Just started to work on the long awaited Import Contact feature. And true to our “lets try to do this differently” mantra, we let you import from vcards, Outlook and even your Yahoo, Gmail and MySpace addressbook. Awesome Blossom feature again!

After this we’ll add Importing from CSV & Excel file.

So at the moment there are a few ways to get contacts into your Contact list:

- Click Add Contact and add them individually (pain in the arse if you had more than 50 contacts)
- Use the Import Contacts feature mentioned above.
- Click on the Reports tab and convert your mobile Leads to contacts with just one click.
- Create a publicly accessible online form for your contacts to key in their details themselves. A much asked for feature by our beta testers.
- Think of a contact in your head and it magically gets saved in your ezypzy contact list (we so wished we could do that for you ).

Managed to improve the Contact List search function a bit this week by adding in the Live Search feature, where the server gets search results as the user types in his/her search request.

So for instance, here’s the contact list:

And as I type in “sh” in to the name search box, the server immediately displays contacts with “sh” in their names right below.

Is that cool or what! But after the search result is displayed, the cursor seems to stop focusing on search box, and the user has to click in the box again and continue typing. BLEH! Will fix that later.

We have had our first official client in Monsoon Cup Terengganu. So basically they went from beta tester to paying client within two weeks. Awesome Blossom!

They loved ezypzy so much that they are subscribing to it for the entire 2008

This is pretty interesting. Got a call from a close friend’s brother recently about helping them out with their upcoming website, www.malaysiandreamgirl.tv, which is pretty much an online reality model search series. First of its kind in Malaysia.

We of course jumped at the opportunity to work with them… for obvious reasons >:)

Anyway, started off by helping them source and set up their streaming server. I tried out the Adobe Flash Media Streaming Server, but it was a bitch to set up, so I scrapped that. So we went with the Wowza Media Server instead, which was easy to set up, easy to configure, streams flash videos smoothly and best of all, super great support. I emailed them regarding some problem and got a reply within the day (thanks Charlie!).

So after getting the streaming server up and running, they wanted to do an online audition and newsletter subscription form. That’s when I introduced ezypzy to them. Because in essence, those who are auditioning for the show are Dreamgirl’s contacts, so are their newsletter subscribers.

So we suggested to them that we could make a publicly accessible version of Dreamgirl’s Add Contact form and whoever registers through this form, they will be automatically added into Dreamgirl’s ezypzy account’s Contact list and tagged as ‘online’, so that they know exactly who registered online.

As for the newsletter, same concept with the audition form, except newsletter subscription form only has one field.

The other feature we would need to add would be a special subdomain for individual ezypzy users. So for instance, Dreamgirl’s online forms will only be accessible via http://dreamgirl.ezypzy.com.my/ (subdomain follows the username) .

Its official, everyone loves ezypzy here.

After my last post 5 days ago, we’ve been figuring out how ezypzy could be used during the Monsoon Cup, little did we know, our users figured out most of it by themselves.

Here are just a few cases of how ezypzy is being used here.

1. T-Best, the Monsoon Cup organisers, already have close to 400 contacts in their ezypzy account currently. They are using ezypzy to mass email important press releases or announcements to the people in their contact list. They are also using it to mass SMS the latest race results to everyone in their list.

An interesting thing happened when we first demonstrated it to them, we clicked on the ‘tbest’ tag in the sidebar and sent out a test message to everyone in the ‘tbest’ list, and immediately everybody’s phone in the control room started beeping in unision, which drew some really surprised looks from everyone and a smile from us

In addition to that, they have set up an ezypzy listing item to allow people to request for the next race schedule. All they have to do is SMS ‘ezy nextflight’ to 36881 and immediately they will receive an SMS detailing the upcoming races. We just set up the ‘nextflight’ PixKode today, but the response for this has not been that great yet, only 3 requests so far and 2 of them were from us Maybe they think they have to pay for the received messages, even though we mentioned only standard SMS charges apply. Malaysia is quite famous for stupid SMS scams. Hope the response will pick up the next few days.

2. Weber Shandwick, the global PR company and official PR company for Monsoon Cup Terengganu, has been keying in all their media contacts into their ezypzy account, both local and international media professionals covering the Monsoon Cup. Then they use the mass SMS feature to blast out events or photo ops that might interest the journalist & photographers. In addition to that, they also have all their media contacts’ details at hand for quick and easy reference.

3. People Dynamics are the partner company that provides the manpower for temps and hospitality hostesses for Monsoon Cup. They have about 30 people under them and have been using ezypzy to mobilise their team, which are often spread out all over the marina and city. For instance, they will send out a mass SMS to inform them of an impending briefing or maybe when a sponsor VIP arrives, a group SMS sent to the hostesses who have been put in charged of that sponsor… By the way, these hostesses are the non-dodgy type, just a bunch of pimple faced college kids.

