard work has gone into this project and I like how it’s completely free if you have less than 10 users, so it’s helping small businesses and provides a great service to larger businesses as pricing starts at just $99/month for 10+ users.