Posts Tagged ‘cardlasso’
I recently listed the desktop version of CardLasso on Adobe’s AIR Marketplace. If you haven’t heard of AIR, check it out on the Adobe site. It is the “Adobe Integrated Runtime” which allows you to run RIA apps on your desktop and distribute them with the ease of a web app. Our AIR version of CardLasso is targeted at the Tradeshow user, and allows you to quickly gather business cards when you have no internet connection and save them locally. You can sync them up to Lasso2Go later back at Starbucks or the hotel.
It seems like not a lot of people know about the AIR Marketplace so I wanted to write a quick note to raise awareness and let you know about the listing process.
First off, I really like their approach. You can use your existing Adobe ID to create a publishing account on the marketplace, this took 10 seconds.
Next you enter publisher information to tell everyone a little about your company and upload a company logo. Very fast and easy. I was immediately approved as a publisher.
Then I filled out the listing for our application which included all the standard info you would expect, description, logos, links to download the app, etc… (See below)
The only hard part about the listing process was sizing down graphics and screen shots to fit the requirements, but not a big deal.
Then I clicked submit.
Literally less than an hour later I had an email from Adobe with a few questions and suggestions on my listing. I made the suggested changes and our product was live.
It was great to list a product on an online store and have it live a four hours after starting the listing process. Granted it doesn’t have the volume that the Apple AppStore has, or the security implications that the Salesforce AppExchange listings have, but both Apple and Salesforce could learn a few things from how Adobe approaches the listing process.
It’s been live for a few days, check it out here and add a review to let us know what you think.
In case you haven’t heard we announced CardLasso back in November of last year. We have had a lot of interest and received some great feedback since it was shown in the Dreamforce keynote by Adam Gross, namely:
- This is great, but I don’t have an iPhone
- Could I use this for Tradeshows?
- Do you have any Corporate plan options
I’m glad to say that we have now implemented each of the above suggestions and they are either live in Lasso, or are currently in beta.
Card Entry via Web Cam
If you don’t have an iPhone you can enter cards directly from your laptop or PC with an attached USB Web Cam. This option allows for high-volume card entry and doesn’t require a proprietary scanner (such as CardScan).
Other Mobile Phones
We also have a new mobile offering that will allow you to enter cards from ANY mobile phone (including Blackberries which you have all asked about). This approach will work with any phone that allows you to take a picture and send an email.
Native Blackberry Client
We are also developing a native Blackberry client to have even tighter integration with this platform, so if you are excited about the new Blackberry Storm you got for Christmas, stay tuned.
Lasso Offline for Tradeshows
If you are in marketing and go to tradeshows, you know the pain of entering hundreds or thousands of business cards. We utilized our 2Go mobile platform and built a special offline version of Lasso that allows you to rapidly capture pictures of cards using a web cam in an offline mode and then they can be uploaded for transcription once you have Internet connectivity.
We are very excited about Lasso and it is a great showcase of what can be done with force.com Sites.
If you are interested head over to http://www.lasso2go.com to sign up for a $1.99 trial to give this a spin.
Just finished up at the
Chicago User Group. Pretty good crew showed up despite the weather and the time of year. The particular one was hosted by Click Commerce and sponsored by Allegro and Model Metrics.
Who is Allegro? Fair question. They produce
FreshDM, an on-demand direct marketing print fulfillment thing. (There’s a catchier phrase for it — I just can’t find it right now.) You know all those hours you’ve spent on postcard addressing? Or letters? Or whatever? They take that process and make it point and click. Put in your direct mail piece template, select the recipients and they do the rest: print, address, stamp, mail.
One word: AWESOME!
If I think back a few years to when I would design a postcard and ship it out to
PrintingForLess.com (who, by the way, still rocks) (I think, I haven’t used them in a few years), wait for the results to ship to me, print out a bunch of labels, peel and stick and run it through the postage machine OR WORSE apply stamps — you get the idea. What a waste of time that was.
FreshDM — if you read this — feel free to set me up with a sample account so I can try it out on my Christmas cards. You would make my day!
OK enough of a non-too-subtle plea for help getting Christmas cards done — back to CUG.
We talked about Winter 09. Standard stuff. It’s funny — no one is talking about
Visualforce Email templates which I LOVE. Think about it — the ability to create an attachment that’s either CSV or PDF and send the whole thing out. It’s AWESOME. Not that the rest of the release isn’t — but I’d like to see more people talk about it for sure.
Then we had a chance to talk about some of the Model Metrics neatness — Lasso2Go mostly. Ever notice that your Verizon wireless card sloooooooows down when you’re in front of a crowd? Mine certainly did this time. Ah the many joys of live demos!
But we had a good number of questions (not soft balls — actual questions) about how to work with Force.com sites and Amazon Web Services — enough that I don’t think too many people other than me noticed the slow wireless. I took pictures of cards with my web cam, everything was transcribed in pretty near real time and we had what were I think a couple of pretty legitimate ooh’s and ah’s.
Thanks to Cecile and Denise for organizing everyone and for inviting us. I look forward to the next one!
We just closed down our booths at Dreamforce and are all heading back to our respective cities. Based on credible sources Dreamforce attendance was just a few people shy of the expected 10,000. That is a very interesting number considering some of the economic news as of late and companies that have travel bans, spending freezes, etc… This really speaks to the power of SaaS (software-as-a-service) and PaaS (platform-as-a-service) and the value companies see in the cloud even in tough economic times.
This Dreamforce was very different than in years past for more reasons than just the growth in attendance. The entire first day’s keynote was purely around the platform and force.com enhancements. Depending on what tracks you attended you almost wouldn’t remember that salesforce.com has a CRM product. With the advances in APEX, Visualforce and now Sites they have put together a very viable platform that can be used in a wide variety of situations.
We have received a lot of great feedback for our new products that we unveiled at Dreamforce, or shortly before so. Everyone loves the idea of Search2GO (demo) and searching for data within salesforce.com from their iPhone for any edition of salesforce.com (other than Group edition). It was exciting to talk to someone from Japan by our mobile booth who is a big fan of Expense2GO and has been using it since it launched with the AppStore back in July. It really proves the international support of the iPhone and force.com when you see users from all over the world storing data in their local language and currency.
We were fortunate to have early access to force.com Sites as well as the Amazon toolkits and the timing worked out perfectly as we could use them as the foundation for our new Lasso2GO product suite. We are very impressed with what you can do by leveraging best-of-breed services from force.com and Amazon Web Services to build cloud platforms that were not possible before these platforms existed. It was exciting to see Charlie Bell (VP of Infrastructure for Amazon.com) on stage with Marc Benioff and Adam Gross and have them showing off our upcoming CardLasso application. I’m looking forward to applying this same technology stack to our customer base as we help them build new applications we haven’t even imagined.
CHICAGO and SAN FRANCISCO – Today at Dreamforce 2008, salesforce.com’s annual user and developer conference, Model Metrics revealed a revolutionary cloud-computing application called CardLasso. CardLasso, part of the Lasso2GO application suite that utilizes services from salesforce.com’s new Force.com Sites capability and Amazon Web Services, enables users to capture business card information using a mobile device camera and automates the transcription of contact data, which is automatically presented for download to the user from www.lasso2go.com.
<Link to full press release>
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