I've been one of Streak's biggest advocates for a while now-- I use it for everything. In particular, it's been extremely helpful for hiring, fundraising, and business development at MixRank. I highly recommend it.
I like how it can apply to all the use cases you mention above, and also how they have a variety of demo videos on their website demonstrating them. About to try it out now for my startup.
We've been using Streak at Entelo and we're very happy. The "social integration" provided by most CRM systems is lacking and when you combine Streak and Rapportive inside of GMail/Google Apps, it's really quite powerful.
The CRM landscape feels like it's undergoing a change somewhat similar to what happened a decade ago when cloud-based providers like Salesforce disrupted incumbents like Siebel. Salesforce, while a very powerful product/company in many ways, is not immune to disruption and it's great to see folks like Streak, Nimble, 37Sigs/Highrise attempting to compete with them.
Its a fantastic app - I've been using it for about two weeks and its completely replaced a clunky process of trying to link lead spreadsheets, with Highrise contacts and Gmail emails. We store contacts in Highrise but it is pretty lousy for pipeline management. Because Streak lives inside gmail, it makes it really easy to see all the email associated with each lead. It also replaces Boomerang (email scheduler applet) and Tout (email template app) so I can get more done without leaving my inbox. Streak and Rapportive handle almost all my CRM needs at this point.
I highly recommend this for those using google apps and looking for a light-weight CRM to handle inbound email leads. I looked at Salesforce and shuddered at the complexity when I just wanted a way to make sure I followed up with inbound email inquiries in a methodical fashion.
It's a big upgrade from my previous homemade gmail tagging system / boomerang hack. Also, the reusable text snippets are a huge time saver.
There are a few improvements that could be made, but overall I think the product was executed beautifully.
> Streak should actually be something like Thunderbird extension with RDBMS running in background
The most popular email client is Outlook with iOS devices in second place (as of June 2011). Although if you combine Hotmail + Yahoo Mail + GMail the total marketshare beats Outlook.
There is definitely a lot of room for a lightweight, "bottom-up" CRM app out there that's focused on usability. I think Dropbox has handily proven that this sort of thing can get peppered across companies without a top-down, sales-driven deployment which is what Salesforce is.
We have been using this for support for our app, and we are very happy with it. Started out using a different service, but the GMail integration was key for us.
