Everybody Helps

What does CrossLoop have to do with Opera?

You probably know by now that we like to be really close to our users - building relationships with each and everyone.....one at a time! Some of the things we do to bring that out is through:

• User stories that come in on a Global Map here (btw, to which we have added many new stories since I last created and blogged about it) or
• Third Party Reviews and blog posts here

Here is one that David, at the Opera Volunteers International, posted as a comment to my response on his blog post on CrossLoop . This one really caught my attention since it was a really unique industry for us, it was courageous on David's part and expresses his well-found faith in what we have built:

"I'm happy to report that in our recently-concluded conference in Denver, I dared to do a live demo of CrossLoop connecting to a computer on Long Island.

As we all know, live internet-based demos are akin to presentation suicide. But I didn't fall on the sword that day. I was both host and client, and each time, CrossLoop worked flawlessly in front of the audience. Wow!

Volunteers of every stripe work on shoestring budgets, so a free tool is very welcome. The concept of real-time collaboration is still quite new, but I know that every time I do a CrossLoop session, it never fails to impress.

Our board is spread out all over the country, so I know that both its simplicity and versatility will raise our intra-board communications to a new level.

Shortly before your post, I concluded yet another successful CrossLoop session with a board member in Colorado.

We all belong to different groups, so the multiplication potential is tremendous. I will surely assist the board in this program and look forward to the new features you're introducing."

Good Afternoon and Good Luck!

The Jonathan Livingston Seagulls of CrossLoop

This weekend I just finished reading the book Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach and it hit me that most of you, our users, are very similar to Jonathan described in Part III of the book.

Many of you are teaching or helping your family - freeing them from the very same technology that should be empowering them. You are helping - parents, grand parents, in-laws, senior citizens and distant relatives, customers - and many of them live in far off places.

Here are some of the stories that express that analogy better than me:
 
Mike: During my Christmas visit, I installed Crossloop on both my mother’s and my father-in-law’s PCs.  The day after I returned home to Alabama my father-in-law called me to say that he’d lost his “folder view” in Outlook Express.  Crossloop made it possible for me to not only fix the problem, but to also show him how to “show and hide” the OE “folder view”.  Even if the student is aged 75+, I can still “teach a man to fish” instead of just “giving him a fish” using Crossloop.

Benson John: This is a fabulous piece of software that you've developed. I am an Indian student currently in Melbourne, Australia & this tool helps me immensely to troubleshoot PC problems for my folks back home in India.

Henk (paraphrased to make it short): I am a helper in a Computerclub for senior citizens in the city of Amstelveen (www.ascc.nl ) in the Netherlands. Our club has over 400 members (!!) of whom many are not very good on the computer and we are running a helpsystem visiting them at home. It is simple to manage and to explain the program to other. Thanks to CrossLoop we are able to assist less computer-experienced seniors. Once a month we have a clubmeeting (with about 80 members) explaining working with the computer. I demonstrated the working of CrossLoop. I worked on another computer communicating through Skype. It worked excellent and all members were very enthusiastic. Together with Skype we have an excellent possibillity for computerhelp.

I have more such inspiring stories that I will share over time but I did want to recognize all the Jonathans out there - it means and says a lot in this busy and tired world! May be it is time to categorize then as "Jonathan Stories" rather than "User Stories"

Good Evening and Good Luck

PS: I strongly recommend this book. It is quick enough to read and work at a startup :)

CrossLoop User Stories

We are getting many of these now and I feel if I were to just post a few of them daily, I have content for a few months now!

Drake left a comment yesterday on an earlier post here on his story and here are some more:

Ryan says "Fantastic! I've attempted talking my 80 year old grandpa through installing VNC and configuring his firewall a couple of times now, to no avail. I was looking for software like CrossLoop - and did find some similar ones, but they had excessive fees attached. I'm stoked to have found you (via Digg). Thanks for helping the community"

Mike at Carputers says " The day after Christmas, while visiting my family in  Virginia, I got a call  from a non-techie friend at home in Alabama. I had previously set a wireless network up for this friend using MAC address filtering. She had given her son a new wireless-equipped notebook for Christmas, and needed me to add that notebook to her router’s MAC filter so that her son could access the internet.  Thanks to Crossloop, I was able to do this in a matter of minutes from four states and six hundred-plus road miles away."

Giovanni van Heydoorn, who lives in Holland, is a Web designer. He has design company called Curasign and helps people online by fixing their problems. He says "I have tried many programs to do this and  sometimes the  frustration gets verry high......till i found CrossLoop. With CrossLoop I can help my customers in a easy way and fast. CrossLoop save me now a lot of free times to spend with my wife and kids."

He has shown us a lot of love by getting us right on his homepage - thanks Giovanni!

If you have a story, email a paragraph with your website (optional) to me at mrinald@crossloop.com

Good Afternoon and Good Luck

Your Feedback, Our Inspiration

We have been getting a lot of really cool and exciting emails from a lot of users and I thought it would be appropriate to share and thank you. We know you are busy so this means a lot. None of you see this but you are making a big difference.

Here are some of the best quotes that have made us pump our arms in joy:

Fred says: "I want to give you guys a big thanks for your software! Over the years I've become the tech support person for my family and friends. This has lead to many frustrating hours on the phone or trips at all hours to fix their PCs. Your software makes my life so much easier. It's easy to install and easy to use."

Darrel says: "I Love the program! It was extreemly easy to set up and use! I would hate to see it get bogged down with lots of extra stuff, but a file transfer would be very useful. I will look on your website for a place to donate!"

