Everybody Helps

Crossloop for Teaching the Disabled

Needless to say, we celebrate all our users, their various use cases, their comments and feedback since the day we opened our doors. But then every once in a while we come across stories that get us extremely excited and inspired of the difference we are making in a little way and so here is Debbie, from UCanDoIt.

"UCanDoIT teaches disabled people computer and internet skills. We aim to combat social exclusion, promote independent living, enhance social, educational and employment opportunities and to increase pleasure and quality of life."

So without further adieu, here is Debbie:

Good Morning and Good Luck!

The Anatomy of Referrals - You Media

One fundamental thing that drove the vision of CrossLoop for me was real people, real relationships - I fundamentally believe that a business process of speaking to a 'Mrinal' using 'Tom' as an identity is completely broken. In fact, fake identities can lead to law suits like that by Tony La Russa of the Cardinals against Twitter recently.

And that is the fundamental thing we provide to all - a platform to enable people to fix computer problems but most importantly, an opportunity for customers to know the real 'Mrinal' helping them. Our expert Helpers mostly use their own picture, their real name and have an individual link to their profile that one can go back to. This enables the customers to make an informed decision to go back again and again to 'Mrinal' and refer him/her to their friends and family through word-of-mouth assuming the service provided is excellent.

When did you last go to a attorney or an accountant who used an alias while doing business with you? When did you last go to another lawyer or attorney, with another alias, at the same firm for follow-up questions or sign them up for another year?

So you can imagine my excitement when I found this eMarketer report today that states the top overall customer priority named was service excellence, followed by building a trusting relationship.

But as rightly pointed out, trust is not as an easy thing to build - it takes time and commitment personally and professionally. I have personally written about this on my personal blog way back but Its a bit like having a cat versus a dog - the former lives well with asynchronous food and water left behind whereas the dog needs you to take them out on walks, runs and some tlc.

 
So when you build that trust and customers love you... yes, love you .... they tell their friends and family - each one of us consequently becomes a media for transportation of that event - I call that 'You Media' (a pun intended on new media)

The study goes on to speak more to what purchases are effected by word-of-mouth but I can assure you that the best brands, and our expert Helpers on CrossLoop are one, are built through it.

So go ahead - Be 'connect-able'....

Good Afternoon and Good Luck!

CrossLoop Crosses 100M minutes along with Eric and Stacy

Very recently we crossed a HUGE milestone in our business - 100,000,000 minutes of desktop sharing enabled by our award-winning software CrossLoop. Just to reflect back on where we have reached, it took us 134 days to enable our first million minutes after we launched and today, we serve one million minutes in 4 days!!

Also, to give you perspective of what 100,000,000 minutes of engagement means:
100,000,000 =  190 years (we launched CrossLoop about 2 1/2 years ago) or if you were flying with Neil Armstrong to the moon, you could do more than 1000 of those trips to the moon and back!

In order to celebrate this historic milestone, we surprised our expert Helper Eric Schuermann and the customer, Stacy Wagner from Lancaster, PA, he was supporting, with a Kindle each. If you want to get help on anything virus, malware or scareware to speed up that slow computer, he is the man you want to connect with. You can contact him via his CrossLoop profile here.

Here is Eric with a little video he made for us expressing his excitement to hit the milestone along with us!

Good Afternoon, Good Luck and have a great weekend!

CrossLoop Mac Gets a Lot of Love .. and Hugs

We launched the beta version of CrossLoop for Mac with a lot of excitement on the "May the 4th" (be with you) night so that everyone could share - desktops! As you know from our early days of launching the company, we are big fans of hugging.

We went out to seek support (no pun intended) to tell the whole, wide and flat world about it and we got a LOT of that support - from the media and tons of individuals like you and me.

So here is a brief summary (click on logos to read the articles):

CrossLoop’s Screen-Sharing App Comes To The Mac

Which got picked up The Washington Post

Computer help service CrossLoop comes to the Mac

which got picked up by The New York Times
 

Both Techcrunch and VentureBeat stories got picked up by Techmeme:

CrossLoop Remotely Controls Any Windows or Mac PC

CrossLoop Now Available for Macs

Connect Mac to a Windows PC with CrossLoop

 

CrossLoop Support Client Now For Mac Users

 

which got picked up by Fortune

And Finally and very importantly, here (click image to read it on Twitter) are JUST three examples of ALL the talk by people like you and me on Twitter about it:

 

For the ENTIRE coverage here are all the media outlets that covered our launch:

Good Morning and Good Luck!!

"I am a Mac ...Also" - Get CrossLoop for Mac Now!

The fight between users has intensified lately with 'I am a Mac' versus 'I am a PC' so now it really excites us to say that we can all stop fighting and share - Share Desktops!

I am sure many of you are as excited as I am, having switched to Mac a few months ago, that CrossLoop is now publicly available for Mac as a beta version for anyone to seamlessly share desktops across Windows and the Mac OS X! It is the SINGLE most requested feature from millions of users across 190 countries.

