BatchBook Blog
Learning a new language is often challenging and frustrating. Batchbook customer Spark Languages doesn’t think that should be the status quo. They want learning another language to be fun, engaging, and effective. Through their program in Spain, students can learn Spanish in an immersive setting as they connect with teachers and native speakers.
What do you do?
We run Spanish language courses for adult learners and school groups. We offer accommodation in our own cultural residence, in hotels and also in staying with Spanish families. We also run an English Academy for Spanish children and a small translation service. (more…)
This is the third installment of The New Batchbook series, a collection of blog posts intended to keep you all updated on the progress of our re-write of Batchbook. We’ve been extremely busy the last few months building the back-end architecture and core functionality. We’ve made some great progress on contacts, custom fields, a new import process, advanced search/lists and integrations all of which I will share shortly. But for now I want to tell you about the mobile version.
A major change in philosophy for this version of Batchbook is our approach to the mobile application. In the past, our mobile versions of Batchbook were built as separate applications native to the mobile platform and completely separate from each other or the web version of Batchbook. They launched months, or even years after the web application and relied entirely on the phone’s OS and database to store data and serve the application. This has meant that new features were not immediately available in the mobile application, customers with large number of contacts could not access them on the phone, maintenance has been time consuming and slow and the only mobile versions available are the iPhone and Android versions.
This time around we’re going with a mobile optimized view of the app. Phone browsers keep getting better and better and we think this is the best way to give you an excellent experience across multiple platforms. This means support for iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, and (newer) Blackberry devices on day one. It also means shifting the burden of large databases off your phones (don’t worry, we’ll cache stuff that makes sense) and onto our beefy new server infrastructure. And it means that we can more easily push out updates to all platforms simultaneously. Exciting stuff (for the right kind of person)!
We’re working hard to make the new Batchbook better across the board and this is an improvement we’re pretty psyched about. We’re excited to get it into your hands and hear your feedback. Stay Tuned!
As you may know, we’ve experienced system slowness and occasional downtimes recently. We’re truly sorry for the disruption to your business. It’s unacceptable and we are working on a solution as fast as possible.
Why is this happening?
Well, there are a lot of people using Batchbook. While the system was certainly designed to scale, it has not kept up at a pace we find acceptable. We started to build the product over 5 years ago and in that time there have been significant upgrades to the programming language, hosting environment and back-end architecture. We realized that to truly take advantage of the strengths of our SaaS environment, we can’t just plug in some bigger, faster servers. We need to take a look at every line of code, every call to the database, every bit of data stored in memory and every process needed to hook them all together. So that’s what’s happening.
What are you doing about it?
We’re rebuilding the entire Batchbook product. It’s an extremely expensive undertaking, but we know that to continue to grow and serve our customers in the absolute fastest and most reliable way possible, we must go through this
short-term pain. There are a few blog posts about the new system and more coming very soon.
In the mean time, we’re also putting our best resources, and calling on outside best resources, to minimize the slowness and periodic outages. Our Systems Administrator is monitoring the system 24/7 and responds instantly when there are any issues. We tweet and update our status page when we do have an outage, and we usually have it resolved within minutes. But even this is unacceptable, so we’re now increasing the manual supervision of the servers and continuing to update processes on the existing Batchbook servers to improve speed and reliability.
What next?
We can’t promise that there won’t be any other problems, but we can promise that the entire Batchbook team and a number of other developers and partners are working as fast and hard as possible to build the new system, and keep your downtime to a minimum. We can also promise that the new Batchbook is well worth the wait and then some; you’re gonna love it.
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Passion. You need it to start a business, especially in the early stages when you have little more than a dream. But passion alone isn’t enough to get you from those dreams to a successful business launch.
That is where accelerator programs and start up mentor-ships can really help. Betaspring is an entrepreneurial accelerator program based in Providence, RI, which draws entrepreneurial teams from all over and enrolls them into an intensive, high-octane culture populated by other passionate entrepreneurs who, just like them, are looking to launch or scale their businesses. Add to the mix a group of experienced mentors and instructors to help them walk a steady path toward their official launch, and you have the basic recipe for Betaspring’s success.
(Betaspring co-founder Allan Tear with Christopher Kieran and Andrew Hapke of Zoko.)
The culture is part of the key to the success of Betaspring. Participants are hand-picked from a list of applicants, with an eye toward finding those entrepreneurs who are ready to launch or to grow their businesses. Both brand new entrepreneurs with an viable business idea and more seasoned individuals who have already begun the process of building a business are chosen for each cycle.
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Searching for a job in today’s market is tough. You want to use every tool available, and as far as those tools go, social media is a pretty powerful one. Batchbook customer and social media strategist Joshua Waldman sets out to show you just how to harness the power of social media to find your next job in his new book, Job Searching with Social Media for Dummies.
Joshua’s passion is helping job seekers and employers use social tools to connect and to find and fill jobs. He blogs on the topic regularly at his website, careerenlightenment.com. He discovered this passion after being laid off twice within 6 months in 2008. After the second lay off, he started to spend more time in social media, partly as a way to immerse himself into something positive after being dealt a couple of hard blows.
Before long, Joshua found that he was able to connect with people who were hiring, and he lined up a bunch of interviews. There was only one problem, he wasn’t ready to take another job. Instead, he had a light-bulb moment. If he could get interviews and job offers using social media, maybe he could teach others to use these tools as well. This is how he started his career as a social media strategist, focusing on the job market niche.
Job Searching with Social Media for Dummies is a resource heavy book, sort of a manual for job seekers who hope to capitalize on the power of tools like Twitter and LinkedIn to help them find a great job.
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