We are now listed in the Chrome Web Store (and, hopefully, soon in the Google Apps Marketplace as well). If you are using Chrome, it’s a handy way to get it installed as part of your browser’s app.

Try it out today — even if you are already a Kerika user! (You will be sent to the account you already have.) And, please rate and review the app as well.

A great article from the Wall Street Journal on which social media channels have the most potential to help small businesses: a survey they did resulted in just 3% picking Twitter as the most effective tool.

41% picked LinkedIn, 16% picked YouTube, and 14% picked Facebook. Google+ came in at 7%.

This matches our own sense for what works, and doesn’t, although the 7% that Google+ grabbed seems surprisingly high. Is this because of the increasingly tight integration that Google is enforcing between their search engine results and your usage of Google+? We haven’t seen any benefits at all from our Google+ efforts, and remain frustrated that we still don’t have a custom URL like plus.google.com/kerika…

Jim Collins, acclaimed author of Build to Last and other well-received books, wrote an interesting blog post about 10 years ago on the importance of creating a Stop Doing list.

Mr. Collins emphasized the importance of deciding not to continue doing something any longer as key to successful prioritization:

A great piece of art is composed not just of what is in the final piece, but equally important, what is not. It is the discipline to discard what does not fit — to cut out what might have already cost days or even years of effort — that distinguishes the truly exceptional artist and marks the ideal piece of work, be it a symphony, a novel, a painting, a company or, most important of all, a life.

He cited the example of Darwin Smith of Kimberly-Clark making the critical decision to sell off the company’s paper-mills, which provided the bulk of the company’s revenues and had been in existence for 100 years (!), in order to focus on the new consumer business of paper towels.

This article has inspired us to create a new task board template called “Weekly Prioritization”: it lets you organize your work in a different way from the traditional “To Do / In Progress / Done” taxonomy of Kanban, by using columns organized as:

• Must Do: in here, put everything that absolutely must get done that week.
• Should Do: everything that you would really like to get done, once you get all the “must do’s” done.
• Could Do: stuff you could do, if you had any time left
• Stop Doing: this is the really critical column — identify everything that you should stop doing!

Let us know how useful this proves to you! (Hat tip to Eitan Nguyen for the suggestion…)

And, as usual, we will continue building new process templates to help our disparate users with their projects.

We are moving to a simpler pricing scheme for Kerika:

• As before, you can start with a free Standard Account, which will let you have two other people work on your projects.
• Once your team grows past that point, you can upgrade to a Professional Account, which we are offering at a simple rate of $10 per user, per month (billed annually).
• Academic & Nonprofit users can still request free service, which will now allow for up to 10 free users per account.

Three key changes with our new pricing:

• You won’t have to buy “packs of licenses” any more: you can buy just as many as you need.
• The new rate is higher, but reflects the tremendous increase in functionality since our November release of task boards, Kanban boards and Scrum boards.
• The refund policy is simpler: instead of changing the subscription end-date, you will simply get a refund for the unused portion of any Professional subscription that you had purchased.

Our new pricing will continue to be very competitive, with tremendous value for your money because:

• There are no limits on the number of projects you can create within an account.
• There are no limits on the number of cards that you add to a particular project board.
• There are no limits on the files that you share as part of a card (the size of your Google Drive is entirely between you and Google.)

All of our competitors are offering very complicated pricing schemes that limit your freedom to create and reconfigure projects as needed. But not us.

And, as before, we will continue to use Google Checkout for our billing, which means we will never see or store your credit card information.

Google is making a huge push to get everyone to create a Google+ account, but it’s hard to see how this is going to succeed when Google+ is missing a very basic feature that every single business needs: the ability to create a custom URL, e.g. plus.google.com/kerika.

We have been updating our website and social media channels recently, and as part of that process we created a Google+ page for Kerika and ended up with the utterly useless URL of https://plus.google.com/110330426240622128664/posts

This isn’t a URL that even we can ever remember, and it certainly offers no incentive for us to publicize it. “Kerika” is a registered trademark and a registered service mark, so obviously it is important for us to use our name in all of our marketing. All other social media offer custom URLs: we have facebook.com/kerika, twitter.com/kerika, linkedin.com/kerika — even youtube.com/kerika! — but not plus.google.com/kerika!

It’s difficult to fathom Google’s foot-dragging in this matter: custom URLs don’t need to be offered to every single user — and its very difficult to manage a namespace if you tried to offer up custom URLs to hundreds of millions of people — but it is an absolute “must-have” feature for every business. All businesses care deeply about their product names: these are valuable intellectual property assets, and we cannot think of any business that would want to publicize a random 24-digit number instead of their own name.

Until Google gets this very basic feature implemented, there is no rational argument to be made for a business to take Google+ seriously…