Everybody Helps

CrossLoop with Mother on Her Day

As Mother's Day comes up this weekend, I am seeing a lot of articles on what to buy. The most common in the technology space has been gadgets so here is our little idea with a big heart:

Spend one nice hour with undivided attention doing any of the following with CrossLoop and shrink that distance:

• Clean up her computer and speed it up
• Backup her files and pictures
• Teach her how to use one of many of the instant messaging tools so that she can always be in touch
• Give her a tour of some cool sites that are about learning new things
  
  • Like Howstuffworks (one of my favorites)
  • Subscribe her to Wikipdia's 'On This Day' article by email here
  • Or like Paolo Barone on Twitter here, take your mother across the world on Google Earth! Today, for that you don't need expensive tickets.
• If she wants to maintain an online journal, blog and you can set her with a free account on a service like Vox (like my personal Blog here). Its one of the few services that actually allows you to privately share posts, photos, videos etc specifically with those you identify as "Family"
• How about a remote slideshow through all the photos on your computer (SHARE mode) with her on the phone (and ACCESS mode) telling her details and stories behind each. Once you are done, drag and drop all those pictures onto her desktop (Here is how to transfer files with CrossLoop) and she can cherish them at her will or use them as a screensaver (like my mother). Here is how to do it on Lifehacker.

According to a 2007 research I found, stay-at-home mothers in the US put in about 92 hours a week and are worth about $138,095 a year! She is busy so make sure you get on her schedule fast.   

More creative thoughts? Please share them in the comments section below and if you do happen to use CrossLoop with your Mother, please do email me [mrinal [at] crossloop.com] since they inspire us. We might even be able to share them here on our blog.

Good Afternoon and Good Luck to Mom, Mummy, Mommy, Ma, Maman, Mama, Ammi, Moder, Mor, Meteara, Imma, Ummi, Niang, Bohqin, Mãe, Patrino, Anne and more!

CrossLoop Servers are Slow so Tom is Sprinting

As some of you know that its been only a few hours since we launched the new Marketplace. It was a really exciting one and here are some outlets that have already written about it:

• VentureBeat: Desktop sharing startup CrossLoop opens its Help Marketplace
• Mashable: CrossLoop Officially Launches Help Marketplace
• Digital Inspiration: Run Your Own GeekSquad Style Tech-Support Business from Home
• SmallBizTechnology.com: Get Support or Give Support with CrossLoop

and here are a couple of publications that have already picked up our press release:

 

Soooooooooo that means Tom, our CTO, has a whole lot of new users coming right at him and he is working hard to get the servers all running optimally. We have noticed our servers slow down, which might have affected some of our users trying CrossLoop sessions, searches etc.

We apologize for any inconvenience but please bear with us as we work hard on accommodating all the new users.

Thats Tom upfront on the right during the last NYC Marathon.

Good Afternoon and Good Luck!

CrossLoop "Help Marketplace" is Now Live!

It gives us all humongous pleasure to inform you that we are now live with the CrossLoop Marketplace!

Before I dig into what this means and whats now, some notable things since our last big announcement - our Series A funding from El Dorado Ventures are:

•  

• Recognized as One of The 10 Best Downloads for 2007 from CNet's Download.com
• Recognized as a Top Tech Sites for 2008 (See # 34) from InformationWeek
• BusinessWeek mentioned us in Worthwhile Small Business Technologies
• In depth 3 page walk-through of CrossLoop in UK's very popular PC Advisor magazine
• We have now served over 31M desktop sharing minutes over 1.75M help sessions!! [Check out the new live Odometer on our homepage now that always keep you current with these metrics]
• Our CrossLoop Badges have seen very good adoption. Here are some  great examples:

  • The Computer Community Hospital

  • Biden PC

  • Absolute Business Solutions

We all know that our product CrossLoop is an enabling technology for those who can help one who needs it. We are all about people and empowering them with tools - so we are taking our popular software to the next level by providing a robust platform to find and identify trusted, qualified people with whom you can get personalized and efficient service driven by relationships.

Maybe you are a huge Star Wars fan like me, and wanted to get your family photoshoped in (I like playing Vader on Halloween and thats my daughter). If that is too geeky, how about having someone to do all your design work so that you can fold the laundry or take a nice long bath? If none of that, this should tip you over since bloggers have asked a solution for the huge email problem in the lives of a few of us - A Helper who can help you automate Outlook so that all your emails would be answered and taken care of by themselves - just like that!

Now, you can find them ALL on CrossLoop!!

So What's New.....

