Bantam Live

Bantam Live mixes microblogging, messaging, profiles, project & task management, social CRM, file sharing, calendaring and stirs that with people, content, and data in an online collaboration platform.

With its mix of features and buzz it generates, Bantam Live is the Long Island Iced Tea of collaboration apps.

(Sorry about that one, folks. We came up with that one after work over drinks at Fanelli's. We'll try to keep our messaging chill.)

We like Hugh MacLeod's work and the GapingVoid blog he's created, which is why Bantam Live invited him to create something for our launch this week. Hugh's range goes from abstract drawing to characters with social bite or existential musing. We like the simple "collab" and "oration" words around the tangle of a network abstraction. Thanks, Hugh. (Check out the new "Hugh's Daily Cartoon," the new mailing list to receive a daily cartoon in your inbox.)

The background of our relationship with Hugh goes like this... Bantam Live launched its public-beta last summer onstage at TechCrunch's Real-time Stream Crunchup at the Fox Theatre in Redwood City, Michael Arrington auctioned off copy #1 of "dream big. techcrunch 2009" serigraph by artist Hugh MacLeod. I won the auction. I figured it was a good cause (to the Electronic Frontier Foundation), would give us a promotional bump, and would commemorate for the team an achievement of sorts to have launched in beta as a selected startup from the stage on that day. As Hugh explains, the serigraph was a "social object." It hangs in our loft today.

Most "webinars" are thinly veiled sales pitches. The webinar we're hosting as part of Social Media Week doesn't have much veil. What's wrong with sales pitches, anyway? Join us on Thursday, February 4th, at 2pm EST for a webinar entitled "Social CRM & Lead-Generation on Twitter for Business Teams." In this 30-minute online presention, we'll paint a picture of the broad spectrum of Social CRM and quickly get to Bantam Live and give you a demo of how it works.

REGISTER NOW FOR THE FEBRUARY 4TH  DEMO OF BANTAM LIVE

Our beta program has just ended and we've launched the the commercial version of Bantam Live with paid-subscription plans that require credit cards for sign-up. All plans will include a free 30-day trial, beyond however long you've been using the beta version. There is also a free plan. If you don't wish to subscribe to any plan, you can cancel your account. The application has some new design tweaks and optimized performance. Moreover, the social CRM module and Twitter integration has been completely redone and improved for lead-generation, contact importing, and CRM workflows.

During February, March, and April we're working on a range of enhancements big and small. These include Google App integrations, bolstering the project management features, adding deeper social CRM functions along with improved pipeline management and analytics for deals. OAuth for Twitter is coming in the Spring, too. Later this year, we'll also be releasing an API and federating the collaboration features such that users will be able to create multiple workspaces for different groups. There's lots more in ongoing development. iPhone you ask? Probably summertime. The optimized mobile access we have now actually works surprisingly well but we know we'll need to offer an app.

Whatever happened to bold statements like, "I challenge you" or "I dare you" in the realm of a wager? Yesterday we came across a sweet tweet about Bantam Live that said, "BantamLive.com is HUUUGELY awesome. SugarCRM is kind of the Defacto, but Bantam is rad as F***  ...Delighted with that user sentiment, I tweeted that I was going to take "Bantam Live is rad as F***" and make a T-shirt out of it. About four hours later, the user tweeted back, "Toxx-Clausing this. Maybe a twitpic of the shirt to satisfy the bet? (I'd buy one)."

Toxx-Clausing? Wha? After a cursory search, I learned that "toxx-clausing" is a sort of bet to follow up on a promise or proclamation that originated on internet message boards. ...Uh, ok. We grew up on the streets of NYC, Boston, and Providence and if any one of us had ever said "I toxx-clause you" you could be sure you'd get smacked upside the head. But hey, interland can be a strange place with a language all its own.

Anyway, I followed up with my original intention to make a T-shirt which you can buy now as we just did. And to Landon Noss of Noss Media: Thanks for your nice compliment about Bantam Live. Now we challenge you to buy one as you promised!

UPDATE >> Landon Noss is a man of his word. After conceding the bet he good-naturedly tweeted "Bantam Live is THE defacto SCRM/SPM tool out there, and it's not even finished" and then took a twitpic of his proof-of-purchase for the T-shirt he inspired us to create. Rock on, Landon.

