You might remember that we spent a little time in Austin a few weeks ago. In addition to getting to hang out with a ton of Batchbook customers and partners, Michelle sat on a panel with some of our Small Business Web friends: Freshbooks, MailChimp and Formstack. The panel was moderated by Scott McMullan of Google. He’s part of the Google Enterprise group and leads the Google Apps Partners program.
Hold on. Google? Enterprise? Small Business? Yes! Scott has been a champion for small businesses for as long as we can remember and he made a big announcement at the start of the panel: Google Apps have become members of The Small Business Web. And we’re tickled to be in such good company. Google Apps and The Small Business Web share a common set of goals and philosophies. Specifically the the belief that web apps are more valuable when they integrate and work together. We continue to work hard to integrate Google Apps into Batchbook and have some exciting things coming up in the not to distant future that will strengthen those integrations.
The panel itself covered a range of topics from why and how web apps can work together to how small businesses can leverage the power of the web to help their business grow. The folks at SXSW have posted the audio of the panel, go have a listen!
When we started working on BatchBook waaaay back in 2006, we set out to create the best darn CRM ever. Along the way, we’ve looked to our customers for input as we added partner integrations and feature upgrades. BatchBook customers have driven the development of BatchBook as much as we have.
But we can’t do everything, which is why we made sure that we made our API available to anyone who wanted to build something cool using BatchBook. Today we’re launching a new page on our site that highlights the efforts of people who are updating, integrating and modifying BatchBook in ways we never even imagined.
From our friend Kurt Milam who’s been building a multitude of ways to get data in and out of BatchBook to Michael Doornbos who used SuperTags to build a visual scoreboard for Lunar X Prize participants, we’ve seen some pretty amazing stuff come from the minds of our clever users. And we’re looking forward to seeing more!
When last we checked in on our friends at Rise of the Cubicle Farmer, our friends AJ, Tony and Michelle were headed West. Armed with laptops, caffeinated beverages and a couple of videocameras, they’re on a 65+ day journey around the US and Canada stopping along the way to chat with entrepreneurs, workshifters, freelancers and the companies that help them do their work wherever and whenever they need it.
They’re even using our recently launched BatchBook iPhone App to build a database of all the cool folks they meet along the way. See what AJ had to say about the App here:
Longtime BatchBlue customer and friend AJ Leon has embarked on a 45 Day trip criss-crossing the United States and Canada. Calling it the Rise of the Cubicle Farmer, he and his colleagues at The LaC Project will be traveling nearly 12,000 miles through 35 cities “documenting the changing landscape of the idea of “work” among entrepreneurs, small business people, and progressive corporate types.”
They’ll be stopping and chatting along the way with small business owners, entrepreneurs, co-workers, workshifters and some of the companies, like BatchBlue, that help make small businesses run. They want to capture and document these stories in the hopes that they’ll be able to educate others about “defining their work as something they do instead of some place that they sit.”
As members of The Small Business Web, BatchBlue is always looking at innovative ways for our customers to connect to other small businesses, and we’re excited about supporting this initiative and look forward to seeing the dispatches from the road. We’re also super excited that AJ and crew will be using our new iPhone app to capture the names and faces of the folks they meet along the way.
The fine folks over at Xioup who have wowed us in the past with their own custom development for BatchBook Web Forms have been brewing a new project for a while that we’re happy to help them announce today.
WebFormGlue is a new service that allows you to connect your web forms with various SaaS products. We’re psyched that they have decided to launch with their initial integration point featuring our very own BatchBook and our other fine friends over at Formstack.
They’ve got all the details and some sample forms you can fill out to give feedback and apply for alpha testing.
We’re excited to see the great things that people are building using our API.
Longtime BatchBlue customer and friend 