For Customers who need Help:

1. New Homepage with Search & Discovery:We have created multiple ways in which you can find      potential Helpers, including
   • Search - from the homepage or any other page
   • Popular Topics
   • Filter Helpers by location and language from the search results
2. Enhanced Profiles of Helpers for you:
   • Contact Helper: There is a more prominent "Contact Me" on the Helpers profile. This enables you to add your contact information and select a service you need
   • Choose a Service: Helpers now have a "Rate Card" through which you can see rates for 3 services with an hourly rate across multiple currencies. Also lookout for the free estimates       indicator on the rate card if they provide one
   • Bookmark and Tell a Friend about a Helper: Each profile has these on the bar above       the Helper's picture. This will enable you to come back to a Helper you like for the continued personalized service and recommend them to your friends
3. Consistent 'Free Download' button: As always, we will continue to provide our popular screen sharing software for free through the consistent 'Free Download' button on the top right of every      page
4. It's a completely FREE service for Customers 

For Helpers

1. Enhanced Profiles with Rate Cards and a prominent "Contact Me" on your profile
2. Leads: When a Customer contacts you, you will receive an email from leads@crossloop.com.
3. Fees: For a limited time, all of the customer leads from CrossLoop are FREE. It is our goal to pair those who want help on their computer with those who can help. 

Finally, as usual, we are all about listening and learning from you so if you have any feedback, please email them to us at cutomersupport@crossloop.com

Thank you for coming along with us on this journey and we look forward to achieving more with your help!

Good Morning and Good Luck!

Your CrossLoop URL

As I said before, I plan to spend a significant amount of my time in being the marketing arm for our CrossLoop Helpers, who have expertise in wide range of technical skills. All the posts related to it will now onwards be categorized under "Helper Success" so here is the first set of tips related to a very powerful tool that we provide for free.

Assuming you have created a free Account and then a Profile, you will get a personalized CrossLoop URL - something like this one for me. This is generated with the "screen name" you choose during account creation - it is simple and very easy to remember. Today, you can find it on the 'Profile' tab after logging in. On your profile, you will see it as 'My Public URL' on the top right under 'Ratings'. This can be used in multiple ways to promote your expertise. Here are a few to begin with:

1. Web mail Signatures: You could simply plug in your URL in your signature file. Here are links of how to do that with

• Yahoo
• Hotmail
• GMail

2. Other Sites: CrossLoop provides a very easy way to post your personal Badge on many social networking sites but here are some more that might help you:

• Twitter: Its profile allows you to add one URL
• LinkedIn: Its profile allows you to add upto 3 links [Log in -> Edit Profile (on the left sidebar) -> Websites (in the very beginning section) -> click Edit next to any one
• Craigslist: I have given an example before, but you can use your CrossLoop URL here. They have a special section for computer services like this one for the San Francisco Bay Area (it is free).

To advertise on craigslist, start with:
1) the 'post' feature here            
2) Pick your location of choice
3) Lets pick San Francisco Bay Area
4) Then specify 'What type of posting is this?' by picking the "service offered" category
5) Then select "computer services"
6) Then complete your posting with details like "posting title", "description" etc
7) You can embed the link in the description so anyone who needs your help can come and learn more about your specific expertise

This is a good start and if you have any questions or face difficulties, please leave a comment below.

Also - if you have a creative idea that you would like to share with others, you can leave a comment below and I will blog about it. Make sure you specify your CrossLoop URL so that I can refer to it :)

We are working on something very exciting that we will release soon - this will be a fantastic foundation!

Good Afternoon and Good Luck!            

CrossLoop 2.10 and 2.11

Some of you might not have noticed it so here is a little post on the quick release of our 2 new versions.

CrossLoop 2.10

1. We added a new account login and creation page on the client for users. There were multiple reasons for this:

a) We saw a lot of people requesting the need to track their sessions. This enables them to build a reputation with each minute they engaged with CrossLoop to leverage their expertise (not very different from an airline pilot who logs every minute of his flight to enhance his credentials).

Furthermore, users who were being helped, wanted to support their vendors with ratings and customer testimonials. which without an account were not considered towards the overall reputation of the person helping them. Customer testimonials are a huge asset for any business - we show  off ours here and so we wanted to make sure you could easily capture and market it even more easily.