"What a fantastic product! I have been using Bantam Live to manage several projects here at Brown Medical School, and I have yet to find a tool that makes collaboration as effortless as yours does. I have tried Yammer, Salesforce, Google Apps, Basecamp, Backpack, and others. None of them have worked for our organization until we found Bantam Live."  -- Kumar Vasudevan, Brown University Medical School, Careers in Medicine Program

Unsolicited feedback that's sent to us by email is often a delight to read. Above is an excerpt from one such email we received this week. We contacted the user to get permission to post the feedback and he happily obliged and provided us a headshot too. For us, this validation to our product roadmap helps us shape the answer to the ongoing question related to what Bantam Live can do.

(Thanks, Kumar. And nice to meet you. Beers are on us somewhere on Thayer Street someday.)

Bantam Live got a nice mention in TechCrunch's January 1st post entitled "Ten Technologies That Will Rock 2010" in the "Social CRM" category. While the DNA of our product has social CRM in it, we grapple with our product's positioning in the market, as it's capable of social CRM and much more. Perhaps our little tough-in-cheek ad banner now running says it best for now: Huddle up, Yammer On, and Get Your Salesforce beyond idle Chatter. Of course, this cheeky messaging in our beta phase will change in 2010, as Bantam Live expands its unified, integrated apps for business teams during this year. Anyway, we're happy to be mentioned as a serious player in Social CRM in 2010.

Happy New Year!  We hope 2010 does indeed rock for Bantam Live in the Social CRM category - and others.

We've always admired what Salesforce.com has done in paving the way for the adoption of on-demand, software-as-a-service architecture across the business landscape. It seems they've evidently returned admiration for us with their pre-announcement of their forthcoming product called Chatter that targets the enterprise. To be sure, industry competitors borrow from each other and it's no secret that the "Bantam Live is Facebook for business teams" moniker has been frequently mentioned in trade media and in tweets, and we tip our hat to Mr. Zuckerberg. Indeed, Facebook gave us the idea, now implemented in Bantam Live, that if people wanted to know what was going on with their friends, then maybe workers would want to know what's going on with their coworkers' activities, ideas, productivity workflows, and data - all visible and interactive in a real-time stream.

Our view is that Salesforce is following our lead in the fusion of people/apps/content that we've pioneered with Bantam Live. It's quite validating. A brief history...

> July 10th, 2009: at the first TechCrunch Real-time Conference event, Salesforce.com and Bantam Live give back-to-back presentations from the stage of the Fox Theatre in Redwood City. Salesforce gave a corporate presentation and Bantam Live launched the public-beta version of its unique online product that fuses people, content, and application data with a real-time stream and integrates to social networks like Twitter. We even showed a social CRM demo with a lead-generation workflow, importing contact and content from Twitter. TechCrunch entitled its post of Bantam Live "The Ultimate Social, Real-time CRM" and ReadWriteWeb had said, "Bantam Live is part enterprise Twitter, part CRM, and part Facebook for business teams."

> July 11th - August, 2009: A swarm of Salesforce product managers and developers register with and use Bantam Live.

> November 20, 2009: at the second TechCrunch Real-time Conference, Salesforce will promote its pre-announcement this week of Chatter. Salesforce's description of Chatter is a product remarkably similar to what Bantam Live beta-launched back on July 10th, which fuses people, apps, content, and application data.

Bantam Live - uniquely in this industry - has blended the multiple apps of microblogging, online collaboration, social CRM, project management, document sharing, social network integration, etc., all of which are parsed and assembled into data objects and fully integrated in the real-time stream. If you want to get a glimpse of what Salesforce's Chatter might one day do for the enterprise, sign on today to see who they're following in the SMB space. We launch commercially with paid-subscription plans in January with new modules, features, and highly attractive pricing.

In the SMB space, we look forward to competing with Salesforce in 2010. Stay tuned.

Introducing the sweet treat of iPhone and Blackberry optimized access. Now you can thumb through your team's evil activity stream while the kids scurry about the neighborhood for sugar. You can also post creepy status updates to coworkers, access freaky contacts, view horrible tasks, read spooky notes, see scary events, and look up hellish projects and killed deals. Happy Halloween!