CollateBox Blog

What Customers Hope & What Customers Get

There is a gap between what customers hope & what they get. And, this gap can define satisfaction levels of your customers. While firms & marketers try to sell hard on first one (What customers hope), they disregard second one (What customers get); this leads to dissatisfaction.

P.S.: Selling yourself short on second one over first one can give you an edge, positive or negative, manner is time bounded.

The reason for us to write this is, to give our customers a bird’s eye view of what CollateBox offers, so that we don’t overhype and make false promises.

 

CollateBox allows you to collaborate on lists without creating and e-mailing copies. It significantly reduces bytes of storage, effort, cost and time. 

We have spoken a lot about the core product, now let me just share with you some augmented benefits.

• Attach files, images, and comments on every record-  Your team members get to open and view the files and even add comments for others to discuss 
• Data collection using cool online forms- You can click & generate white-labeled online forms and share it with your customers, partners and employees instantly
• Track changes made on the data- See WHO changed your data, WHEN did the change occur and WHAT data was changed in your existing data
• Data summary and visualization - painful to create pivots and write complex macros to analyze data? Work your way out with just a click

There is more which is not mentioned here, all up to you to figure it out.

Now if we go back to where we started, I will say this is what we give to our customers.

You have all heard WYSIWYG "what you see is what you get", but CollateBox has tweaked this to WYGIWYS “what you get is what you’ve seen”.
Picked it from DEMO Conference last year where we launched.

Enjoy collating with us!!!

Share your experience…

 

- Athar Ankalgi

Related articles

Good and going forward...

Night is darkest before the dawn and I promise the dawn is coming!

Sharing crumbs of data easier than sharing crumbs of bread!!!

CollateBox is in use, how cool is that ….!

I know we have been silent, but that’s only because we haven’t caught our breath. 

The run that we started @Demospring 2012 in Santa Clara has introduced us to a whole new world of possibilities. Honestly – we are finding it way too hard to keep up with investor discussions, more chop/chop on features, factoring common user feedbacks into our validated build-release cycle and charting our immediate roadmap. But from all the stuff that’s going on, here are a few key things that are worth a quick post:

1. more than ## + users are already hooked on to CollateBox (CB). How cool is that ….! We know its buggy and so do the people who use CB today. But our early users are begining to come back to create views of their tabular data (task list, album list, video collection list, survey results list) and share it with their selected friends. Why?

Because there's no better way to organize, work & share relevant views of their data lists with others while maintaining one master box of data :-) 

Thanks Jeff – Ravi – Karissa Martin – Jonathan, Adi and everyone who have been patiently supporting us during this period. Promise to do lot more than what we are able to do now…

2. several new use cases, unheard bugs and feature requests are beginning to show up that are beyond “undo, commenting, coloring capability” :-). Obviously, not planned. Hence we are filtering the most obvious ones and putting things in a Que. Some of them are possible to achieve via a work around and I expect a lot of those to happen during the short to medium period. Keep sending those errors with screenshots or otherwise to our support guys and they will keep you updated on the next course of action. Don’t forget, we need your help to shape this into an awesome product – [mailto: supportatcollateboxdotcom]

3. helpdesk - on its way. We signed up with Freshdesk, a feedback link will appear on the sidebar of CollateBox app for everyone. That hopefully will reduce efforts to give us your must have/valuable feedbacks.

4. our capacity is sadly limited right now and you can only get access to Collatebox if one of your friends or colleagues have an invitation account inside CB already, and willingly shares a data view of one of their boxes with you. Which means a lot of our new users and their invitations will be delayed for sometime more, but existing users are free to organize their work lists and share/invite other team members. We are going to remove the share limitation this week for existing users. Once you have access to a shared box, you practically have a unique FREE account inside CB :) For those who are yet to join CB, CollateBox creates a unique Box for every data that you bring in. Somewhat like a windows folder for every new file, where you organize and share parts of the file as views for others. 

PLEASE BEAR WITH US !!!

5. personalizing CB is on hold and so is adding a box of data from scratch or via links and RSS feeds. Internal bandwidth reasons, but you are free to use copy/paste from Excel or GoogleDocs. If a type of data upload is throwing errors, please attach the file via feedback link with some notes (just leave some sample data and remove the rest from the sample excel file…)

6. FAQ sucks and we will cover a lot more usage scenarios as we go along. For those who have access to the beta live site, please note that this is just the beginning and we request you to keep sending those comments in through social media, blogs, support emails – we are listening.

Ta da for now, more updates soon….

Sunny Ghosh
Founder, CollateBox Inc

 

Social is THE direction for business software on the web

The influence of social platforms is everywhere. Phones, gadgets, applications are going the social way. 

Interestingly, we ran a poll sometime ago trying to understand customer perception on how business software should work on the web. Covering a  diverse set of 400 professionals across geographies, sex, companies and functions, the poll results give a strong indication of the direction business software is taking. 

Here is a summary of the LinkedIn poll which was a part of the overall survey:

 

The results indicate that the vast majority of people prefer their business software to work  like popular social platforms such as Facebook/Twitter rather than as Act or Goldmine. 

