May 2013
1 post
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SendHub adds Auto Attendant and Android in-app...
Our engineers continue to ship new features for our customers.Last month, we shipped the new Android app, expanded business features, and added unlimited SendHub to SendHub calling. Last week, we launched sound notifications and iPhone in-app purchase. Today, we’re excited to announce two more updates:
Auto Attendant
Direct your calls from your main business phone line to any department. Record...
April 2013
3 posts
4 tags
Hacking Flask: A Success Story
AKA Flask Howto: Add request execution time to log output
By Jay Taylor, published April 24th 2013
I scoured the internet high and low for a way to add request execution time logging to my Flask server console output, but failed to find any examples of how to do it. Here is my formula for one way to make it happen.
We are going to turn this:
INFO:werkzeug:127.0.0.1 - - [24/Apr/2013...
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SendHub adds iPhone in-app purchase and sound...
Our engineers are hard at work launching new features for our awesome customers. If you missed our news last week - we launched an Android app, unlimited SendHub to SendHub calling and expanded business features. This week, we have some more news for you.
iPhone in-app purchase
We have added a new feature exclusively for our iPhone customers. If you are an iPhone user, you can now buy more...
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SendHub launches Android app and expands business...
In 2011, Garrett, John and Ash started SendHub to build a communications platform for Garrett’s nephew’s school. Since then a lot has happened - we graduated from Y-Combinator, raised $2M from a handful of angel investors and have been hard at work building out our platform.
Our mission has always been to build a simple, fast and reliable communications platform for businesses and organizations....
November 2012
4 posts
1 tag
How to serve Django Statics (and not go insane)
It’s crucial for a website like ours to be as responsive as possible. One of our goals over the last couple months has been to improve our website’s performance. Not that page load time was particularly slow for a single page web-app, but we knew there was room for improvement. This post will take a look at some of the steps we took to improve performance.
Before we even start you might be...
6 Easy Marketing Tips for Black Friday
With Black Friday just three days away, retailers around the country are ramping up marketing efforts for the imminent swarms of coupon-clutching customers. Unfortunately, email marketing isn’t sufficient anymore. Our advice to retailers: Setup an SMS marketing campaign now.
Every year stores are opening earlier, and staying open later to fully cash in on the holiday rush. Last year,...
How Papa John's Could Have Saved $250MM
U.S. Pizza chain, Papa John’s is in trouble— we’re talking serious marinara sauce. Today, trouble is a $250 million class-action lawsuit for sending 500,000 unwanted text messages to their customers through a mass text messaging service. Yikes!
What could Papa John’s have done to prevent this?
Express written consent before sending a message to customers. Just because your company collected...
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Why can’t I vote online or from my cell phone?
Voting, Computers and the Future of Cybersecurity, November 9, 2012
Our Current Voting System is Broken.
Voting can be tedious. Between the “shade in the bubble” process, physical presence, and now, unforeseen natural disasters, actually getting out the vote can be difficult. Voting for a president is one of our greatest rights as American citizens. Today literally millions of us are excluded...
October 2012
7 posts
8 Ways to Easily Enhance Your Customer Service
In the social media age, where reviews and opinions are abundant, good customer service (CS) is essential for every company. Southwest Airlines, FedEx, Amazon.com, Bonobos and Zappos as examples of companies that treat customer service as an opportunity—a strategic business investment. These companies all have strong commitments to ensuring a simple and seamless buying process— and if...
How Do You Get Students to Read Your Emails?
The short answer: Stop sending them.
One of the biggest frustrations for educators, coaches and administrators in K-12 and higher education is students not opening emails. This problem is not new, and is only getting worse. Fortunately, some in the education community are exploring new “tricks” and adopting new messaging solutions.
If you want students to read your messages, send them a...
Spotlight: Avi Herschman, High School Hockey Coach...
Meet Avi, a social entrepreneur and men’s hockey coach at Rambam Mesivta High School in West Hempstead, New York.
Avi first learned about SendHub through Hacker News and TechCrunch, two of the most trafficked sites for tech news and hacker gossip. Avi was looking for a more effective way to contact his players.
“SendHub allows me to stay in close contact with my players outside of...
Introducing Shared Groups!
Our engineers are tired….
…even the dog is tired!
We (yes, Kovacs the Afghan Hound, too) have been working tirelessly these past few weeks on an exciting new feature that we can FINALLY tell you about.
Shared Groups! SendHub Users now have a fast and simple way to share a group of contacts with their team. It’s just like Shared Folders in Dropbox, but for groups of contacts...
Casual Friday: Meet Java Superman, Caleb Doxsey
Name: Caleb Doxsey, the newest member of the SendHub Team!
