Check out David’s latest blog post on MINDdrift:

“If you’re in the web app startup space, no doubt you’ve heard the big news during TechCrunch50 that Mint was acquired for $170M. That’s a very high return on a company that did a great job visualizing data from Yodlee. What is Mint? It’s a great service that allows you to track all your accounts, expenses, budget and more. Many people, even ones that use the service, didn’t know that Mint actually gets their data from Yodlee, which preforms all the heavy lifting and connecting with financial institutions.”

Read the rest of “Learn how to fund a web app startup from nothing to $170M acquisition“

To those long-time GotVMail users that have incorporated our service into your business workflow, why should you get excited about the new Grasshopper virtual phone system? Yes, I know change is difficult. Why fix what isn’t broken. However, there’s plenty to get excited about and hope it will make any pain from change worth it.

So what’s new? Well, here’s what I think are the most compelling changes:

• Flexibility – we’ve introduced the concept of a user and separated it from an extension and a phone number.

  Now, you can easily point your phone numbers to any type of extension (e.g., department, employee, dedicated fax, Q&A, etc.) and enable your staff to have access to one or more extensions, or even have multiple staff monitor the same extensions. What’s more, you can limit access to administrative features like plan changes and billing info.

As of October 12th, we successfully migrated 85% of our active customer accounts from the GotVMail platform to the new Grasshopper virtual phone system.

Those that have already been migrated are enjoying the new unlimited voice-to-text feature, as well as the many improvements I blogged about in my previous post about migration.

For those of you still patiently waiting, rest assured that you have not been forgotten. Rather, your current account setup involves the most complicated aspects to migrate, like Q&A extensions, multiple VPLs, no VPLs, etc. We are in the final steps of quality assurance testing for these conditions.

You’re brain is tired, but your body wants to go. I find this to be the typical sensation following one of our quarterly off-site planning sessions for Grasshopper. I’ve looked at data, talked for hours, and at the end of it all, it’s nice to give your mind a rest and find an outlet for that pent-up physical energy.

So, for all of the quarterly planning sessions at Grasshopper, I’ve tried to find something fun and different to do at the end of the day. My goal is to give people a release and also build group interaction based on something other than talking about Grasshopper.

In the past, the team has gone snowmobiling, go-kart racing, and brewed beer together. For our latest post-planning session activity, we decided to go indoor skydiving at Sky Venture in NH.

Meetings. Conferences. Cars. What do they all have in common? They are all places you can’t always answer your phone.

As an entrepreneur running your small business there is a lot of traveling, meetings and times you simply can’t take a phone call or listen to a voicemail.

That’s why Grasshopper is excited to announce our NEW feature – Unlimited Voice to Text.

The Voice to Text feature will do just what it sounds like; take your voicemail and transcribe it into an email, giving you the ability to view your voicemail. You can read the transcription of your voicemail on your phone or your computer without having to listen to it.