We’ve been pretty quiet lately on the blog as we’ve been down in the Mercury Grove cave working away at building the new interface and features for Network Hippo. It has been a long process working through all of the usability issues and focusing on core features that will drive a lot of value for startups, small businesses, and independent professionals.

But it’s getting very close.

I’m really excited about how we’ve been able to streamline the application to make it more intuitive and really easy to use, and I think all of our work doing usability tests is really paying off.  We’ve had tons of great feedback from users, which we have incorporated in this new launch, and we also used the service usertesting.com – which is an amazing resource that I recommend for anybody developing web-based applications.

Some of the new features:

• Fixed the auto-email import so it runs daily
• Feedback on your network (quality and size)
• Collaboration with people in your network
• Ability to send emails from within the app
• Allow your contacts to update their info
• Better social network integration
• Smart notifications sent weekly by email
• MUCH easier to add contacts, deals, activities

We’re getting really close to launch and I’m excited about how everything is coming together.

Below is a teaser screenshot of the new reporting which I think is much more useful than other CRM-like products.  More details on launch to come!