4. The broadcasting team seems to be using it for something as well. I don’t have the details as I had to fly back to KL recently. But I think they are using it to mobilise their team, because the broadcasting and video production crew is about 20 people strong and spread out as well.

So far about 2500 SMS messages have been sent in the past 4 days. Which is waaaaaaay more than what we had anticipated. We’ve also had people from Europe asking us when they can start using ezypzy over there, not just for the other international Match Racing Tour locations, but for other big scale events as well.

At least we can put our “nobody’s going to use ezypzy” fears to rest for now and sleep better at night!

I’ve been meaning to start this blog for ezypzy for months now but never got around to doing it. However, now is a good time as any seeing that the beta version is finally ready and we have secured our first real beta tester, the Monsoon Cup Terengganu, the world’s richest sailing event right here in Malaysia.

This year’s event is even more momentous because it is the last race and title decider of the World Match Racing Tour sailing series. Kenneth, my colleague, and I are here in Terengganu in the thick of the action, figuring out how the organisers can use ezypzy to manage this prestigious event.

We took a drive up to Kuala Terengganu from Kuala Lumpur 2 nights ago. It was a 450KM journey and it took us approximately 7 hours to arrive, with stops for food and all. Checked into Primula Beach Resort, which isn’t too bad. My room had a bathtub, so that always puts a smile on my face.

The next day (which was yesterday 23rd Nov) , we were explaining to the organisers what was ezypzy about and what it was capable of. You see, until thus far, only their IT manager knew about it and recommended it to the rest of the team, but everyone was clueless on what ezypzy was about. Heck even we’re clueless about it ourselves sometimes.

So we showed them the site, showed how they could easily create their contact list, and then how they could tag them and mass email/sms to their contact list. Immediately they assigned a temp, to key in all the business cards they have been collecting into ezypzy. She took less than 10 minutes to figure it out, which was a success in itself because she is a real computer newbie. We figured out she was a newbie right away because after she was done, she saved the web page (i.e. File->Save As), then opened it again and asked us what happened to all the data she keyed in.

Instead of trying to explain to her the whole mechanics of a web based application, we just told her that all the data is saved elsewhere, she just needs to hit Save button on the web page itself.

Anyway, later in the day, they wanted to send out a couple of press releases to everyone in their contact list. Now, ezypzy was never meant to be a newsletter or emailing application. Yes we do have a mass mail feature, but that’s for sending a quick and simple text email to your contact list. So we had to tell them that they couldn’t format the way their email message looked like. However they did require to attach at least one file to the email, a feature we did not even plan to have. So within 2 hours, Terry, our kickass programmer back in KL, whipped something up and voila, we had a mass mail feature with a single file attachment, and we blasted out press releases right after.

Those were basically the highlights of yesterday, a really great feeling to see the fruits of our labour finally being used by someone other than ourselves. We started this journey since February 2007 and lots of things have happened since then. But being the lousy blogger that I am, I never chronicled our journey since the beginning. But then again I’ve always been a rebel, so screw it, I’m going to chronicle the start of our journey in retrospect.

Welcome to ezypzy’s official blog!

The ezypzy story started from a very simple idea in October 2006. To allow property agents to upload & manage their property listings online and push it to potential leads via the mobile phone. The unique thing about this was that each property listing had what we call a PixKode, and the agent could advertise this PixKode on their For Sale/Rent signboards like so, “Property For Sale, for free and instant info on this property, sms EZY P291 to 36881″.

Hence whenever someone saw this signboard and SMS in for more details, the ezypzy system would send to the requester more details of the property via SMS and send photos of the property via MMS.

Then we realised that, hey this is not too difficult to do, anyone could do it really. So we decided to add more value by building a simple to use Contact Manager with notes and task reminders to help the agent run his/her business better. None of the complicated and mammoth CRM features that Salesforce or SugarCRM and others have. They were just not user friendly and bloated for the layman-woman to use.

Then as we were developing the product, we realised that if we wanted to launch this application internationally, agents in USA or Europe would probably require different data fields compared to Malaysian property agents. So for the listing, we made it in such a way that you could define your listing types and each listing type had a customised template of fields for it.

We thought this was great and then after a few beers or so realised that, hey if you can create customised fields, what’s stopping a second hand car dealer, an indie rock band, an event organiser, a regular shop owner who wants to keep inventory, from using this app?

So we set about building and branding the application for a much larger and totally undefined userbase. And no I had not read The Blue Ocean Strategy business book at this point of time. I did however read Founders@Work and Upstart Startups. They were really inspiring books and probably helped us more.

Anyway, we hope to chronicle ezypzy’s journey through this blog and also hope to hear from readers and users about ezypzy. We love feedbacks and we hope to get a whole bunch of them when we launch proper.

Enjoy reading and hope ezypzy makes a difference to you.