Jigsaw 3rd Annual Rainmaker Event in Las Vegas

I recently attended the 3rd Annual Rainmakers Event in Las Vegas from June 19th to June 22nd.
Jigsaw is a crowd sourced contact information platform that makes it easy for sales people to find the relevant contact details of people in their industry.

Rainmakers are Jigsaws most trusted and engaged users.  As a thank you for our hard work Jigsaw, who is owned by Salesforce, throws one of the greatest parties I’ve ever attended.  

Well it’s not all fun and games; the primary focus is to get hard user data about experience design, usability, and functionality from these Rainmakers.  Since we, Rainmakers, are using and interacting with the platform on a weekly or even daily basis our experience and pain points are high on their radar and they want to know about it.

I think this is a great way to get your super users involved and to give their feedback; put them up in a fancy hotel, feed them, and give them plenty of opportunities to interactive with the product teams to build a user driven top notch platform.  I can seriously attest from experience that it is a true pleasure to work with these guys.  It makes me want to work even harder every day to help them attain quality information.    

During the event we listened to keynotes from the top Salesforce people, interacted in roundtable discussions, and participated in user feedback groups.  After the main conference events we were given fun scavenger hunt tasks to complete for a chance to win some very cool prizes; like mac book airs, iPads, and Apple TVs.  Jigsaw also reserved the Ghost Bar on top of the Palms featuring a live band and all the free alcohol you could drink just to show their appreciation.
 
Overall the event left me feeling great! I met some interesting people, made some great connections, and didn’t have to spend a dime.  If you’re a sales person prospecting without Jigsaw I would say you’re pretty much dead in the water.  Do yourself a favor and get on board with Jigsaw.  Jigsaw (Salesforce) is a great company and I highly recommend giving it a try and maybe someday I’ll see you at the 4th Annual Jigsaw Event in Liva Las Vegas!

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HTC EVO 4G View

HTC tablet: EVO View 4G (Photo credit: cizauskas)

This is a review of Sprint’s HTC EVO View tablet.  
The first thing I’d like to address is OS.  Loved this tablet when it was running on Gingerbread OS, however when I downloaded the update to Honeycomb there were a lot of features I was missing.  First off, the hard buttons at the bottom no longer worked.  I wondered why they jammed all the apps so close together not taking advantage of the full 7 inch screen as it was meant to be viewed.  It’s like a glorified cell phone that doesn’t make voice calls.
The other noteworthy flaw with View is the touch sensitivity when web browsing and was my ultimate pet-peeve is reviewing the device.  Especially viewing sites like Facebook or using Gmail it was extremely hard to get the thing to open the page in which I touched.  I also had a ton of trouble sending any kind of email from the Gmail and Hotmail sites.  As much as I hate to say it the HTC EVO View has nothing on the iPad2 when it comes to the touch screen sensitivity.  
I think this was a bad idea on Sprint’s part to have a mandatory OS update.  I believe that choice to the user should always be the most important thing.  Build it with your users requests in mind and you’ll never have to wonder if you made the right choice not mention your customers will love you for it.  On user experience design I have two ratings but will only count the second as after you update there is no way to revert.
User Experience Design: Gingerbread OS:  10 out of 10 Honeycomb OS: 2.0 out of 10

Next let’s talk about battery life; one full charge gets you through the whole day with a decent amount of usage.  If you don’t run live wallpapers and just use Wi-Fi for internet, this puppy can hold a decent charge throughout a 24 hour period.  Considering the tablet is pretty lightweight I applaud the durability and life of this battery.
Battery Life: 9.8 out of 10

A very important factor in all devices of this type is connection stability.  The HTC EVO View is probably going to be the front runner from the all other devices I have reviewed.  A very strong signal wherever you go in and around New York City.  The 4G signal is also very good, although it does eat up the battery quite a bit more.  Another important point is that if you are roaming with this device it does hinder the experience.  As I’ve seen from other types of devices that it will notify quite annoyingly every time it cannot find a signal.  You actually have to put it on Airplane mode to get rid of the nuisance.  
Connection Stability: 9.0 out of 10

I’d like to highlight processor speed as the HTC EVO view.  The single core, 1500 MHz, Snapdragon processor is quite amazingly fast and I was quite satisfied with it.  Also the 1024MB of RAM also helped in making this device as fast as possible.  It runs multiple apps with ease and I never need to force stop applications as a result of needing more free RAM.  There is absolutely nothing to complain about in regards to processor or application speeds.  In this case iPad2 has nothing on the HTC EVO View 4G.
Speed: 10 out of 10

Feature set of the HTC View is quite extensive.  One feature that doesn’t come with most tablets of this caliber is a stylus.  With Gingerbread you aren’t able to use it much but with the addition of Honeycomb it becomes much more of an editable feature function.  Just the ability to use it for writing notes was enough for me.  For me at least it’s much easier to handwrite notes on the fly instead of typing in out on a laptop.  The other advantage is portability.  The HTC View is extremely portable I was able to slip in my pants pocket or coat pocket without it being too heavy or bulky.  Trying to carry an iPad this way is just not ergonomically correct.

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