This is going to be significant for all:

• I joked before with a new tag line I created "Once you go Mac, You Never Go Back" and this just made going Mac even easier: transfer all your files from Windows to a Mac without external hard drives or buying products that are built specifically for that
• Still want to keep that old Windows Machine beside your Mac and dont want to pay for Fusion or Parallels for those on and off use cases - just go CrossLoop
• You are a small business supporting a dual OS environment - now CrossLoop can be a simple one stop solution

How about any of the following very attractive packages - You can get these deals through our expert Helpers here

Download CrossLoop for Mac here!!

Here is our official press release

Good Evening and Good Luck and Yes - "May the Fourth" be with you! Happy Star Wars Day!

Support Us - Vote for CrossLoop to Win TiE50

We are very excited to inform you that CrossLoop is a finalist amongst 149 others out of 1,200 nominees for 2009's TiE50 - a selection of the 50 best startups worldwide.

TiE, The Indus Entrepreneurs, is world's largest not for profit institution focused on promoting entrepreneurs with a global presence.

This is especially relevant to us since we are in the business of fostering entrepreneurship ourselves by enabling tens of thousands of expert Helpers to build their own brand, reputation and business on the CrossLoop platform - our Marketplace!

Its really simple and will take a minute to vote:

1. Go to http://www.tie50.net/polling/
2. Choose 'CrossLoop' under the Consumer Web column, which is the first one on the left
3. Click on 'Cast Your Vote Now' at the bottom right
4. Submit your email address and click on 'Cast Vote' and you are done!

We believe its time to change the way computer support and training is provided - it needs to be done by real people built on relationships who 'own' your problem.

Your vote will go a long way towards achieving our vision!

Good Morning and Good Luck!

We Have a Dream

Today The New York Times has an article 'Apple Tops PC Customer Service Rankings' on the abysmal customer experience PC owners face based on Forrester's Customer Experience Rankings for 2008

I personally switched to Mac a few months ago so, personally, I am not so surprised about these results but it fundamentally underlines the pain consumers go through everyday and why we are here in the first place. There is absolutely no justification to live with that misery day in and day out.

We can not do much about how these products are developed but we are definitely here to bail consumers out with the products they purchase.

With tens of thousands of expert Helpers now on CrossLoop, their job is to speed up that PC which is slower than molasses, whose job is to optimize Vista, whose job is to remove viruses and whose job is to provide computer training apart from practically any other requirement a customer has.

These expert Helpers:

1. Provide relationship-based help
2. You know EXACTLY who you are getting help from and  can go back to them again and again and again
3. You can compare easily with ratings and comments from other customers not just us touting our brand name

We have a dream......and the time is NOW

Sooooo - if you are on Twitter, tell me (You can follow me here on Twitter) your dream of being free from any computer pain... of getting a job (if you have recently been laid off - I relate to that since I was "vocationally challenged" for 3 years in the last downturn!!!) and your need for continuous computer education, I will start giving one person everyday a fully paid CrossLoop coupon worth $30 to the most creative one. Your tweet should start "@mrinaldesai #IDream..."

Good Morning and Good Luck!

Publish Success to Social Networking Sites

Social Networking sites are growing by double digits every year.  As many new people join these sites, they offer a great opportunity for Helpers to let their friends, family, and customers know about the technical services they provide.  CrossLoop has made available an easy way for Helpers to share their most recent success stories with their online community.  After sessions, Helpers and customers can easily send their experiences out to their favorite community.

 

For a more detailed explanation you can read our online documentation that explains the process, click here.   Let us how you use CrossLoop in your social networks and what networks you use.

Please Meet Ashley Coffey - A CrossLoop Scholar

We started from day one with a very basic philosophy - we believe everyone helps and we want to make sure we enable that. The business around it is our super simple, award-winning software and a marketplace of over 14,000 Helpers for those who do not have a friend or family to help but we wanted to keep doing things that live that philosophy apart from the business.

So in that spirit, we asked ourselves how we can enable anyone who is helping ... independent of business, independent of computers and empower them.

So it gives us great pleasure to introduce Ashley Coffey, a student at Oregon State University, who is probably now in Namibia, Africa for an internship to conserve the Acinonyx Jubatus...um the Cheetahs. She is headed to the Cheetah Conservation Fund as a 'CrossLoop Scholar'

If you are curious to learn whether you can outrun a cheetah or not or where you can go to pet them, here are some neat facts about them

We wish her the best and look forward to her updates.

Good Afternoon and Good Luck!

CrossLoop Helpathon Winners

As you aware we were running our Helpathon contest.

It gives me immense pleasure to celebrate and congratulate our winners:

Kenny S for wins the grand prize of a Dell Netbook

   

You can contact Kenny for computer help on his profile here
Notice here how his customers are raving about his service on Twitter- and Yes, Kenny is on Twitter.

[Note: If you are not on Twitter, I highly recommend it. You can follow me here so that I can promote you and here are some suggested posts on our blog that will help you get started - here and here]

The other prize winners are:

Nick Lockard with the iPod Touch. Contact Nick on his profile here

Frank Zabroski with a Logitech Headset Contact Frank on his profile here

So again - a HUGE Congratulations from all of us to the three above!

Our next Helpathon will launch in April and if you want to participate, follow these two steps:

• Email us at helpathon@crossloop.com and put 'notify me' in the subject line
• Place your username in the body of that same email

Good Morning and Good Luck!