On February 14th, the time and expense tracking service LiveTimer will be re-launched here as Syncd.

LiveTimer started in 2006 as a side project for tracking the time of our own consulting business. A year later, we decided to share our project with the world. Since then LiveTimer has grown and improved quite a bit. Our side project now helps thousands of organizations manage their time and expenses.

So what's next?

First of all, we want Syncd to be the best time and expense tracking service possible. With the help of our customers, we've re-examined and improved almost every aspect of our service. We'll be previewing these changes here in the week before Syncd's launch.

But why change your name?

Because our service has grown beyond just time tracking, we feel that it has also outgrown the name LiveTimer. Looking forward, we'd like to help your business stay sync'd - you, your team and your clients working together. Syncd will be able to be with your business from your initial contact with clients, to collaborating with your team on projects, all the way through invoicing. We've laid the foundation for these features and will be rolling them out in the coming months.

Sincerely,

UPDATE: The launch of Syncd was delayed until February 21st.

We're making a big move this Sunday. We'll be changing our hosting facility and bringing online a whole new fleet of servers to better serve Syncd to you.

Our new servers and hosting facility should provide better performance. In testing, we're seeing improvements of over 50% in the time to complete processing-intensive requests, such as reports. In addition, our new host's infrastructure has significantly improved response times.

Our new server architecture is fully redundant so that downtime can be minimized. Although we've had better than 99.98% uptime since 2008, we hope to improve upon this.

We've also got room to grow with our new host, where we'll be able to bring more servers online quickly to serve growing demand. We will also be able to bring new capabilities to Syncd, such as file storage.

We think that the only downside to our move is that we expect some downtime on Sunday. We're starting the move at 8am EST and expect it to take between 2-4 hours.

Therefore, please plan for Syncd to be inaccessible from 8am - 12pm EST (GMT-4) this Sunday, September 18th.

We'll be tweeting our progress on Sunday to keep you informed. Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns, either through Twitter, a comment below, or using the contact form in the Help section of Syncd. Thanks!

Update: Thanks to everyone for your patience. The upgrade was completed successfully and slightly ahead of schedule. We've already heard from some users who are happy with the improved performance. Please let us know how everything is working for you. Thanks!

In preparation for some major updates coming to Syncd in 2012, we're changing our browser support policy. Beginning January 1, 2012, we're going to officially support only the most recent two versions of the major desktop and mobile browsers.

As of the time of this post, these browsers include:

• Firefox 7+
• Chrome 16+ (auto-updates)
• Safari 5+
• Internet Explorer 8+
• Mobile Safari in iOS 4+
• Android 2.3+

Although Syncd may work well in other browsers, these are the only ones we will test and officially support. We may display warning messages for specific browsers which are known to cause problems (e.g. Internet Explorer 6 & 7).

Modern browsers are not only more secure and responsive than their predecessors, they also provide a number of capabilities, loosely defined as HTML5, that enable real advances on the web. Capabilities such as offline data storage, drag and drop file uploads, geolocation, and push communication will allow Syncd to behave more like a native application while still enjoying the advantages inherent in a web application.

Because of the scope of the changes coming soon to Syncd, we'll be explaining many of them in detail before they are released. We know some features have been a long time coming in development, and we sincerely appreciate everyone's patience as we try to get them "right".