We caught AJ from Marketcircle again shortly after a surprise win in the Apple Design Awards for Billings 3. Here's a quick reaction!

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AJ, CEO of Marketcircle (Billings, Daylite, Daylite Touch) sat down with us to talk about WWDC, new iPhones, Snow Leopard and the upcoming Billings Touch, which I'm personally pretty excited about. Read the rest of the post for the video of our chat. I apologize to AJ and our readers for what is, by the sound of it, some iPhone interference on the soundtrack.

Update: This video has been moved to YouTube and is now watchable.

Marketcircle, the company behind Billings (which I mentioned in some depth recently), knows that a freelancer (or small business) needs every advantage they can get to survive in this economy. Sympathetic to the plight of the individuals on "Main Street," they're offering Billings 3 for $20 off the usual price, and upgrades for $10 off until November 30th. If you'd benefit from time tracking and high-quality invoices but weren't ready to drop $59.95 to get there, see if $39.95USD sounds a little better.

If you've already purchased or upgraded to Billings 3, you're not excluded from the party. Emailing a proof of purchase to Marketcircle will get you a voucher for the difference, redeemable for anything else in their store. See AJ's blog post for directions. Prices have also been reduced in the U.K., Canada, Europe and Australia with slightly modified numbers based on exchange rates. Stop by the Marketcircle store for details.

Marketcircle just released version 3 of Billings last week, greatly expanding the functionality of the time-tracking and invoicing application. One of the major reasons I've chosen Billings in the past for my invoicing is the professional-looking documents it can create for electronic and paper delivery. Billings 3 adds new templates and new features, making it an application which any professional individual who needs to manage estimates, invoices, statements and collections should take a look at.

Billings 3 started as a ground-up rework of the program's foundation, focusing on future extensibility, workflow improvements and the user interface. Billings has always had time-tracking and invoicing features, with an easy-to-use timer window, menubar timers and professional invoice templates. This version expands those areas, but it's got a bevy of entirely new features designed to make the lives of self-employed individuals, freelancers and small business owners easier. Read on for an overview of what's new.

On June 23rd an announcement was made at the Marketcircle Blog which revealed that an iPhone companion to their business productivity application, Daylite, was being developed. The news has been greeted with great enthusiasm from current Daylite users, and we got a chance to talk to Marketcircle's president, AJ, about their mobile development plans.

First, for those not familiar with Daylite, it's what AJ refers to as a Business Productivity Manager. "It's more than a PIM," AJ stated, "it's more than groupware. Our premise is something called a Productivity Pyramid. The bottom layer is tasks, notes, files, meetings, urls, et cetera. The second layer is people: contacts, your companies and users. The top layer is what we call objectives, which is projects and opportunities." Daylite is geared towards helping small business -- ranging from one to fifty people -- move forward.

Very recently, Marketcircle released a new version of Daylite which integrates with the iWork suite. Daylite can also integrate with Mail.app and supports Sync Services for iCal and Address Book syncing.

The developers at Marketcircle were receiving constant requests for mobile applications for Palm, Blackberry, etc. AJ says that, at that point, the richness of data provided by Daylite didn't sync well with the available platforms. "And no offense to those platforms," he went on, "but they're quite ugly." All of that was "until we got the iPhone."