Hi guys – just a quick update to say thanks to all who came to the Big Party for Small Business! We had a lot of fun and hope the folks who came did, too. A special thanks to Guy Kawasaki and Gary Vaynerchuk who took time out of their insanely busy schedules to come by, do a little bowling, and be good sports about getting their pictures taken a million times. Thanks, too, to our Small Business Web sponsors American Express OPEN and to Laura Thomas from Dell for providing some great last minute additions to our giveaway bags in the form of their hot new ruby red laptops, the Vostro V130. It’s great to see how much support there is out there for small business owners!
Here are a few pictures from the party, as well as some other Texas highlights. We’re really looking forward to doing our panel tomorrow with our pals from Google, FreshBooks, Formstack and MailChimp presenting on being Friends with Business Benefits, How Integrations Sell Apps in Salon D at the Hilton. If you are in Austin, swing on by to say hello!
This blog post is coming to you live from Austin, where my need for coffee is seriously battling my good intentions of hitting the hotel gym before we start our busy day. Who shall emerge the victor?!
Christelle, TJ and I are arrived in Austin last night and are looking forward to our first day of events and activities. First, we’re pleased to be a part of AppSumo’s Lean Start-Up bundle for SXSW, which includes a huge array of useful software for folks looking to build a business on a shoestring. We’re all about keeping costs low for small business owners, so we think this deal is an amazing one and gives you access to some really cool apps. The bundle is launching today here at SXSW so be sure to check it out.
Any start-up who purhcases the SXSW bundle can enter their “Lean Start-Up Challenge“. The grand prize is a ton of cool software, mentoring and $100,000 cash – wow that will buy you a lot of Red Bulls and Diet Cokes!
This afternoon, we’re heading over to the Co-Working Unconference where we’ll be meeting with co-workers from all over the world, giving out BatchBlue t-shirts and stickers, spreading the word about our own Providence co-working space BatchHaüs and just hanging out with the cool folks who run their businesses from shared spaces, coffee shops, etc. These are our kind of people!
And for the second year, we’re once again throwing a “Big Party for Small Business”. This year, American Express OPEN has come on as an official sponsor of the Small Business Web. They’re promising some great special guests appearances in addition to the great food, drinks, bowling and karaoke. If you are at SXSW and would like an invitation, please let us know!
It’s February and once again our spring dance card is filling up with various events. The biggie for us is of course SXSW Interactive, and we’ve been busy planning parties, coming up with content for our panel on integrations, and of course, designing fun Texas-shaped stickers. We find SXSW to be one of the very best events for networking with other like-minded geeky/techie/nerdy yet still very attractive folks, so if these are your people, I’d recommend making the trip. Just make sure you bring a pair of comfortable shoes: you’ll be go go going for five days straight. For those of you going for the first time, there’s a lot of great additional advice on what to expect while you’re there here, here and below from our friend Dave Delany:
The best part of my job is when I get an email from a company letting me know that they’ve integrated their product with Batchbook. We love having new partners, especially since each new partner we integrate with means added value for all of our customers. In the last couple of months, we’ve had several new products integrate their services with Batchbook that we’d like to introduce to you:
RightSignature
You know how you get that email from the person at that place and they ask you print it out, sign it and fax it back? Quaint, right? This happened to me the other day. First I had to find our fax machine, dust it off, have one of our tech folks network it and then finally, I was able to send the signed document back. There has to be a better way, and there is. Here at BatchBlue we’ve been using RightSignature for (most) of our document signing needs. And now that they’ve integrated with Batchbook it’s made the process much easier by syncing your Batchbook contacts to your RightSignature account.
Here’s how RightSignature works: You upload the document that needs a signature, add the contacts that you need to sign the document, type a subject and hit send. Those recipients are then able to electronically sign the document. Easy peasy. Be sure to check out their site to see it in action.
We learned recently from our partner Flowtown that they have decided to change their API policy to no longer allow the social media discovery searches that some of our customers are using to power the “search social media” button in BatchBook. According to their blog post, starting January 1, 2011 this search will no longer be available to BatchBook customers who have set up an integration with Flowtown. This does not affect most BatchBook accounts, as we do have a lighter version of the search built in to every BatchBook account. This only affects those customers who had a separate Flowtown account and had set up their integration with BatchBook. We are working with other vendors to continue to increase and improve the social media integration in BatchBook
While we are sorry to see this change in policy from Flowtown, we do understand their need to adjust their API functionality to support their business efforts. This is a formative time in the world of integrated business development, and we appreciate Flowtown’s early and open discussions with us as they made these changes. We will continue to work with vendors such as Flowtown and other members of the Small Business Web to help establish best practices and standards for sharing information between social networks, online applications and mobile devices. Cloud customers can only win if we as an integrated business community work with each other and the social media networks to establish reliable procedures for data sharing.