Hometown: Spanish Fort, Alabama Unofficial Title: Team Minstrel! Fun Fact: When I was a kid I was an avid juggler. Juggling, like riding a bike, is a skill you don’t ever really forget so I still juggle from time to time. Best Prank Call you’ve ever pulled off: I can’t think of a time I ever prank called anyone,...
Spotlight: Donald & Ann, Student Leaders for CNU...
Today’s user spotlight is of Donald Hair and Ann Joyce, the Student Leaders for the Christopher Newport University Students for Obama Group! Donald and Ann are, as you might suspect, avid Obama supporters (“political junkies,” in their own words) and both enjoy travel, sports, and running. “We first heard about SendHub through a quick Google Search because we were trying to find creative ways...
Spotlight: Kevin Cline, Director of the Christian...
After receiving this post on our Facebook wall, we had to reach out to Kevin!
Hearing from users like this is the type of thing that brings a smile to the face of everyone in our office— it’s our bread and butter and keeps us working hard everyday. But back to Kevin. Kevin first heard about SendHub from his cousin, who is a youth minister in Georgia and uses SendHub to communicate with...
September 2012
6 posts
SendHub Visits Facebook for "HackEd"...so how did...
Facebook and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation put on a hackathon yesterday right here in Menlo Park. SendHub was fortunate enough to be invited to participate. Sweet, right? Since our team is located down the street from Facebook’s campus, it was a short trip to join the party. But how did we do…. We dominated, of course!
“HackEd” was part launch party and part hackathon. The...
Spotlight: Shira Malone, 2nd Grade Teacher at The...
We launched SendHub in order to empower educators to communicate more effectively with students and parents. Teachers can text everyone, without having to give out their personal number, which is especially helpful in disadvantaged communities, where access to computers and email are limited, but nearly everyone has a cell phone. Enter Shira Malone. Mrs. Malone teaches second grade at The Orchard...
Spotlight: Perry Wasserbauer, Phi Gamma Delta at...
If you grew up with at least one brother, you can probably recall your house being pretty crazy at times. Well, imagine having ninety brothers and throwing everyone together on the campus of the University of Connecticut. There’s likely to be a few stories you never write home about.
Perry Wasserbauer is the recording secretary for Phi Gamma Delta. He gave up on using email to reach the brothers...
Casual Friday: Meet Engineering Ninja, Kevin...
Name: Kevin Calloway
Hometown: Lynwood, IL
Unofficial job: Director of Cilantro Detection
Fun Fact: I have twice the amount of nerves in my gums as the average human. When I got x-rays for my wisdom teeth removal, the surgeon rushed into the room, excited to share his “discovery”. I’d like to say that I experience sensations that you can only imagine, but in reality, cavities just hurt...
Spotlight: Jeremy Stine, Stine Home and Yard
If you mention Stine in Louisiana, everyone knows you are talking about the home improvement store. With 12 locations and more than 800 associates, this family owned business competes in the major leagues, against giants like Home Depot and Loews.
Stine is the weekend playground for avid ‘DIY’ (do it yourself) warriors in Louisiana. But a large percentage of their business...
Casual Friday: Meet Captain Canada, Brock!
This week, we decided to profile one of our awesome engineers. Meet Captain Canada - Brock Haywood.
- Name: Brock D. Haywood
- Hometown: Kamloops, BC Canada - Unofficial job: Director of Awesome
- Fun fact: Canadians don’t have fun facts. We just have facts.
- Best prank call you pulled off (or want to pull off): Calling the east coast office of a company I worked for...
August 2012
7 posts
6 tags
Spotlight: Donald Engstrom, Executive Director at...
Friday Night Lights (I’m talking about the TV show, not the movie… duh) was a must-watch for a lot of people for the past years, and many (including myself… maybe) shed a tear during the season finale. Remember when Riggins skips practice because he thought it was cancelled, and Coach Taylor puts him in hell for it? Donald Engstrom, the Executive Director at DeBartolo Sports &...
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How to Upgrade a Legacy Heroku Database
“Grayed out upgrade buttons on Heroku”
The number of concurrent users on our service has been growing by leaps and bounds. This is great news for our business but also means our primary database on Heroku keeps running out of cache. In our experience, Heroku’s Postgres databases see a significant performance drop when cache utilization exceeds 85%.
Ten days ago our growth caught up with us and our...
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Spotlight: Jason Toff, Product Manager at Google &...
Remember the summers you spent at Camp Wannapeelyo (you know, that lake you still don’t know how to pronounce…)? Did your camp counselors seem organized, well on schedule and overall on top of things? I didn’t think so. Keeping the kids in line is one thing, but organizing the counselors can be an entire challenge in its own. No one has more experience with this than Jason Toff, a co-founder...
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Casual Friday: Meet Our Superuser Intern, Ben!
Ben Jubas, User Support/Project Management Intern Hometown: Stamford, CT Unofficial job: Marketing agent for Wheaties: the Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner of Champions!