Very very importantly, there is study that strongly recommends collection of ratings and reviews. Mediapost reports here about a study that
(i) 68% of online shoppers read reviews before buying
(ii) 64% of consumers surveyed by Forrester said that user ratings and reviews were the kinds of features that they wanted to see on Web sites

CrossLoop is enabling that for all ....so bringing ratings and reviews done by your customers to potentially news ones, makes it extremely powerful! So make sure you capture them (on your profile) and use your Public URL in your signature, for example, to market those.

b) The two editable fields of our UI - Computer Name and Access Code - confused people and created a bigger learning curve. Now with a quick one-time only account creation, we only have the Access Code that can still be edited.
Many have asked for a regular password that comes along with an account to connect easily with their trusted contacts for example, instead of an editable Access Code field

Make sure to confirm your account (an email is sent to confirm the validity of the email submitted while creating the account) since the ratings are 'escrowed' until you do.

c) Furthermore, we are working on some more exciting stuff coming soon that will make it a more seamless and compelling experience. Stay close to this blog!

2. Optimization of our software to avoid the many frequent false-positives caused by anti-virus softwares. This will always continue to be a work-in-progress for a small company like ours. Thank you for all the feedback on this.

3. A two step download since the pop-up blockers were confusing users when they couldn't see the instruction box to click through and install the software

The details of V2.10 are here

CrossLoop 2.11

1) This was a biggie - Many Vista users wrote in with the issues they faced while connecting due to UAC that is built into Vista. We have significantly made it a better experience. The step by step explanation is here   

Again - as I said before - I genuinely believe I am a marketer first for you!

Finally, let me end this post and head home with this neat mention here in PC Magazine that recognizes our product as one of "91 Utilities to Supercharge Windows"

Download v2.11 here

Good Afternoon, Good Luck and have a great weekend!

Your Success First Leads to Ours

Once in a while I will see a question from a user or a comment on a blog post wondering how we will make money or will we charge for the use of CrossLoop down the road.

I had addressed it here (the product, as is, will always be free and we plan to add premium services) before but let me do it again for the benefit of the hundreds of thousands of new users since then and with more insight into the team, its philosophy and culture which is all around a term I call "collateral success".

Generally all corporations are built around the core objective of maximizing shareholder wealth/value. I argue that it does not focus on users first. Our philosophy of collateral success focuses on our users first - make you successful first and we are confident, we will be successful. Think personal professions - would you choose to follow your passion and incidentally make money or would you prefer to do something and devote a significant amount of your life focused on your paycheck first?

There are business models that can measure and monetize this but more as we move along our product roadmap and make some exciting new releases soon.

Based on that philosophy, our last  big release was all around providing experts and professionals in anything computers - technical support, training, etc. - tools to be able to quantify and personalize, market and monetize their reputation. Here are some good examples of some of our CrossLoop professionals who are leveraging it:

OnClick Tech Support:
1) They provide remote support with CrossLoop and here is their CrossLoop badge: http://www.onclicktechsupport.com/remotedownload.htm
2) They are using Craigslist to advertise their service with their custom URL (click on the CrossLoop logo): http://duluth.craigslist.org/cps/604835940.html

When you click on his profile here (or through his Badges on the above links), you will notice the number of sessions he has logged now with different individual clients - he is building up a very impressive reputation with some good customer testimonials that aid in getting them more business.

Robert Plumer
1) CrossLoop Badge on his blog here
2) His profile and custom URL on CrossLoop: http://www.crossloop.com/RobertPlumer   

I intend to feature creative technical support and training CrossLoop professionals here on our blog. If you have an active profile with our Badge on social networking sites, classifieds, your blog etc. - email me at least two links, like above, at mrinal [at] crossloop.com. I will work on getting them up here and again - hope to get you some more promotion.

Think of me as your marketer and if you really like what I do - I welcome tips through the small widget on the left sidebar below :)

Good Afternoon and Good Luck!

CrossLoop is Growing - Seeking Web Developer

It gets exciting every minute our users have a session and to continue bringing the best so that everyone can help and share with those that matter - we are seeking a Web Developer.

Details for the position are here

If you have the right skills and very importantly, like to work for a cause of empowering people, like Brian and his grandma (see handwritten letter below), with people you can smile and laugh with everyday (Many in the corporate world may ask - whats that?), contact us at jobs@crossloop.com. Maybe you know someone who does, please have them contact us.

Good Afternoon and Good Luck!

Over 20,000,000 CrossLoop Minutes

We ended 2007 with a very inspiring recognition from CNet's Download.com as one the of the best 10 downloads for 2007 and now I get a chance to inform all of you that we have started 2008, with another excellent recognition - a recognition by one of the best authorities out there for us, all of you - our users!

