Cozi Blog

Announcing: Cozi To Do Lists

To Do lists are now available in Cozi!

By popular demand, Cozi has launched a To Do list feature just in time for the busiest To Do list season of the year!

With all the lists you’ll need to write to prepare for your Thanksgiving feast, or to organize your holiday celebration, Cozi’s To Do lists could help you keep your sanity in these busy next few months. With To Do lists in Cozi, you can delegate a list of chores or tasks to each family member, and the list will automatically be assigned the Cozi color dot associated with that person in your family calendar.

If you’re winterizing your house this weekend, and want to assign “rake leaves” to your daughter, and “clean gutters” to your husband, it’s now easy to delegate these tasks with Cozi To Do lists. If your daughter gets sick, and you need to reassign her list to your son, you can do so with the click of a mouse.  As soon as you reassign the list, the color dot will change automatically.

With the new To Do list feature, you can keep even keep shared lists for tasks that your family needs to tackle together. For example, if the whole family needs to help clean up the garage to make room for the car now that snow’s on the way, you can add that to the Shared To Do list, represented by the All color dot in your family organizer.

It’s even possible to add categories within a list. For example, if you would like your Shared List to include categories, such as “THIS WEEK” or “IN THE FUTURE,” just enter these words in capital letters, and the To Do list will take care of the rest. If only the To Do list feature could take care of the tasks as magically as it creates the lists of the tasks!

Now that the To Do list feature is available, we need your help to give it a test drive and tell us what you think. So, take Cozi’s To Do lists for a spin today, and share your real-world feedback with us by sending comments to us here.

Feedback on Family Journal Sharing?

If you've got feedback about sharing your stories with the Cozi family journal, we'd love to hear it!

We’ve added lots of new sharing features to the family journal in recent weeks, and we want to know what’s working and what’s not. 

What's new? In addition to sharing your family journal posts on Facebook, you can now set up email newsletters so your family members who are not on Facebook will also receive your updates.  You can also share via Twitter, and you can send individual posts by email.

We want to know if you've tried these features, and if so, what you think of them.  Our goal as always is to simplify your family life.  Is it working?  What's missing that you'd like to see? Overall, do you have suggestions for how we could improve the sharing capabilities in the family journal?

Thanks for using Cozi, and for sharing your feedback!

More New Family Journal Features!

If you’ve been busy getting the kids back to school, you might not have had time to notice all the new features we’ve been busy adding to the Cozi family journal. If you’re just tuning in, here’s a recap of what’s new:

Family journal sharing via e-mail: It’s now easy to share your family journal entries with friends and family. You can share just one entry or your whole journal, depending on the settings you choose. You can even pull email addresses directly from your email address book to make sharing even easier. It’s quick and simple, so go ahead and try it! Your in-laws in Colorado will love the pictures of the kids jumping the Washington waves over Labor Day weekend.

Family journal newsletters: If you’d like to share on a regular basis, rather than sending out individual emails, this is the feature for you. When you sign up to send newsletters, you decide which entries to include and which family and friends to invite, and we’ll do the rest. We’ll send out the newsletter from you at the beginning of each month to keep your friends and family updated on all that your family’s been up to that month. The next newsletter will go out in early October, so don’t forget to add your back to school shots for everyone to see. After all, the first day of kindergarten only comes around once, and your friends and family around the country will be thrilled to share in the excitement.

Family journal smiles: Receiving a fun family journal post is guaranteed to bring a smile to the face of any friend, aunt, or grandma who receives it, but you’ve never been able to see that smile. Now you can! When friends or family view your journal entries, they can add smiles with a click of the mouse. And don’t forget to send smiles back when you read family journal entries.

As you can see, it’s been a busy summer at Cozi! But we’re not done yet. We’re already working to develop other new features you’ve been asking for. So check out these new features, let us know what you think, and stay tuned for more soon!

Cozi's commitment to availability of service and protection of your data

Last week Cozi experienced two exceptionally rare service disruptions. Given the length of these disruptions and the proximity to each other, we thought it was important to provide you with a few more details and to assure you of our ongoing commitment to providing consistent and reliable service for you and your family.

Cozi takes very seriously the fact that you have entrusted us with your family calendar, shopping lists, journal and more. We have designed our system to be available 99.9% of the time. And, historically this has been the case. However, last week we were struck by an incredibly rare chain of events.

First, some background on last week's outages. Cozi's servers are located in Seattle, Washington in the Fisher Plaza Building that houses servers for some of the biggest Internet companies in the world. On Friday, July 3rd the electrical room at Fisher Plaza caught on fire. In and of itself, that would not normally have disrupted our service as the backup generators could have kept the facility running reliably for months, if needed. Unfortunately, the fire suppression system, designed to protect the facility, destroyed the backup generators resulting in a complete power failure and the need to bring in new generators. Not only was Cozi knocked out by this chain of events but so were many other top web service providers. Although the time it took Fisher Plaza to bring in new power generation was lengthy, we are proud of the fact that within moments of the restoration of power, Cozi was back online and available for our customers. We were up much faster than most services in the same facility due to the work we put into handling contingencies.