Whats even more suprising is that 78% of Enterprise users that reponsed to the poll wanted their business software to work the way they do in social platforms. 

The poll essentially higlights the role social tools are playing on business software. This is precisely why CollateBox works with your data the way you would socially work.  

I hope this helps you get a better understanding of what's coming your way with CollateBox.

- Aditya Tandon

Why CollateBox should matter to you?

CollateBox is your every day web based application that lets you gather data from multiple sources to work on it, get ready online forms to collect & share data from your team members or just stay informed on every activity that occurs in any row or column. Magic, huh!!!

Why should CollateBox matter?

Now anything such as this ought to be really simple. Hence this blog post to cover a few elements that we think makes “CollateBox” really special for you. Here we go… 

1. Speed - “Really fast” – Building for regular web users isn’t easy and the one thing regular users like me look for in a web app is speed. The application works on the “Push” and “Pull” concept over HTML /AJAX with minimal options for page refresh making it one of the first lightest web apps in the world.


2. White – “Clean” – If white isn’t your color, don’t worry; we have many shades to match your mood and personality without compromising on cleanliness.  This web app saves your eyes from the gluttony of content and let’s you work with the most important thing, “Your data” via a clean interface.  And yeah – we too love what our friends @ 37signals, Twitter and Facebook are doing :-)


3. Instant utility – “Right away” - We hate being in places that ask for a whole lot of information before giving something. Load data and we will magically turn your data into an web app :-) Workable, linkable, shareable, actionable…Like it? Go ahead and save your precious time without giving much away.  


4. Social – “Relationship and not roles” – No access or complete access isn’t fair. Someone should talk to Google Docs! We believe trust & security are social factors and cannot be established via strict corporate boundaries. Hence, we let you share and work on your data with whomever, however and whenever you wish.  That’s not all; we let your trusted members share further with their members increasing the discoverability of your app (if you wish so…)


5. Experience – “Media” – Imagine reading RSS feeds without Flipboard? Learning lifestyle without reading Vanity Fair or Vogue? Being social without Facebook? And so on… CollateBox is designed with attitude meant for your boxes of data. Working with data without CollateBox isn’t going to be simple anymore.


6. Less is good – “Value” – We chopped 32 features to just 3, it wasn’t the easiest thing to do, but we believe it was the most sensible thing to do. “Easier than excel”, “better than Google Docs” and “powerful without programming” – that’s it.


7. Programmable – “Consumable” – I believe we know the principles well. If it’s not embeddable, shareable, consumable, invoke able over a URL then how can it even be, right? We allow you to gather data from many sources and export it too. And Ooh – we have read/write API’s too :-)


8. Playful – “Loving It” – Working with simple data and lists is really fun. It doesn’t have to be exactly like Excel L Drop a few pieces of data inside your CollateBox account and we will turn that into a giant transformer or a Jaguar. Share it with your friend and it turns into a talking robot – hehehe! 


9. Personal – “me too” – We have a white headphone like an apple. If you still don’t like the workspace – change everything to personalize it. How about pinning a few elements in the home section of your web app that matters the most?

 

There are many more things that make us more of a programming tool than your regular data app, but we will reserve them for our next post.

If you like what you hear, give us a your comments and share the link of our app with your friends. We are yet to close our 10,000 beta invite registration to open the gates :-) 

 Best Regards, 

Sunny Ghosh
Founder, CollateBox 

 

 

Introducing Magic for Data: CollateBox

It’s pretty apparent from our previous posts that an idea has been brewing in our minds for a while now. Thanks to the priceless inputs from friends and that of our own outstanding team - we see the need for an online tool that can ease some of the collation challenges of living with dynamic data for millions of businesses around the world.

While Lotus, Excel, Google Docs and many more tools exist in the market today, we believe there is no single tool that solves the basic problem of data collation (sharing and organizing). Yes, the problem seems simple enough but the answer is not so obvious. Let me elaborate a bit more: A list of data (your contact list, office expense list or maybe even your grocery list) may seem to be the simplest thing to work on and yet there are a multitude of questions concerning the real-time storage, collection, sharing and the whole possibility of different actions on these data lists. Is it possible for you to do all the above actions via a single tool...?  

Simply put together, the question really is:
How do you collate and act on a data list without significant efforts?

Precisely why we have been building a magical way to work, organize and manage our data list. We call it "CollateBox"

 

 

 

Expect CollateBox to be a grandma’s toolkit for storing and knitting simple data to complex lists with a single click. We’d naturally be happy if developers and business analysts find our system useful, but we won’t be satisfied until we work for the millions of small businesses and teams for whom managing data is purely a painful reality of their everyday working life.

The time seems right to share news about our progress and take inputs on the product that we are building. So as of today, we’re registering early invitees at CollateBox.com and plan to send out beta invites to 10,000 selected invitees only. You are invited to join the list and learn more about the service @ CollateBox.com

If you have some ideas you’d like to share, drop us a line in our blog. We’d love to hear from you...

Sunny Ghosh
Founder, CollateBox 

Getting more with lesser efforts, some more thoughts around managing data

It is practically impossible to expect business managers/owners to spend time on creating data structures and/or waiting for marginal improvements in software that don't take more than 30 to 60 seconds.

