At the Adobe MAX08 conference we were very excited to announce Universal Mind’s “Customer Explorer” application as the winner of the Intuit WorkPlace contest. We think this app is pretty amazing – it had to be to win the contest as it beat some stiff competition with a total of ten apps built on the Intuit Partner Platform making it to the final contest review round.
A Big Thanks
A huge thanks to all the developers who entered the app contest. The process was a challenging one for them – they were developing on Beta bits, services and moving targets as our team was preparing the platform to go live. We really appreciate their patience and perseverance and all of the quality feedback they provided throughout. We hope to bring you more examples of their work in the coming weeks.
And also a big thanks to the contest judges: Oliver Marks (writes the Collaboration blog at ZDNet), Mario Morejon (Senior Technical Editor at everythingchannel.com) and Ryan Stewart (Platform Evangelist at Adobe) who took the time to review the ten finalist applications and talk with the developers as part of the judging process.
Now…About the Winning App
Customer Explorer allows customers to quickly see geographic and temporal trends in user's QuickBooks customer data. Users can view interactive heat maps of their balances and filter by time, job status or job type and drill down to specific customer and job details. Street and satellite imagery in the application is provided by MapQuest. Users can also view thematic demographic data provided by Placebase's Pushpin data and mapping service, which includes median household income, in context with their own customer data.
The prize included $5,000 cash, a place at the Intuit booth at MAX08 to demo the winning application (plus covering travel expenses) and an opportunity to take part in the Intuit Partner Platform speaker session at the conference. It also got some deserved attention by press and media (see Slick data-visualizer launched for QuickBooks users).
A preview release of Customer Explorer is available for free on Intuit WorkPlace so you can play with it right now.
Meet One of the Winning Devs
Today we took the opportunity to talk to Doug McCune, Principle Software Engineer at Universal Mind – one of the developers involved in creating the contest-winning Customer Explorer application. At yesterday’s speaking session he mentioned a few things I thought would be cool to share you, so video’d our conversation:
Congratulations to Tom Link (Universal Mind’s CTO), Doug McCune (in this video) and the rest of the Universal Mind team!!
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Update: see a video of the app in action at Universal Mind's blog.
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The Intuit Developer Relations Team
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