We suffered a second outage on July 8th in the early hours of the morning. Normally this would have been extremely short lived and probably gone unnoticed by most users. However, this outage was exacerbated by complications caused by the fire outage. We worked quickly to overcome this situation and restore service.

We want to assure you that your data, though temporarily unavailable to you, was never at risk. The means by which we backup data ensures that under no circumstances would your data be lost.

Having said that, we understand that losing access to your schedule or lists, even for a short period of time, can be distressing. That's why we want to reiterate our commitment to maintaining 99.9% availability of the Cozi service. Since the outages last week, we have reviewed our systems and processes, and implemented changes in an effort to eliminate the likelihood of another service disruption like the ones last week. We take both the availability and integrity of your data very seriously and we will continue to work tirelessly to avoid future disruptions.

We hope that, regardless of your experience last week, you will continue to entrust Cozi to be a valuable part of your family. Our goal is 100% satisfaction. Above all, we apologize for the inconvenience you experienced and thank you for your patience.

We're always interested in your feedback. Please let us know if you have questions or would like to see us doing something differently.

Very sincerely,
Bill Baxter
Cozi Chief Technology Officer

A New Way to Share Your Family Journal!

Introducing another way to share your family journal with friends and relatives! In addition to sharing your Family Journal on Facebook, you can now share special moments and quick stories on your very own family web page. Not only is sharing easy with this new feature, you can also decide exactly how you want to set up your page. You can select:

• The web address: Choose an address that’s easy to remember, or choose one that would be virtually impossible to guess; it’s up to you!

• Which stories to share: You might want to keep some entries private, and share others, or you might want to share all your entries. The choice is yours, and you can mark each entry individually. If you change your mind about sharing a particular post, you can edit your choices at any time

• Who gets the link: The link to your web page is yours to share far and wide, or just with a select few. Only you can choose to share the link for your Family Journal.

• Whether to hide information: If you want to take the extra precaution of using initials instead of the full names of your family members, Cozi makes that easy. When you set up your page, you can choose to hide any or all of the names of your family members (or other words you might not want to share, like city names, etc).

Even with all these choices, setting up your own web page through Cozi only takes a few minutes. It’s simple and fast, and will allow you to share your fun family moments with as many (or as few) friends or family members as you like. This brand new feature is in beta, which means it’s in the final stages of development and ready for feedback from families like yours.

For more information on setting up your family web page, please click here:

Cozi Family Journal Sharing

Enjoy!

Customize Your Cozi Calendar with Internet Calendars

Would you like to add the schedule of your favorite baseball team to your Cozi calendar so that you never miss a game? Or, would you like to add a calendar of Moon Phases or of local events? Whatever Internet calendar is of interest to you can now be added easily to your Cozi calendar.

What’s more, any updates to Internet calendars are automatically reflected in your Cozi calendar. For example, if you have the Seattle Seahawks schedule added to your Cozi calendar, any game date or time changes will appear in Cozi. Plus, if they make the play-offs, the new game dates will automatically be added into your Cozi calendar, even though the play-off dates weren’t even scheduled when you first added the calendar to Cozi. Just add your favorite calendars once, and you’ll be up to speed for the whole season. It’s that simple!

To add a calendar to your Cozi account, all you need is the URL for the calendar you want to add. To find out if your local library, favorite sports team, or specific religious holidays publish an Internet calendar, just check their web site. Or, check web sites like http://icalshare.com for lists of the most popular Internet calendars.

Your family calendar is unique, and adding Internet calendars based on your family’s special interests will allow you to further customize your family calendar with dates and events that are important to you. Cozi is always adding new ways to simplify!

The Cozi Family Journal and Sharing: The Perfect Combination!

Some things just go together, like ice cream and apple pie. They’re each great on their own, but even better together. That’s the way it is with Cozi’s Family Journal and now, the first of several ways to share—introducing the Cozi Family Journal Facebook app;  the quick and easy way to share your latest family updates with your friends on Facebook.

With the Cozi Family Journal Facebook app, you’ll be able to:

• Share the moments you jot down in your journal with friends and relatives on Facebook.

• Update your family journal right from Facebook. 

• Choose which posts you want to share, and keep the others private.  You can always change your mind.

• Keep a joint family journal on Facebook with your spouse or partner. You can both jot down moments in Cozi or in Facebook and they’ll appear on both of your Facebook profiles.

If you’ve been wishing for a way to share your Cozi Family Journal with your Facebook friends, now you can!

It’s easy to link your Cozi Family Journal with your Facebook account! With just a few simple steps, you can link, sync and keep everyone in the loop! To add the Cozi Family Journal Facebook app, click here:

Cozi Family Journal Facebook App

And coming soon, more ways to share your Cozi Family Journal, including your own family journal website and sending a journal entry by e-mail. Stay tuned!