Fun fact: I once helped break up a fistfight between a teammate’s father and the team bus driver. Best prank call you pulled off (or want to pull off): I never really prank called, but when I was in elementary school I once...
5 tags
Inbox Zero? Done.
What you say? Yes… it’s true. SendHub can help you get to Inbox Zero a little faster now, with the new Message Center.
You ask. We listen. Simple as that :-)
One of the features requested by many of you was the ability to separate your inbox, and see Unread Messages only, as well as the Scheduled Messages you have set up. Today, we’re really excited to...
3 tags
Casual Friday: meet our Engineering Intern, Lucas!
Lucas Ellgran, Software Engineering Intern Hometown: Maple Grove, MN Unofficial job: Captain Major Double Extreme Gunnery Sergent of Mountain Dew Consumption Fun fact: I was actually born in Colorado and moved to Minnesota when I was about 12. I grew up on the slopes and learned how to ski not long after I could walk. Best prank call you pulled off (or want to pull off): One of my friends once...
July 2012
5 posts
5 tags
Spotlight: CoachO and the AAU Junior Olympics
Everyone is talking about the olympics right now - and why shouldn’t they, it’s a once-every-four-years-event and seeing these superhumans compete is the closest we get to having real superheroes, but today’s spotlight is focused on a different type of olympics… the annual Amateur Athletic Union Junior Olympic Games. Organizing this event can be quite a challenge and headache - between the...
3 tags
Casual Friday: meet our designer, Zach!
Zach Segal, Product Designer Hometown: Naples, FL Unofficial job: Author of the ‘How To Read For Dummies’ book series & Senior National Executive Director at Pixel Engineering Fun fact: If you brought the Sun down to the size of a white blood cell, and then brought everything else down to scale, our galaxy (the Milky Way), would be the size of the continental United States. Best...
6 tags
Who's The Prettiest Of Them All?
Magic Mirror on the wall… oh wait, wrong story.
I think we can all agree that it has been a busy few months for us since we left our cushy, warm home at Y-Combinator… we raised a $2M seed round, moved into a new office in downtown Menlo Park (with a green wall), launched our iPhone app, added the call & voicemail feature, and now… we have another new exciting announcement...
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Casual Friday: meet our intern superstar, Casey!
Casey Simmons, Intern Hometown: Gainesville, FL Unofficial job: Food supplier for the SendHub team (aka the person who orders lunch/dinner/treats and keeps everyone fed). Gym rat and health fanatic. Fun fact: Born and raised in Gainesville by two die hard Gator fans (parents both went to UF and never left Gainesville), only to attend Florida State University and become a Seminole (probably one...
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Casual Friday: meet John!
John Anthony Fallone, Chief Operating Officer
Hometown: Rochester, N.Y (phonetics of an upstate New Yorker - RAH - chest - er)….. and I know what you are thinking - no - I am not from anywhere close to New York City. I live is 334 miles away from NYC (Thank you Google Maps); the part of New York that gets over 100” of snow a year, people talk like the mom from Bobby’s world,...
June 2012
6 posts
3 tags
Casual Friday: a new blog series!
Friday morning, the sun is shining, the office is quiet… what better way to get through the last few hours before the weekend, than with a new blog series to enjoy? :) Starting today, every friday, we’re going to give you a little sneak peek of what it’s like to be a part of the SendHub team.
Since graduating from YC we’ve grown a lot as a team - there are 9 full time...
6 tags
Call Me, (on) SendHub?
Yea, that’s right, we just used this years summer pop-sensation ‘Call Me Maybe’ as a cheesy headline. But, we have a new update today that made this impossible not to do. Our goal has always been to simplify communication across multiple channels, and turn social, sms and voice into one - and guess what? Starting today, you can actually call us, on SendHub.
Last month we...
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Spotlight: the 116th Annual PTA Conference (and...
Every year (for the last 116 years), hundreds of members of the National Parent Teacher Association from all over the country descend upon one location for a conference, where they attend workshops and meetings about how to grow their local PTA groups and further their mission. This year, the conference happened to be just down the road at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California so...
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Spotlight: Suzi Townsend, Chi Alpha Staff at FSU
Everyone knows organizing college students can be quite a challenge – between the classes, the sports (and the partying…), it’s hard to get them to respond, or sometimes even read, emails. No one has more experience with this, than Suzi Townsend, who leads the charge for the FSU chapter of Chi Alpha.
Chi Alpha is a Christian campus ministry on universities throughout the United States &...
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Spotlight: Ricky Sailor, Founder of UnsignedPreps
Ricky Sailor loves football and everything that comes with it. As a retired football player himself, he says the most exciting day is when a high school player makes his decision for college ball. This inspired him to start his non-profit, unsignedpreps, which helps unsigned high school athletes secure college scholarships. His mission is to create opportunities that maximize the student athlete’s...