If broadcasting a message globally takes less than 1 click (Twitter) and connecting with lost forgone childhood friends takes less than an hour ( Facebook) – managing data without the pain of worrying about structures should be a simple reality. Why even Excel, why not Jadoo...?  

Data being the most essential element of any business, I am of the opinion that businesses (small or large) would adopt online tools/utilities that can gather, collect, share, enhance and harness data very efficiently without using complex efforts. 

 

 

Magic for data

 

 

Utilities that can drive such a magic spell for new and regular business users and make their workday more productive within seconds seems to be the future. I haven’t found one, but have been dwelling on it for a while now. Don’t know what such an idea would name itself – Simplified Data Management tool? Online Database? 

We are working on a few ideas, will take a few steps soon. Until then – send us some more food for thought…

Spreadsheet saga, where you fit in?

Every generation of technology lends itself to improving the past and bringing higher benefits to customers. If the world wouldn’t have experienced a Douglas DC-3, we probably would never have seen a Boeing 737 in a commercial airline fleet service. If the world would have never seen a spreadsheet, we probably would have never imagined how regular business users would store their small business data electronically (Microsoft officially sold 70 million copies of Microsoft Office) and parallel pay for structured RDBMS software (database programs make $ 21 billion dollar market today).

It’s funny and a bit scary on how one idea leads to another great idea and how the original idea percolates towards unforeseen territories. Let’s take the current example of data management in small and large companies with spreadsheets and spin a small hypothesis on the possible future of simple yet killer data management business tools.

Now a spreadsheet utility like Microsoft Excel is undoubtedly the most successful business application of the 20^th century that started as a business tool used primarily by Business Managers for accounting and database purposes. Accounting type guys love it – they type and math and transpose to type and math again. Not every day you get software that offers 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns with the ability to put almost anything. From sales figures to budgets to personal tax calculations, to a database size only limited by the amount of hardware RAM available in your machine, awesome. On the other hand, Business Analyst charged to accumulate, formularize and report on business performance dealing with multiple complex formulas and files on a daily basis swear by it too. You may call these users as experts or power users, they know how to enumerate many flaws from your best hypothesis using merely a few clicks in Microsoft Excel. 

But wait, isn’t this the same spreadsheet which has limited us for years. Why?

While Microsoft Excel might enjoy the de-facto business user working program status, I think its glamour and value is beginning to be threatened by:

(a) self created limitations to service the real spreadsheet user (power users)
(b) mushrooming options from a host of smaller vendors

I have attached a small hypothesis below, special thanks to Praveen, Karissa and a few others.  

 
Clearly the inability to service the multi-user collaboration needs, growing demand for higher security, lack of structured methods to gather data – automatic data synchronization – etc – etc –have already spawned an array of products and possibly a complete Cloud-based SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) industry around it. This positions the good old spreadsheet as the starting tool for your professional career/learning program and not essentially one that is cut out for your future needs or can cut code.

Unlike a detailed hypothesis, I have only captured an overall essence of how spreadsheets started, gathered momentum and how the same idea spread to 14 other possible tools due to its own immediate limitations. I am quite curious to know what you think about the current ideal tools available in the market for LOB managers, DBAs and Programmers. 

Surely all of them are waiting for Office365 from Microsoft, but what else are they using today?  How does the Value square look for them? Will they continue to use the good old spreadsheets...?

Hand written register with simple math or spreadsheet

If there is one thing that keeps on growing in business it’s always data. Walk into any super mall, a bank, a restaurant, your insurance office or healthcare pharmacy -  and you will see tons of data being accounted from everywhere, all the time. And why not? Without these records and transactions the whole business  will be illegitimate - right?

Now these are just transactional data, what about emails, files (docs, excel, PowerPoint, pictures), to-do lists, contacts, web links, blogs, podcasts, youtube videos, news, google search, etc etc. This is how we live - communicate and do business today, a world increasingly dominated by data. Whoever you are - Small or big -  a business or consultant - data is all that really matters.

Managing the amount of data we are talking about here needs systems and skilled people. Undoubtedly the big enterprises spend millions of dollars and countless hours to manage their data/transactions - initiate IT projects to build core systems, the small ones driven by light users on the other hand admiringly do a great job with spreadsheets, emails and accounting tools.

We know some of you might argue that both of these segments face the same fate (somewhat hard to believe why software’s lend to more complexity and not simplicity, but that's for a later post) - one with all the planning and one without any, it's worth paying attention on how the small businesses / non DBA's manage their data/automation and develop so called database or applications as they grow.

For many years, we personally believed that process development before automation (leave maturity) is the hidden secret to success, but that's like expecting a lot from a normal user for whom ease of using a hand written register with simple math or spreadsheet is all that's needed.

It only struck us a few months back that probably the way data is managed in smaller companies by not so skilled users is lot different. Somewhat like that simple register with simple math, maybe spreadsheet is a culture in there? Maybe, it is evolving, iterative and a chaotic way of managing data where one can find email, spreadsheets for database & accounting and the ubiquitous google search toolbar. Anything else is overkill.

Sunny Ghosh