The Engineers of Tomorrow display their programming trophy
When Pam and I had our first meetings way back in the winter of 2006, even before we had fully fleshed out what our first product was going to be, we talked about what causes we were going to support as a company and in what ways. As a team, we decided that the issues closest to our hearts were promoting technology and education, improving the lives of children, and supporting fellow entrepreneurs.
We were thrilled to learn of kiva.org, which allowed us to lend small amounts of money to entrepreneurs in other countries. We became lenders long before we started charging for our own product. We now get regular updates on our two entrepreneurs, who have since paid back 83% and 50% of their loans respectively! Once the debt is paid off, we can lend it to some other folks. How cool is that?
Over the past year, various members of the BatchBlue team have presented at Johnson & Wales University, the University of Rhode Island, and Rhode Island’s “We Mean Business“, which is an event promote and support local business. In February, we helped sponsor NewBCamp08 in Providence, which was an (un)conference held at University of Rhode Island on emerging technologies, and Adam gave a well-received presentation on getting started with web standards.
This past spring, BatchBlue became a proud sponsor of the Rhode Island Engineers of Tomorrow LEGO Robotics team, who went on to win 3rd place in the programming category of the 2008 First LEGO League World Festival, held in Atlanta, GA.
Because we are such a small company and still getting started, what we do is not a lot. We do what we can mostly by volunteering our time and services. But last week, just before we took the stage at our Providence Geeks presentation, a woman and a young man came up to introduce themselves. It was Mary Johnson and her son from the Engineers of Tomorrow, who had specifically come down that evening to thank us for our support.
Meeting Mary and her charming, delightful son reinforced the idea that even giving a little of your time or money can go a long way in the lives of those you are helping. Congratulations to the Engineers of Tomorrow: we look forward to seeing what your tomorrows will bring!
One of BatchBook’s key features is the ability to track all sorts of custom data for your contacts. We introduced SuperTags, allowing you to create custom fields, choose which contacts to apply them to, store custom data, generate sortable, printable reports and export the data.
Now, we’ve made it super easy to import custom data. In your “Import a Contact” sidebar (see image below), you can now export a blank CSV template based on the fields you’ve created within your SuperTags. So, while you’re importing all your phone numbers and addresses, you can also easily import data such as favorite color, dog’s name, zodiac sign and just about anything else you can think of.
To assist you in the import process, we’ve built a page with step-by-step instructions that will help you prepare a file chock full of contact info and other custom data for an import to BatchBook. Happy organizing!
We’re pleased to announce a major overhaul of our contacts browse page. While we never thought the previous incarnation was bad, we did feel it could be better. We finally carved out some time and through a major team effort, were able to launch the redesigned browse contacts page today.
Here’s a peek at the new page:
Of special interest is that there’s now a live search option on the top left, which makes it really easy to narrow down to a single contact record. This is my favorite part of the redesign; I usually know exactly who I’m looking for and live search will pull up that record as soon as I start typing.
We also added some more filters to allow you to view your contacts in different ways. You can filter by Individuals, Companies, Most Active. You can further refine that by choosing a tag to filter by. We kept the alphabetical search option as well. All these options work together to help you refine your contact list. And the best part though is these search filters are persistent. Each time you come back to the browse page, it will remember your search preferences and display your contacts based on those options. So if you only ever want to see individuals, select that preference. Every time you come back to browse you will only see individuals in your search results.
Ahh, but there is something missing here you say…where is the business card view?
We’ve made it so if you hover over a contact name with your mouse, up pops that old familiar business card. We also added to ability to tag and SuperTag from within the business card.
Last but not least, batch actions are still here and we just launched a brand new one…merge! You can now merge together 2 records. Pick the contact to become the main record and we will merge over all comms, location information etc into the new contact.
We tried hard not to take away anything and feel that the overall experience is much better. We hope you agree! As always we appreciate your feedback so let us know what you think.
Last night, Pam, Michelle, and I gave a presentation at the June Providence Geek Dinner (Providence Business News covered it here). Good friend and Geeks Co-founder Brian Jepson interviewed Michelle and I after the event to ask us about BatchBook, our customer service strategy, and how we keep our social media sanity.
Not just for the obvious reasons, either. The fact that they use BatchBook and find a unique value in what we’re creating allows us to keep doing what we love doing. I truly appreciate that, but my love goes beyond that.
I love that they’re so smart.
Time and time again, we receive feature requests from our users that just happen to be exactly what we’re working on. That type of validation is priceless. But we also get some excellent feature requests that we simply haven’t thought of. When users share this alternative perspective with us, it allows us to make sure our product works well for everyone—in scenarios we’ve never thought of. For that, I am truly grateful.
I’m kicking off a new series of blog posts called, appropriately, “Our users are so smart”. I want to profile some of these great feature requests that we have since implemented. I also want to publicly thank the user(s) that recommend them and show what the final solution looks like.
Today, I want to thank BatchBook Forums user jakedfw. He wrote in with this recommendation:
If I’m overseeing “project X,” and that is the subject of conversations with multiple people, all tagged with the project name as a tag, when I do a search of that tag, all I see is a row of “project X” items. They all look identical, and there’s no way for me to find out which one is the conversation I’m looking for.
In our own personal use, we don’t tend to reuse Communication subjects over and over. But, in jakedfw’s example, this could be a common scenario. Also, with the introduction of BatchBox email forwarding, this will certainly be even more common within BatchBook. So, this was one of those feature requests where I thought to myself… “this is a no-brainer”, dropped everything, and put it into BatchBook.
Here’s how it looks:
Each search result now has a description.
If the result is an individual, you see the title and company.
If the result is a company, you get the number of employees.
If the result is a communication, you get the type and who the communication was between.
Thanks to jakedfw and the rest of our brilliant users! I look forward to writing more posts in this series.