Megan says: "Thank you so much! I just used CrossLoop to help my father with a computer problem. He lives 250 miles away and is extremely visually impaired. He is technically savvy and does a lot with adaptive technology (screen readers and magnifiers). Every once in a while he has a technical issue that he can't sort out by himself. I had him install CrossLoops and while the software didn't "read" in his screen reader (JAWS), the type was large and there was enough contrast for him to see the code and the Connect button. I was able to solve his problem quickly without spending hours on the phone! Now he's going to put CrossLoops on my Mother's computer. (Oh no, what have I gotten myself into??!!) Thank you for creating a wonderful, easy to use program!"

Shanti says: "This is f***** GENIOUS!!! evil genious"

You can just imagine our engineers thumping their chest with joy, giving the Tarzan cry and swinging around in the office from computer-to-computer.

We have many more of these so I will share them over time. If you want more disclosure about you, your website and what you do, just let me know.

Good Afternoon and Good Luck

CrossLoop empowers Crystal Coast to support a Non-Profit

Anthony Muhaluk, President of Crystal Coast Technologies, has a really nice story to share with all of you about how he leveraged CrossLoop so here it is under our "User Stories" category.

Crystal Coast Technologies is a web design firm that always works on helping out non-profits.  A little over a year ago, they created a website for a local non-profit Carteret County Partnership for Children  and have provided computer tech support to them free of charge since then.  The non-profit has been very appreciative (and so are we!) and it gives Anthony's team a lot of personal pleasure to be able to support them.

 

The two offices are about 30 minutes away and they try to troubleshoot remotely as much as possible.  Until CrossLoop, they were troubleshooting their computers remotely using Microsoft Screen sharing program.  However, that often was less than desirable.

 

Recently when they had an email problem, both the teams got on Skype and had Carteret County Partnership for Children download CrossLoop all by themselves. They started a session and fixed their problem in a matter of minutes. Carteret County Partnership for Children loved the ease of use, that they were able to install it by themselves and of course, that it was free - something very valuable for a non-profit and those supporting one! Anthony loved the fact that he did not have to drive (or send one of his employees) 30 minutes to fix that problem! 

According to Anthony: "It makes helping our non-profit clients easier on us since we don't usually charge them for this type of thing."

A classic "CrossLoop in the Trenches" story!

We love these stories that empower people doing good. If you. like us, have been inspired by this and have one that you want to share, please email me at mrinald@crossloop.com.

Good Night and Good Luck!

Hatmkr.com - a CrossLoop story

This category is one of our personal favorite one since  we see the difference we are making that makes every moment working on CrossLoop very exciting.

We hope to bring you more posts under this category of "User Stories" - if you have one that you wish to share, email us at info@crossloop.com. We have a small framework of questions that weaves the story well for all to read and learn.

hatmkr.com is a reseller of PC software, anti-virus, anti-spam, anti-adware, firewall as well as PC "tuneup" software apart from installation of home and office networks. They also have an on line web store selling new and refurbished cell phones from all the major wireless carriers.

They use CrossLoop to support their existing customers as well as assisting new customers if they need help installing software. On being asked our favorite question Why CrossLoop?, they answered that it "installs very easily and is even easier to use." Life is easier for a small business like them now with CrossLoop because to "see what a customer is doing is always better than having them try to explain what they are doing!"

We are hoping that these stories help us create awareness and passion amongst more users and any help to do that is always welcome!

Are you using CrossLoop to "teach how to fish"?

One value (quote) that the CrossLoop team really lives by is the following:

""Give a man a fish and you will feed him for a day; Teach him how to fish and you will feed him for Life."

We see a significant number of our users driving CrossLoop to help their friends and family, customers etc and empower them to use the PC and the Internet to its highest potential.

If you have stories that you wish to share on how you helped someone learn how to share photos better or trained them on a particular software or application, let us know and we will get it up here for others to get inspired! If not a blog post, email it to us - we love it and it is very inspirational for a small team like us to know that we are making a difference!

First User Story

So here is the first post under the category we have created called "User Story" - we hope with a series of these we can get your experience to be shared with others. If you  are a small business or self-employed, we hope to let people know about your business as well.

Pete Warden, one of our users is also a brilliant engineer. He gave it a quick test run after downloading CrossLoop and got a post reviewing CrossLoop on his own blog here. He says it all on there so I will not repeat it again.

If you get a chance, I would also urge you to try his pretty cool search widget - it is a mashup, which brings Google results with a preview pane! It has certainly made me very productive and actually making me consider using it as my default search engine on Firefox - I have been using Ask recently.

You can find Pete's creation here

Stay tuned for more 'firsts' - startups have a lot of them :)

This time I mean it - Good Night and Good Luck!

Whitewater IT calls CrossLoop because of its "presence"

I am very excited to inform you that Larry Braziel of Whitewater IT is the first to contact us, through our Skype 'Call Me" button on our blog, at CrossLoop during our 'sneak preview'!!

This is very exciting for us since technology, some creativity and Web 2.0 is enabling CrossLoop to be close to their users. It enabled us to be available immediately to our user and try to address it their questions as soon as possible. As a team we strongly believe in listening to our users and want to bring the best to them in a collaborative approach.

If you want to learn more about Whitewater IT - a complete IT solutions provider - you can go to their website here or see them in "Users in the Loop" list on the right of this blog below. They use CrossLoop to support their customers.

We plan to continue adding our users to the list mentioned above and write about their CrossLoop stories - personal or commercial - as separate posts under the 'User Stories' category like this one. If you have one, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Good Night and Good Luck