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Today, live from the action at SXSWi in Austin, we launched the new version of The Small Business Web. This site has grown from a single page put together on the fly at last year’s SXSW, to a full-blown Directory that includes categories, screen shots, pricing info, links to integration information and more.
Helping small businesses navigate and use technology has always been part of BatchBlue’s mission. It’s why we write our “Blue Papers“, it’s why we started the Twitter chat for small business owners #SBBUZZ and it’s the reason we’re now so excited about the new Directory. We think it will be very useful for folks looking for ways to grow and manage their businesses using some of the best tools out there.
Here’s a short video our friends at MailChimp put together to help explain what the Small Business Web is all about:
We hope you will make many good connections through the new Small Business Web Directory. We look forward to helping you hook them all up.
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Tags: batchblue, mailchimp, small business, small business web, SXSW, SXSWi
You may have noticed our big announcement yesterday that BatchBook is now listed in the Google Apps Marketplace. We’ve since gotten a number of people (including reporters, other SaaS companies and even a few customers) asking us simply, “Why did you join?” So I thought I would share my response with you all.
As I explained to Mike Pearson who wrote an article about the new Marketplace for the E-Commerce Times, it just felt like the right thing to do. Let me explain why.
Google understands the value of giving customers control of their own information. All of the Google Apps business products have a publicly available API. You may think this is only important to tech addicts and uber geeks. But THIS IS HUGE for every entrepreneur who cares about growing their business. You see, this is Google’s way of saying (and something BatchBook says as well), “the business information that you trust to our care is yours – do what you need to do with it to succeed.” Yes, Google Apps let you send e-mails, schedule events and create spreadsheets. But they’ve just increased 20 fold what else you can easily do with YOUR information including tracking deals, sending newsletters, generating invoices, scheduling appointments, managing your projects, sending surveys and so much more.
And they were able to do that because a few years ago they made the decision to make their API, the gateway to the data stored within the Google applications, available to anyone their customers chose to grant access to it. They did it in a smart way, in a secure way and honestly, in a pretty gusty way. They knew customers might take their data and run. They knew competitors would have a peek at their inner workings. But they focused on empowering their users to take control of their own data, whether through a geeky friend, a trusted reseller, or another SaaS product. And their users are now benefiting immensely.
This idea is a founding principle of the Small Business Web, a movement we co-founded a year ago to bring together like-minded, customer-obsessed software companies to integrate our respective products and make life easier for small businesses. With more than 70 companies now participating, many of which are part of the new Google Apps Marketplace, we feel that the growing trend towards open integrations can only benefit small businesses.
So yes, the decision to join the new Google Apps Marketplace was a no brainer. They’ve made it easier for their users to access the growing number of applications they can use to run their business. We, of course, wanted BatchBook to be the first in line.
We are in this to help small businesses. And we know this is the right way to do it.
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Tags: api, batchblue, batchbook, google apps marketplace, small business web
We’ve been working with many of our Small Business Web friends in planning a Big Party for Small Business. If you’re going to be in Texas next week, we hope you’ll stop by from some food, drinks and conversation with the smashing hosts of the party (and the people who love them!)
Here are some of the small business SaaS companies who will be in attendance and eager to meet up:
FreshBooks
Formspring
Handset Detection
MailChimp
oDesk
Outright
Rackspace
Shipwire
shoeboxed
surveygizmo
TeamSupport.com
Wufoo
…and of course, good old BatchBlue (hint: look for the blue cupcakes!)
You can RSVP (required by Austin law) and find out more about the party on the official party page. You can also follow the party-specific Twitter account, where we’ll be posting updates, plans, pictures and more.
See you in Texas!
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Tags: batchblue, small business, small business web, SXSW, SXSW10
Last week was a milestone week for us. It was the two year anniversary of the launch of BatchBook and the starting week for our three (!) newest employees.
It’s a very exciting time here at BatchBlue. We’ve seen rapid growth not only in BatchBook, but in our weekly Twitter chat SBBuzz and our SaaS coalition the Small Business Web. We have some related major new launches coming up and to help us prepare, we were lucky to have found three amazing new employees.
Allow me to introduce:
Mikey Hougland (@lamikey) is a local artist about the town and our new on-staff designer. We have known Mikey for a couple of years and have attended many Providence Geeks meetings and even SXSW parties together. Not to mention her dog (and Twitter user!) @scoutsprout is a t-shirt wearing BatchBlue fan. We’re thrilled to have Mikey’s help in making the BatchBlue world visually interesting and useful for our customers.
Scott Blitstein (@scoblitz) is living proof that online relationships are the real thing. Scott was an early beta user of BatchBook, he has been one of the most frequent non-employee contributors on our forums, he’s written about us on a number of different blogs, participated in every contest we ran, regularly attends and periodically guest moderates on SBBuzz and helped us develop our new Experts Program. I’ve never actually met him in person, haven’t seen his resume or CV, didn’t ask for writing samples and yet when he expressed an interest in working for us, I knew immediately we had to hire him. And we’re lucky he said yes! He’ll be joining the Customer Experience team, working over on our forums, writing for the blog and just generally being the helpful guy that he is.
Christelle Lachapelle (@stellel) is our newest Customer Experience diva. She found us through our good pals at MailChimp (so we knew she was a smart lady) and told us in her cover letter that she would look good in a pink mustache. Her personality came through in every communication we had with her, so we knew she would be a great addition to our fanatical customer support team.
Please join us in welcoming the latest BatchBluers. We’re glad they are along for what promises to be a very fun and interesting ride.
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Tags: batchblue, hr, Social Media, virtual office
We wanted to start the new year off with a round-up of some recent articles and reviews that have hit the Interwebs. A brief media retrospective, if you will (a complete list of media coverage can be found on our press page.)
Live via Skype
Back in September, our friend and Internet marketer Bernie Borges did my first ever interview via Skype about all things BatchBlue and our content strategy in particular. His Optimize This blog post has a link to the audio version as well as a nice summary of our chat.
The work/life thing
One of our very favorite ladies Aliza Sherman, who’s the Entrepreneur Mom at WorkItMom (among her many other projects!) posted an interview of our president Pam O’Hara and me by problogger Gina Blitstein. Pam and I were both surprised at how different our answers were when it came to how we balance our work and family lives (Pam has three kids under seven and I have two.) Have a read – maybe you have come up with an entirely different way to make it all work that you’d like to share.
Locavores
Here in our hometown of Providence, we were featured in Rhode Island Business Quarterly. I like this article because it includes a picture of (most of) our team in our office, which is kind of rare. I also love the title “The Organizers” because it makes us seem alike street gang in a gritty episode of the Sopranos — arguably more exciting than building software!
Monkey do
Our favorite monkeys over at email marketing company MailChimp reached an important milestone with their API and mentioned BatchBlue and our Small Business Web cohorts over on their blog. Our integration with MailChimp was our first ever, therefore we will always have a great fondness (as well as free bananas!) for them. Congrads to the MailChimp team on their continued success.
Word on TheStreet.com
Finally, as an early Christmas gift, Jonathan Blum wrote a nice review of BatchBook on TheStreet.com and also posted a slick little video of BatchBook in action. It was a great way to end an exciting year.
As always, we’re now hard at work at the BatchBlue headquarters, building things to surprise and hopefully delight our customers in upcoming months. Thanks to all for your support — we look forward to what the new year will bring for BatchBlue and our customers.
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Tags: batchblue, batchbook, mailchimp, small business web
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