CrowdSound Blog

Intridea’s pleased to officially announce the Fall 2008 Release of CrowdSound. This release follows the Summer 2008 general release and includes several new features and enhancements, including:

• Internationalization of the CrowdSound tool
• A Popup Version of the CrowdSound tool
• Many interface improvements on the management tool
• Completely fleshed out hosted site option
• Custom branding for enterprises
• Custom enterprise integration
• On-premise/cloud hosting options

The customer-facing sections of the CrowdSound tool are now available in twelve different languages – Dutch, English, Brazilian & European Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Russian, Japanese and Traditional & Simplified Chinese – with on-the-fly language switching within a single account. Along with the many user interface improvements for managing suggestions, multiple language support makes the CrowdSound tool a perfect solution for international websites and multilingual companies.

The much-requested popup version of the CrowdSound tool allows for unobtrusive integration of the CrowdSound widget into websites—the widget pops up whenever a user clicks on a feedback-activated link or image, with complete control in the hands of the website’s designer. CrowdSound also offers an always-visible version of the widget and a hosted website that serves as an entry-point for those companies that prefer to use the tool independently of their website.

The hosted website has undergone many changes—the most prominent of which being the new session-based authentication. If you are using the hosted site integration options, your old links will still continue to work the way you expect them to. However, users visiting your hosted site will be required to signup (or login) with CrowdSound (unless you’ve specified otherwise) in order to make suggestions and vote.

Bump, Inc. has developed the groundbreaking BumpTop three-dimensional graphical user interface, which mimics the behavior of a real-world desk.

Through CrowdSound, Bump has gained valuable-and sometimes unexpected user insight-into the BumpTop beta product. The customer feedback on feature preferences and priorities has helped Bump to focus its development efforts on the functionality that will offer the highest customer satisfaction when BumpTop launches.

“We are committed to changing the way users experience their computer desktops with BumpTop, and it’s a top priority to deliver a stellar product right out the gate,” said Anand Agarawala, founder and CEO of BumpTop. “With CrowdSound, Intridea has provided a fantastic tool to help us deliver the product users want.”

Agarawala has actively sought user feedback since BumpTop began as his master’s thesis defining a user interface that let people stack, bump or toss files on their computer desktops to simulate a physical desk-like experience. Initially Bump used email groups and Web-based forums to solicit input, but those channels provided few responses, and Agarawala realized the need for a social feedback tool.

After evaluating multiple feedback products, Bump has implemented Intridea’s CrowdSound because it offers several advantages over other solutions. At the top of the list is the low investment CrowdSound demands of users; they can choose to craft a comment or simply contribute to an existing one.

“Users tend to get deterred from contributing their opinions if they have to make the effort of formulating an email or posting on a forum,” said Agarawala. “CrowdSound makes giving feedback easy for our users. They don’t have to worry about navigating pages; they just click once to offer a suggestion or cast a vote.”

Other key factors in Bump’s decision to use CrowdSound for feedback on BumpTop are the:

• Ease of adding users with CrowdSound, which contrasts with other account-based solutions that require more effort to set up and manage;
• Split view showing both the most recent comments and the most popular ones; and
• CrowdSound’s ease of implementation and ability to seamlessly integrate with the BumpTop product website.

“It took me 15 minutes at most to create our CrowdSound account and set it up, and most of that time was inputting the initial entries,” said Agarawala.

Once Bump had CrowdSound running on its site, the company saw a surge in user feedback-up to five times higher than previous response levels. More importantly, the company gained much greater insight into what BumpTop features customers considered to be top priorities.

“Initially, we posted on CrowdSound the top 12 features we were thinking of building into BumpTop, including some that were pie in the sky,” Agarawala recalled. “It was easy to identify the top few priorities because they each received 40-50 votes versus less than 20. Interestingly, we thought we knew what users would choose, but we were surprised by some of the features that were voted to the top. There were also valuable user suggestions. CrowdSound has definitely helped us to focus our development priorities to give users what they want.”

Agarawala adds, “With CrowdSound, we are also able to update the status of a suggestion to indicated we’ve implemented it. This lets our users know we are listening and working to deliver a product they will love.”

Intridea is proud to announce the July 2008 release of CrowdSound, the social feedback tool that opens up new lines of communication between you and your customers. The social feedback tool allows enterprise websites and social networking sites to gather, organize and respond to suggestions from their customers—for just $10 per month. Because CrowdSound requires only minimal Web developer knowledge to implement, businesses of all sizes can quickly realize the power of interactive, Web-based customer feedback.

The latest release of CrowdSound has many new much-requested features:

* Customize the widget's colors and look and feel
* A hosted website in addition to the widget
* Custom suggestion buckets
* Private suggestions for sensitive topics
* SSL encryption
* iPhone integration
* User-selectable, customizable categories for each suggestion
* Profanity filtering to focus on constructive criticism
* ...and many more!

Using CrowdSound, companies can open a direct line of communications with customers via the Web—transparently gathering their suggestions without forcing them to navigate away from their page. The standards-based, highly customizable tool seamlessly integrates with an enterprise website or social networking site while providing a tailored look-and-feel that reinforces the company brand.

For additional details and to try it out, visit CrowdSound.com

With all the buzz about crowdsound, we got picked up by KillerStartups.

Subscribe to our RSS feed if you want to hear about new releases.

Intridea’s latest product, crowdsound has been featured on TechCrunch. We love showcasing our products to a new audience, so it’s definitely a treat everytime we make it to the front page.

Here’s the link: CrowdSound on TechCrunch

We’re currently hard at work integrating our new features and pay-plans to take us out of public beta. At the same time, our own widget is helping us receive new suggestions effortlessly—these help us polish our existing features till they shine. As such, here’s a status update on some of the most popular suggestions.

You will soon be able to customize your widget top-to-bottom. Here are a few screenshots of widgets built using the new customization interface:

Next, we’re working on custom categories/tags. These would be in the form of an admin-created, user-selectable list of keywords to attach to each suggestion. For all those who requested internationalization—we’re working on it. We are also working on a new search algorithm to improve the existing suggestions shown when posting a new suggestion.

The bottom line is that crowdsound is under very active development. We recommend that you subscribe to this RSS feed if you want to hear about new releases. Thank you for your support!

Intridea is pleased to announce the official public beta release of crowdsound, a new tool that allows companies and websites to gather, organize and respond to suggestions from their users.

By integrating the crowdsound widget on their website, companies can transparently gather suggestions from users without forcing them to navigate away from their page. Using the widget, users can post new suggestions and also vote and comment on existing suggestions—essentially building a community around the improvement of the company’s product or website.

crowdsound’s detailed admin interface then lets companies respond to each suggestion, opening up previously closed lanes of communication between the company and users. The admin interface also allows companies to manage, organize and integrate suggestions into their workflows quite easily.

crowdsound is currently in public beta. After the beta phase, we will launch reasonably priced, tiered subscriptions plans with exciting new features.