We had the great pleasure of hosting Dan Jeffries (@newmindgroup), CEO of New Mind Group, a technology consulting company and Google Apps reseller out of Kalamazoo, MI here at the BatchHaus last week. We first met Dan when BatchBlue CTO Sean Ransom met him at Google’s IO conference last spring.
We’ve working with Dan and his team for a few months now collaborating on some about to be announced Gmail/BatchBook goodies, so were delighted when Dan wrote in that he was going to be in the Providence area and wanted to come by (when you run a tech company in the cloud and outside of THE VALLEY you relish these opportunities for a partner “drop-by”).
I had a delightful time talking to Dan about our businesses, SaaS apps, and the joys of parenting through it all. He was nice enough to go on record in the below video documenting his visit. And I promise, he said all of these nice things BEFORE we bought him a beer.
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.
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!
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.
Being a largely virtual team, our Customer Experience group has come to rely on lots of different tools and technologies to stay connected and manage our work. I thought it might be interesting to feature some of the tools that we use to do the stuff that we do every day.
A big part of working with our customers is to answer their questions and help them resolve any issues that they may be having with BatchBook. On our team, we do a lot of collaboration amongst ourselves to share ideas and ask each other questions. Since much of this information is visual, we’ve really come to rely on a tool called Jing. A picture is often worth a thousand words – and Jing helps us create and share those pictures. It’s often a lot easier to put a big arrow on an image and say “Look Here” than it is to try to describe things.
If you’re not familiar with Jing, it’s a really nifty screen capture tool that lets you quickly and easily grab and share screenshots and screencasts. For us, the quick and easy really is the key to Jing and why we have all naturally gravitated towards using it. With just a couple of clicks, we can grab all or a portion of our screen, annotate it with highlights or text, and then share out those images with the rest of the group.
Jing integrates with screencast.com to host or store these images and with a click it automatically uploads the file and puts the URL on the clipboard. This lets us share the image with each other via Skype, send it out to a customer via email, or add to an issue ticket for the tech team.
We’re starting to use more short screencasts in the group as well since they are so easy to make. To show a series of events or to document how we achieved a particular result is really much easier to do visually than to write out a series of steps.