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Going to Red Alert! Battlestations!
As some of you may have noticed, SendHub was unavailable for 2 hours yesterday morning. This was on top of 4 hours of downtime last week. Embarrassing? Yes. Fixable? Hell yes. Downtime sucks, especially when the causes are outside of our immediate control. Not cool. Yesterday morning, Heroku ran into some problems related to how they route requests to our application (which impacted many...
May 2012
4 posts
8 tags
Spotlight: Brandon Nappy, Tactical Marketing...
Brandon Nappy loves beer. In fact, he loves it so much he made it his carreer, as one of the key people at Florida’s Swamp Head Brewery. What makes Swamp Head special? The six amazing people behind it, who are passionate about craft beer and the state of Florida!
But as some of you may have guessed, Swamp Head also uses SendHub on a regular basis. Their famous tasting room, “The...
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SendHub Tech Quiz & NYC fun...
Rise and shine tech masters! If you follow us on twitter (hint: if you don’t, take a moment now to follow), you may have noticed some of our amazing team is in New York right now!
We’re showcasing SendHub as part of the Startup Alley, at TechCrunch Disrupt. If you are at the event, make sure to stop by and say hi - we’d love to meet you and give you some of this fun swag
...
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Spotlight: Peter Walters, Campus Program Director...
Peter Walters is a recent college grad, in fact so recent, he should still be recovering from a massive graduation celebration (ok.. maybe not, he graduated last may - but still). But instead, he jumped head first into the family business – Two Degrees Food, which is a one for one social good food company. What does that mean? For every Two Degrees snack bar you purchase, the company donates a...
6 tags
iPhone, are you there? It's me... SendHub
Last week we told you about our $2M seed funding round from Kapor Capital, Menlo Ventures, 500 startups, Howard Lindzon’s Social Leverage fund, Eric Ries, Paul Buchheit, Jawed Karim and a handful of other investors. Today, we’re taking the SendHub experience to a whole new level with the launch of the official SendHub for iPhone app.
The iPhone app has been our most requested feature...
April 2012
3 posts
4 tags
SendHub Brings On An All-Star Investor Team, Not...
Our goal at SendHub is to create a fast, simple and effective communication platform that businesses and organizations actually enjoy using. Garrett, John & Ash started SendHub back in Florida, to help Garrett’s nephew’s teacher find an alternative way to reach her students. From there, we applied for Y-Combinator, moved to Mountain View to participate in the accelerator (yes, we got...
6 tags
SJSU Hackathon
Two weeks ago we teamed up with San Jose State University to host a Hackathon weekend, which completely unrelated, was such a huge success we even got a feature in the San Jose Mercury News (here)! But enough humblebraging :)
We were blown away by the products created during the weekend and the amazing students who built them. So much hard work, passion, lack of sleep, and incredible results...
Startup SJSU - A SendHub Sponsored Event
We are doing our first ever hackathon, so get excited. SendHub is partnering with San Jose State University to sponsor a campus hackathon this weekend. Participants will build on SendHub’s API for 48 hours straight. Awesome, right!
Everything kicks-off at 6pm on Friday, April 6th and is being held at the San Jose State University Dining Commons. Each...
March 2012
6 posts
Missed Appointments Cost Doctors Billions
Every year, up to 12 % of appointments with doctors are missed by patients. Forgetting to make an appointment might not be a big deal for the average patient, but for the doctor’s office, it certainly is. Let’s crunch some numbers here to put things in perspective.
If a doctor’s office has 1 to 2 no-shows per day, the lost productivity from this could be anywhere from $100 to $900, depending...
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Single Page Web Apps with Backbone.js
About a month ago, we decided that we needed to give the front-end of sendhub.com a face-lift. The site looked a bit dated, and it just didn’t feel as snappy as we wanted it to. All pages were rendered almost entirely on the server, and only a couple of places used Ajax to pull in data asynchronously. In parallel to this, we were also in the process of releasing our developer API which we knew...
Profile: Jamari Johnson, High School Freshman
Garrett’s nephew is on spring break this week and convinced his uncle to fly him out to California for a few days. Since SendHub was originally created to help Jamari’s school, we are featuring a special post from him. The words expressed are his alone, but we support the underlying message. “Part of the reason why some Black males don’t like school is because of the culture and music they...
Profile: Michael West, High School Senior
Michael West is a senior in high school and among our most active users. Since reading our February launch article in TechCrunch, his database has grown to over 100 contacts. Michael explained, “I’ve been looking around for a way to text all the students in my school’s National Honor Society (NHS). When I saw your TechCrunch article I was like ‘whoa, this is great’.”
Before discovering SendHub, he...