Holidays in Cozi? Now That's a Reason to Celebrate!

We heard you loud and clear. You like your holidays, but you can’t plan your family celebrations if you don’t know the dates. That’s why we’ve added national holiday calendars to Cozi’s family organizer.

To automatically add the most popular national holidays to your family calendar, just sign into your Cozi account, go to Settings, click “Calendar options,” and then click “Add a holiday calendar.” After that, you’ll automatically see the most popular national holidays right in your Cozi family calendar every year.  

With the holiday calendars, there’s no need to search for next year’s holiday schedule on the Internet, since Cozi does it for you. And because Cozi families live all over the world, you can choose to add U.S. holidays, Canadian holidays, U.K. holidays, Australian holidays, or all of the above.

Holiday calendars are only available in Cozi 2.0, so make sure that you are using the web version of Cozi. For more info about Cozi’s new holiday calendar options, and all the other new Cozi features, look here: http://www.cozi.com/Promo-New-in-Cozi.htm.

So what are you waiting for? Automatically add national holidays to your Cozi family calendar today, and put an end to the accidental double-booking of your son’s birthday party on Mother’s Day! Cozi even tells you when Daylight Savings Time begins and ends, so you won’t be an hour late for that Little League practice on Sunday.

Cozi Shopping List Improvements!

For all of you who have asked for improvements to Cozi shopping lists, we’ve got good news for you. We’ve added significant new features to the shopping list feature of Cozi! These changes are in direct response to the feature requests we’ve received from Cozi families, and the improvements dramatically affect the way you use your Cozi lists.

One of the biggest changes is the ability to reorganize the order of your lists and select the list that’s featured on your Cozi home page. Before, your lists were positioned in the order in which they were created. There was no way to reposition the lists or change the list that appeared in the shopping list section of your Cozi home page. With the improvements we’ve made, you can now move your lists around in any order you choose, and you can select which list is featured when you sign in to Cozi. For some, it will be a daily “to do” list, and for others it might be a grocery list. You can choose a particular list and leave it there, or change it frequently; it’s up to you!

To organize the order of your lists, sign in to Cozi and click on the shopping list area. From there, you’ll see a line-up of all your lists, with a More Lists menu on the right side of your screen. If you click this menu, you’ll see any additional lists you have in your account, with an option at the bottom to Organize Lists. With this option, you can reposition any of your lists within your shopping list section. The list you choose for the top slot will be the one that appears on your home page when you sign in to Cozi.

Another big change is the ability to reposition items within a list in the order you choose. Many Cozi users have told us they want to organize their grocery lists by aisle or food category, rather than be locked in to the order in which they enter the items. With the new changes, you may add items in any order you like, and reposition them in a different order later. Maybe you like to organize by aisle, but your husband likes a different view, with all the beverages listed together, and all the dry goods listed together. Depending on which one of you ends up doing the shopping, just move items around with a quick drag and drop to suit your taste.

Finally, we’ve made it easier to enter items on your shopping lists by adding an auto-complete feature. With this new feature, you can just start typing the item you want, and commonly entered items will appear as options. For example, typing "A" will generate a multitude of options, including apples, apple juice, apple sauce, asparagus, or aspirin. Select your item from the list, and move on to the next item. It’s that easy!

In addition to changes to the shopping list feature, we’ve also made other key improvements that many of you have requested, including a significant change to the printed version of your Cozi calendar. When you print your monthly calendar, you’ll now see gridlines to separate the dates. You’ll also see improved contrast in the printed version of Cozi if you’re using a low-contrast monitor. Finally, the shopping list size has been adjusted so that you’re more likely to be able to print out lists on a single page.

Thanks for your help with these improvements! Your comments and suggestions have been critical in our ongoing improvements to Cozi, and we sincerely value your input. We welcome your continued feedback on any feature at any time at support@cozi.com. Enjoy!

Cozi Mobile

Today we're releasing a beta version of Cozi Mobile, optimized for iPhone and Windows Mobile smart phones. With Cozi Mobile you can access all of the appointments and shopping lists you have put in the regular version of Cozi, on the go. It's designed to be easy to use, even with a virtual keyboard.

In the calendar area, you can see which appointments each family member has on a given day. For example, in the calendar below I can see that Kate has a piano lesson at 4:30, since I know her color is yellow.

Cozi Mobile also lets you easily access all your shopping lists, anytime and anywhere as well. It features a "cross off items" option which is great when you're out shopping. Personally, I have a lot of Cozi shopping lists which contain the ingredients of my favorite recipes. With Cozi Mobile I can cross off each ingredient as I buy it without deleting the list. That way, next time I want to make the same recipe, I still have it.

We hope you enjoy the beta version of Cozi Mobile. Just point your browser to m.cozi.com to check it out. We're looking forward to your feedback so we can continue to build and improve upon this new way to get Cozi!