Bye-Bye CardScan?

John Barnes — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 19:32:01 +0000

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.

Chicago User Group Notes: FreshDM, Dreamforce and Verizon Wireless

model — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 01:35:21 +0000

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!