ReadWriteWeb

Last week we told you about "lean startups" and how one of their strengths is rapidly collecting customer feedback and implementing changes to their product. With online tools like Get Satisfaction, gathering the opinons of your users is easy, and now with InstantLoop you can even hear what they have to say with automated phone surveys.

InstantLoop is the recent winner of the Twilio Startup Weekend Challenge, a contest for companies utilizing Twilio's API for sending and receiving phone calls. Users enter questions and possible answers, pick the phone numbers to call and then sit back and watch the results come in. The service is subscription-free; instead, users pay as they go at a rate of $.10 per customer feedback with the first 20 at no charge.

Rypple is an enterprise solution that works in such a simple, effectual way that it borders on the elegant. It uses absolutely top-notch social web design to engineer a user experience that is focused on solving a single problem: how to gather honest feedback quickly.

Since its founding, Rypple has garnered some serious accolades from the media and users alike. Everyone from The Economist to "Wikinomics" author Don Tapscott have been singing its praises. Come this fall, new additions to the service will boost its ability to support collaboration among coworkers.

Backboard, a sophisticated online solution for gathering feedback about various types of documents, came out of public beta this morning. Backboard allows users to upload and comment on standard Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents, but it also supports most standard graphics formats, including PhotoShop, and gives users the ability to mark up and comment on web pages. Backboard is geared towards a wide range of users, including freelancers as well as enterprise customers, and it is one of the easiest to use feedback and approval systems we have seen in a long time.