by dlevy under Uncategorized

I know that all the folks recently displaced by the recent Coghead announcement are really faced with some tough decisions over the next next few days/weeks/months.

Customers are scrambling to find a long-term solution that can run and and grow with their business.
Partners are scrambling to find new solutions onto which to migrate their existing customers.
Developers are looking for new and exciting platform offerings on which to build the most powerful, rich, web enabled applications that can reach a substantial marketplace!
All three of these groups are looking for powerful, proven solutions that can help them meet their goals, and grow with them.

I believe that Intuit QuickBase is the answer! QuickBase has been growing for over 8 years, and we currently have companies large and small, from half of the Fortune 100, to thousands of small businesses relying on QuickBase every day.

To that end, we would like to take this moment to invite all existing Coghead customers, partners and developers to attend the following upcoming events in which we’ll introduce our offerings and provide everyone with the information they need to make the best possible decisions for their customers, their businesses, and the marketplace.

For Partners and Developers : QuickBase will be hosting a free online web demo for all Coghead Partners and Developers to discuss QuickBase
During this presentation we will cover :
• How QuickBase can meet your business needs
• How to make money developing and reselling QuickBase applications to your customers
• How to build Rich Internet Applications with the Intuit Partner Platform and QuickBase, to market and sell to over 25 million QuickBooks users world-wide!
To kick off the call, we have invited Bill Lucchini, Intuit VP and QuickBase GM, who will discuss QuickBase’s commitment to the Coghead customers, partners, and developers.

The date of this presentation will be on Tuesday March 3d, 2009 at 10am (PST)
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To join this meeting
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1. Go to https://intuit.webex.com/intuit/j.php?J=338346797
2. Enter the meeting password: 123
3. Click “Join Now”.
4. Follow the instructions that appear on your screen to join the teleconference.
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For Customers: QuickBase will be hosting a free online web demonstration for all Coghead existing customers to introduce them to our tested, proven and reliable platform
We will cover :
• An overview of the QuickBase platform-as-a-service model including a review of its 250+ template applications from which you can build custom “right-for-me” solutions for your business
• A review of the “Big 5” : the core components that make QuickBase the most customizable, flexible, secure PaaS offering on the market today
• An interactive Q&A to review any outstanding questions or issues including a review of the QuickBase Offer to Coghead Users who convert and next steps for beginning your migration

The date of this presentation will be on Thursday March 5, 2009 at 10am (PST)

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To join this meeting
——————————————————-
1. Go to https://intuit.webex.com/intuit/j.php?J=336291688
2. Enter the meeting password: 123
3. Click “Join Now”.
4. Follow the instructions that appear on your screen to join the teleconference.
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If you should have any questions about the above or would just like to learn more about how QuickBase can help your business, please don’t hesitate to contact me directly at Darren_Levy at intuit.com.

by Joshua McGinnis under Uncategorized

If you aren’t already, we encourage you to follow us on Twitter!

by Kirk Trachy under Inside QuickBase, QuickBase News

Whilst most of us were still in bed sleeping this Saturday, our QuickBase engineering team was up early readying for a new QuickBase feature release. This release sports three main features, numerous improvements and many enhancements.

If you have ever filled out a form and selected a make and model of a car you will get an idea of what one of these features is. We call them “Conditional or Cascading” drop down boxes. Whatever you select first effects and determines your second choice. It has many applications and is one feature that has been a top request of users and developers.

Also released is a new “Home” tab that is replacing the “Reports” tab on your “My QuickBase” page. We’ve changed it to reflect greater functionality. In short we have increased the number of function panels, enabled a versitile text/html editior for video, scripts and whatever other html gadget you can think up.

One more thing. If you’re an Account Administrator, you will be pleased to know you can now delete unverified users within your domain.

Give it a go, kick the tires and let us know what you think.

by Bill Lucchini under Customer Stories, Industry Trends, Partner Corner, Uncategorized

Last night TechCrunch announced that Coghead, a startup that built an online database, is going out of business.  Personally, I’m sorry to hear about it.  I’ve met some of the Coghead team and they are a smart, entreprenuerial team.   This is an important class of applications and there is a lot of opportunity, but in this environment it’s very hard to be a startup dependent on outside funding.  Today, I definitely feel lucky to be a part of Intuit, to be profitable, and to be the #1 player in the online database world.  For QuickBase I certainly feel that everything is a little harder in this economic environment but this news certainly reminds us to be thankful about what is working.