It didn't feel too long ago that I was all excited about our first million minutes and here I am again, ecstatic to inform you that CrossLoop has now served over 20,000,000 minutes (=38 years!) over sessions between people helping and getting help! Today, a year ago, we had served 532,000 minutes i.e 37x growth in the use of our product because of you!! [Note: We show minutes served on our new homepage on the top left]

To give you a feel how far we have traveled in 38 years, here are some events that happened in 1970:

• Paul McCartney announces that The Beatles have disbanded
• This one is for Tom (our CTO who has run a few of these): The first New York City Marathon is run
• Jimi Hendrix dies
• Fiji becomes independent
• The global population is 3.6B

You get our customary hug and a hug-e Thank You from each and everyone from your team at CrossLoop!

Good Afternoon and Good Luck!

CrossLoop One of The 10 Best for 2007: Download.com

There is not doubt that this has been a smashing year for us - it began with Amit's post that took us to the homepage of Digg with user votes; other great recommendations by The Wall Street Journal, LifeHacker, PC Magazine, PC World in Germany, How To Geek to name a few; our funding and big release recently and in less than 3 weeks of that we are being recognized by one of the best global authorities on software....

CNET's Download.com has recognized CrossLoop as one of The 10 Best Downloads for 2007!

I can see Tom and his team ecstatic to learn about the recognition their product continues to achieve!

Merry Christmas to all and hoping for an even better 2008 for all of us together!

CrossLoop Raises $3 Million, Releases Web Service

I have to be honest that this is one post that I am very excited to write about - so here is the most exciting update from your team on its anniversary:

1. We raised $3 Million in a Series A financing led by El Dorado Ventures.
2. We are releasing Version 2.0 -€“ a brand new site with a complementary free web service that seamlessly ties in with our popular software.

Let me start with some quotes relevant to this event for us.

"€œTechnology makes people more productive and efficient, but it also comes at a cost. The average consumer spends hours each week addressing computer problems," said Lisa Alderson, President and CEO, CrossLoop, Inc. "€œWe are pleased to be working with El Dorado because they share our vision of dramatically changing the time-consuming and often expensive process that consumers and small businesses go through to get basic computer help today."

With this investment, Tom Peterson, General Partner at El Dorado Ventures, joins CrossLoop's board of directors.

"€œSince launching last November, CrossLoop has seen rapid adoption with hundreds of thousands of user sessions connecting people in over 150 countries worldwide," said Tom Peterson. "€œWe are excited to partner with the CrossLoop team to help them achieve their vision of solving the frequent computer support problems that every computer user has experienced."

You might have noticed that we celebrate our users - stories, hugs and more - so this celebration would be incomplete without a couple. According to one service provider, " I've been waiting for Crossloop for 6 years! We've tried every remote desktop sharing software out there and our client base cannot use any of them - they're far too complex. This has changed the dynamics of our entire company. My happy customers are now jubilant customers, and support call length has been reduced from an average of 1 hour to 15 minutes!"€

And Yes, people are going green with CrossLoop! As Mark says "€œGrandma loves it! She's 80 and crashes her computer regularly ... its 180 miles to her house to make it right, or just 5 minutes on CrossLoop. Beat that for reducing our carbon footprint!"

CrossLoop Version 2.0 is Live!

Apart from a brand new design, as always, you will be able to download the CrossLoop utility for free, but now, there will also be the option to create/log in to your FREE CrossLoop account.

What's new?

In response to frequent requests from those in the business of hardware, software and application support/training, we have created free CrossLoop accounts.  You can now:

• Create a FREE account to view your session history
• With an account, create a dynamic public profile page and reserve your custom CrossLoop URL - here is mine for example and No - I am not an MS Office Expert :) Once created, your profile can be used to promote your expertise anywhere on the web.Your profile will update 'automatically' every time you have a CrossLoop session!
• With the account, log in to the client every time you have a CrossLoop session to record and track your session history and statistics.
• Use the CrossLoop Badge to promote your expertise: The CrossLoop Badge, which also updates with each session, can be pasted on any site, blog (like on this blog - see mine on the right on our side bar or here ) or social networking site (such as MySpace - You can add us as a friend here on it and advertise your business with a CrossLoop Badge with a comment like me). Furthermore, you can generate leads when someone clicks on 'Contact Me' on it
• Capture testimonials and referrals easily. When logged in to the client, the new post-roll for each session enables you to capture customer feedback:
  • Rate the person who helped you or whom you helped
  • Use tags (keywords) that describe the purpose of the session
  • Add comments to review the session 

Continue using CrossLoop as you always have but now you can build your credentials with each session!

It is live now at http://www.crossloop.com

With a Good Morning and Good Luck, here is the demo video: