We Are Growing!

We have a CTO - Bruce Tate! Bruce is a best selling author and renowned Rails developer. He is heading up all technology practices at Sentient Services, including the icanmakeitbetter platform. Read more about Bruce and what this amazing hire means to us here.

And, we are also pleased to announce the hire of Meghan Bazaman as Research Analyst. Meghan has an MA from UT-Austin in Advertising. Her past experience includes agency work at ThinkStreet and Experience Design/Usability interning at Dell.

Eric Vo, joins the team to help manage the icanmakeitbetter platform and client services. Eric comes to us from Loyola University with a focus on technologies for entertainment companies. Eric has worked to build online start-ups and is the unique combination of coder, researcher and an online community marketing whiz.

Read more about the hire of Meghan and Eric here.

We are very proud and honored to have these great new folks as part of the team. It means the world to us that they would choose to share their time and talent with us and our clients.

 

Platform Updates

icanmakeitbetter - our social innovation and market research platform is going global. Stay tuned for launch updates from Brazil and othercountries. A few more platform updates for you:

• Updated home page design, now with custom background images and branding.
• Full SSL.
• In-line commenting and voting for enhanced user engagement
• Fully secure private communities (for internal employee communities, private customer-advisory-boards and more). Limit by invite, email domain, and IP address. 

And some big partnership news. We have signed an exclusive partnership with Granicus to use and enhance the icanmakeitbetter platform in the government space. Granicus is a leader in cloud-based services for government and citizen participation, and an amazing partner. We will be working with them in tandem to develop new features and functionality to serve both the public and private sectors. Read the press release here. 

Not using icanmakeitbetter? 

icanmakeitbetter provides you with online focus groups, surveys, recruitment, panel management and innovation in a simple, single platform.

We will have you set up in one day - fully hosted, seamless and easy. Even better - an entire year on our platform costs less than a single traditional focus group!

If you do any market research, product development, marketing, innovation, or usability this will be game changing - we make it quicker, easier, cheaper, and more accurate than ever before.

Super quick tip + trick this month, but hopefully a very helpful one. Since we have launched icanmakeitbetter.com we have been doing a ton of online web demos around the globe. We were using another tool, but our clients always seemed to have to download the latest meeting software or have issues joining the meeting - all-in-all it was not a great user experience.

We then came across join.me, a product by LogMeIn. It requires no end-user downloads, and you can set and schedule meetings ahead of time or create them on the fly and simply give users your dedicated URL.

It has the ability to create a waiting image, fully branded URL, multiple monitor support, and international dial-in numbers. It is not a webinar tool for 100s of people nor does it record and archive, but for quick web demos and team meetings we love it! Try it out and let us know what you think. Hope this tip + trick helps you out!