Nick Gonzalez at TechCrunch just did a great article on our library of customizable business apps! Nick writes:
So, as promised earlier, LongJump has seeded their platform with a suite of applications that can be remixed by their users. The suite consists of 13 business applications that will be free to use through the end of the year.
LongJump builds on the success of our parent company’s (Relational) enterprise business application platform. Nick points out that this platform is currently used by “over 100 enterprise level customers.” The good news is that because LongJump is built on a tried and true enterprise-grade platform, it ensures a reliable and scalable solution for its small to medium-sized business users.
Yesterday, we found out that LongJump won a DEMOgod Award! The DEMOgod Award is given each year to a handful of companies with the best overall presentations. We were totally humbled to receive this award given this was our first time at Demo! Thank you Chris Shipley! This award really pays tribute to our team’s hard work and we would also like to thank the many individuals who having been working hard to make the LongJump launch such a success! Thank you.
Our on stage presentation at DEMOFall 2007 is now available online or you can watch it here.
This morning, Pankaj (our CEO) and Derek (our Director of Marketing) were on stage at DEMOFall. Many of the folks who saw the presentation were impressed by the LongJump offering. Josh Dilworth wrote on his blog:
the way in which [the applications] work together as they are demoing it, [was] way cool, I have not seen this done before.
Both Pankaj and Derek were pumped up and excited about sharing the benefits that LongJump has to offer small businesses. In fact, Dean Takahashi writes on the The Tech Talk Blog that as Pankaj jumped for joy when he left the stage, Chris Shipley, the executive director of the show, had to comment that “I’m hiring him for the next infomercial.”
A video of the entire presentation should be available online short on the LongJump profile page on the DEMOFall site.
One of the themes at this year’s DEMOFall is “The Not So Small Small Business” that touches on the growing trend companies like LongJump are enabling by empowering small businesses with enterprise-class business solutions! In fact, our presentation today was part of DEMOFall’s “Small Business Session”.
This interest in services and solutions for small and medium-sized business is sometimes understated by the actual size and importance of small businesses in our economy.
According to the SCORE, small businesses are big business! The estimated 25.8 million small businesses in the United States are responsible for the following:
- Generating 60 to 80% of net new jobs annually over the last decade
- Employing 50.6% of the country’s private sector workforce
- Representing 97% of all the exporters of goods
- Representing 99.7% of all employer firms
The good news is that as more and more small businesses are having to use the same business tools used by larger enterprises, LongJump and others are there to “bridge the gap.”
As more and more users as signing on to LongJump, we are trying to do the best job possible in “jump starting” their learning curve. Although, as Nigel Powell of the Red Ferret Journal puts it, “you can easily work out how to get the system up and running in a matter of moments”, we have always been committed to providing the highest level of online support.
LongJump University is one of those resources that is available to you as a LongJump user. You’ll find tutorials, guides, videos, and access to online training (a comprehensive training schedule will be available shortly). Be sure to check it out today!
Our attendance at DEMOFall 2007 has so far been a blast! We have had great traffic at our booth and a lot of press and partner interest! Its been a very busy time. We have had numerous meetings and interviews and Pankaj even had some time to do a little bit of coding before the official launch! If you are attending the show, make sure to catch our on stage presentation tomorrow (Wednesday) at 9:50am.
LongJump was been fortunate enough to receive a lot of rave reviews and reactions from a broad range of journalists and market leaders in the last couple of days. Here is summary of what folks have to say.
Nigel Powell of the Red Ferret Journal writes:
I’ve been playing with the new Longjump business application service over the past couple of days and I like it…What makes it stand out for me is the fact that you can easily work out how to get the system up and running in a matter of moments, since all the heavy lifting database work is hidden behind a very user friendly interface.
Rafe Needleman of Webware says:
I like what LongJump is trying to do: bring the kind of interconnected suite of apps to the small business that SalesForce has brought to larger companies with AppExchange.
TMCNet comes to the conclusion that:
LongJump’s offering represents a compelling solution for small businesses that cannot afford expensive enterprise-level software that is taxing to maintain, cannot be easily customized, and does not integrate with other business applications.
Leslie Poston of the popular blog Profy was pleasantly surprised to find that:
LongJump has all the markings of a true Web 2.0 company. It is well organized, attractive to look at and easy to use. My favorite feature of the LongJump application suite was the ability to not only pick and choose which applications would work best for your business, from one of them to all of them, but the fact you can customize each one.
Since our official launch this morning at DEMOFall, LongJump has already started to generate some great buzz in both the blogger and press communities. I just wanted to share a couple of links with you:
Publications:
Blogs:
We officially launched LongJump today morning at DEMOfall 2007. Here is the official press release on BusinessWire. The team has hard at worked making LongJump as unique and useful as possible - we hope you enjoy it. We’ll also keep you posted on the goings-on at the DemoFall show.
