BatchBook Blog
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.
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Tags: api, formstack, web froms, webformglue
Our panel “Friends with Business Benefits: How Integrations Sell Apps” made it through the first round for SXSW11! We’ll be speaking with some of our favorite Small Business Web folks and other integration fans about why integrated apps are the way to go for companies and for customers.
Here’s a description of the panel, should be a fun one!
“The Small Business Web now has over 100 web app companies all serving the small business market. Together, we’re re-writing the rules for traditional business development and building the market for small business software through integrations.
So how has it not devolved into fisticuffs and mayhem? And why does integration help both the consumers and the vendors who are building the applications?
Members of the Small Business Web will discuss the power of the open API, why customers buy apps that integrate, how they are embracing their competition and why sometimes even they have to remember to “Hug It Out” as they work together to define the future of the Small Business Web.”
We need your help in making our dream of a Small Business Web panel a reality by giving us your vote*, your Tweets, your love etc. Vote for our panel and hopefully we’ll see you in Austin in March.
*You’ll need to sign in or create an account at the SXSW site to vote.
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Tags: Community, events, small business web, SXSW
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.
We find that being able to show each other visually what we’re seeing makes us work much more productively and able to respond to our customers and share information with each other much more efficiently.
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Tags: Customer Experience, Jing, Working VIrtually
We love being able to pull in information related to your contacts and their actions on the Social Web. While our ‘Search Social Network’ option lets you pull in some of this data automatically, it’s really very easy to set up custom fields to bring in information from a variety of different sources as well. Our SuperTags are capable of pulling in and populating your contact data with any RSS Feed. (For a quick primer of RSS, check out this handy video from the fine folks at CommonCraft)
For example, I’m a music fan and a long time user of the last.fm service which records all of the music I listen to on my computer. I think music is a logical conversation starter so I’m a big fan of adding information about what my contacts are listening to and adding that to their profile. Here’s how I did that:
(more…)
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Tags: Dossier, Last.fm, rss, supertag
Customer: Piers Shepperd
Company: Stagelink Limited (www.stagelink.com)
Tell Us A Little Bit About What Your Company Does And What Services You Provide:
Stagelink provides specialist technical design and production services to the live event industries. We have worked all over the world, helping teams from the Rolling Stones and U2 to the Opening Ceremonies of the 2004 Athens Olympics and 2010 Vancouver Olympics. We provide specialist 3d technical design solutions using AutoCAD and Rhino, technical drawings, specifications and technical direction. Much of our work involves the coordination of lighting, sound, video, rigging and staging teams to ensure that everybody is heading in the right direction. Our real ‘buzz’ is bringing together hugely complex projects and teams to realize a creative dream.
How Did You Get Started:
After leaving school, I worked as a lighting technician on events all over the world, before moving onto the technical design of stage sets.
How Long Have You Been In Business And How Many Employees Do You Currently Have:
I have been involved in the technical side of live events for the past twenty years. We don’t have any full time employees. We use a network of specialists from around the world, who we call on depending on the exact requirements of our clients.
What Is Your Target Audience:
We seek out teams who are producing ‘mega events’ wherever they are in the world. The industry is relatively small, so we rely on our network of existing contacts.
How Does Your Company Stay Connected With Clients And Your Business Community:
We run a successful website which provide free listings of people and companies working in the events industry. We communicate regularly using email, and run document management systems to allow for the distribution of drawings and specifications.
Can You Offer Any Advice For Anyone Else Looking To Start Their Own Company:
Strive for excellence.
Is There Anything Else You Would Like To Add:
We connect to Batchbook using the API to automatically generate pdf contact sheets for every production, which are available for our clients to download from our website.
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Tags: Blue By You, small business