Based on this news we thought about what Coghead users, partners, and employees will do.  Here’s what we can offer:

• For Customers: We recognize that you need to move fast to replace Coghead and if you’re anything like QuickBase users, your apps are critical to your business.  To help ease the transition we’re offering:
  • Six months of free service to get started.  We’d like you to be able to focus on getting your business transitioned and not covering a monthly subscription.
  • Two hours of free consulting with a member of our QuickBase Business Consultant Program who can help rebuild your application in QuickBase
  • Unlimited support
  • Lastly, we will be offering webinars specifically for Coghead customers where we talk about QuickBase and discuss transition issues.
  • You can visit our web page for the offer here.
• For Partners: For those of you who have built businesses around Coghead we’d like to offer participation in either our QuickBase Business Consultant Program or our Intuit Partner Platform. 
  • The QuickBase Consultant Program is perfect for Solution Providers who are good at working with customers to solve their unique problems with QuickBase.  For customers you bring with you we will honor our 20% revenue sharing and we are working to organize a special free QuickBase training class specifically for partners coming from Coghead.  As a QuickBase Business Consultant you’ll also be eligible to participate in our lead share program.  If you are interested in the QuickBase Business Consultant Program please either apply directly to the program, or email darren_levy at intuit.com. 
  • The Intuit Partner Platform (IPP) is designed for Independent Software Vendors that want to build SaaS businesses targeting Intuit’s 4M small businesses.  Like Coghead, IPP uses Adobe Flex for the User Interface so you should find some familiar tools.   If you are interested in the Intuit Partner Platform, apply here, or contact alex_barnett at intuit.com.
• For Employees: Any Coghead employee who is interested can submit a resume to Intuit and we will do our best to get it in front of all the relevant hiring managers either inside or outside of the QuickBase team.  Please send your resumes to sally_russell at intuit.com.

I wish Paul and his team the best and I hope we can help.

by Greg Collins under QuickBase News

Product release scheduled for Saturday, February 21 at 8am EST

I wanted to take a moment and let the QuickBase community know about some of the new features that will be coming out with the February product release scheduled for this Saturday, Feb. 21 at 8am.

“Reports” tab gets renamed “Home” tab

It’s more than just a new name. Our product team has added features that allow users to customize this new page even more.  Now, in addition to adding your favorite reports you can also add free-form text boxes on your Home tab. You could use the boxes to add a quick list of favorite links, to-do lists, or even embed html, scripts, RSS or images from other websites. It’s like having the features your come to love about application dashboards right on your Home tab.

Conditional Dropdowns

For advanced users “conditional dropdowns” provide a new tool for improving usability and simplifying data entry. Application builders can now filter a dropdown choice by leveraging relationships. For example, if you have a long list of Cities, you can set it up so that the user selects the Country first, then the City dropdown is filtered by that Country. This is a popular request from our users and I know this feature will make the lives of app builders easier in a bunch of ways. Enjoy!

Still thirsty?

I’ll be posting some screen shots and links to support pages over the next couple of days. Those resources should give you a better sense of how these changes will allow you to get more out of QuickBase.

by Bill Lucchini under Customer Stories, Industry Trends

Back about a year ago I posted about customization and SaaS.  Some people have said that one of the primary inhibitors to adoption of Online Applications (SaaS) was that there is no ability to customize them.  Well, as all of you know as users of QuickBase, that doesn’t have to be true.  Just recently I did a post asking to hear stories about how people were using QuickBase.  The results were awesome and one reaction I had was that reading the comments was enough to prove the point that customization and online can go together.  Here are a couple of examples:

• Scott Skibell at National Seminars Group uses QuickBase to organize over 700 training videos.  In his words:
  “ I created a content management system in QuickBase that points to our different servers…  …Marketing and web designers can search the database and click a preview button to watch the different videos. They can then copy the file’s URL and use it in their code for web pages or downloads. This saves me countless hours each day and streamlines our workflow. Without it, we’d probably have to hire someone just to track everything. QuickBase is a godsend.”
• Tamara Littleton is CEO of eModeration Limited and has a global challenge.  She has offices in London, New York, and Los Angeles, as well as 65 staff members working in locations such as Belgium, Germany, Australia, etc.  They use QuickBase to track time cards, manage their clients and new leads, track projects, bring new employees on board, and track staff experience, knowledge and preferences to match them to projects.  You can see more in her excellent comment to my post.  This one company demonstrates the flexibility of QuickBase all on their own.
• Patti Dornacker uses QuickBase to track expense reports for employees.  Employees complete an online form and reimbursement rates are calculated automatically.  They’ve been able to please employees by reducing turnaround time and managers get easy access to reports that give them the info to stay within budget.

As you can see from these examples, because QuickBase is an online database it can serve a broad variety of needs.  People in today’s world have begun to expect things to be exactly how they want them.  Today we have 190k different ways to have our lattes at Starbucks, we can get custom printed M&M’s, or the awesome Flip Mino video camera that you can order with a picture of your choosing on the body (my wife’s has a grasshopper).  It’s time software started working for us and working the way we want it to.  No more “one size fits all” software that solves everything everyone asked for and in the end is such a clutter that it makes no one happy.

by Kirk Trachy under Uncategorized

Scott Wyatt of Advantage Integrated Solutions (www.advantagequickbase.com) called me last week. Scott is one of our Intuit QuickBase® Business Consultants and he was excited to show me how he has leveraged QuickBase’s open API (Application Programming Interface) with that of VerticalResponce (www.verticalresponse.com). For those of you that don’t know, Scott has been developing QuickBase applications forever and VerticalResponse is a well known email campaign management service that enables you to develop and launch email marketing campaigns and track their viewablity, results and effectiveness. QuickBase adds the Sales Management and CRM applications and includes detailed tracking and feature rich reporting.

The new application is called eResults and it is available as the featured application in our QuickBase Application Library. Check out their press release for more information.