b2bFront Feature Rundown

Ok, so for anyone who doesn’t know what b2bFront is, here’s a quick synopsis:

b2bFront is a Storefront Management System for wholesale businesses.

Designed as a step-in solution with speed of setup/migration in mind; b2bFront provides the horsepower and precision seen in traditional desktop stock management systems yet maintains the simplicity and ease of use that users expect from modern web-based applications.

Written entirely by myself (Damien Walsh), b2bFront comprises a powerful backend inventory system, ordering platform (frontend) and CRM features like Live Chat, Questions, SMS, Bulk Mailing, Order-bound thread based discussions and more.

Today, as my first blog post since the start of the year (sorry!) I’d like to just rattle off a few features of b2bFront.  At some point I hope to create a dedicated site (b2bfront.com) to sell the software; but this will have to do for now…

Inventory

The core of b2bFront. The staff inventory view provides instant “Spreadsheet” editing of prices, stock values and powerful bulk modification and exporting features. Take control of your inventory!

Custom Filters

Easily create powerful custom views using the Filter Editor. Gain an insight into your inventory breakdown without complex functions and data manipulation.

Attributes

Provide dealers and end users with more information about your products while building a more comprehensive interlinked portfolio of products.

Spreadsheet-style editing as standard speeds up the process ten-fold.

Statistics Counting

b2bFront contains an easy to use, understandable statistics counting system. Customisable graph views and raw data overviews eliminate spreadsheet work and keep you informed. For real-time information, CCTV, Questions and Live Chat keep you in-tune with how dealers are interacting with your products.

Questions

Help your dealers get issues solved fast while you build a comprehensive product-linked knowledge base, saving staff hours and effort.

Live Chat & CRM

Interact with your dealers on a new level. Solve their issues in real time and expedite their ordering process. Canned responses, quick Item-level linking and hotkeys can help you improve response times. CRM has never been so easy.

Outlets

Get an insight into how your dealers are selling your products. Get notified about price changes and help protect your brand.

Staff Profiles

Fine-grain control over how your staff work on the system. Avoid data compromisations and losses by keeping roles well-defined and structured, but still agile and adaptable in future.

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So there’s a rundown of some of the features I’ve been working over the past year or so.  If anyone is interested or has any more questions please do feel free to comment.

On a blog-related note, I’ll be trying to post more regularly now, especially once the dreaded exams are over with.

Cheers.

 

2011 Round-Up

It’s been another year, I’ve procrastinated, explored, learned, worked, dossed about and more.  But mostly procrastinated and dossed about.

I did the Imagine Cup ,that was probably the highlight of my year really, travelling to the states was incredible and I can’t wait to go back some day.  I still haven’t done most of the things I posted in the list back at the start of this blog.

I’m quitting drinking alcohol for new years, and as a sort of side-resolution I’ll be making a serious effort to improve my physical fitness from now on too.  (I don’t really have any problem specifically, I just feel I’d be happier without alcohol and with a bit more muscle!).

Well, I hope everyone has a prosperous and happy new year!

- Damo

The duplicity of iParadigms LLC and TurnItIn

I am a careful writer.  Not in the sense that my writing isn’t scattered with spelling errors and misuse of punctuation; but in the sense that I am careful about where I source my facts and how I attribute them.  I have never been on the wrong end of the plagiarism stick, never accidentally, and certainly never deliberately – if I can’t do the work, I’ll chew on the failure that comes with that rather than be branded a charlatan and a cheat, and I certainly won’t get caught up in the victimisation of the careless.

TurnItIn is a system used by schools, colleges and other academic establishments to check for plagiarism and originality in works.  It works by collecting up a huge database off the web of documents, essays, articles and the like, then comparing submitted documents with what it has on file.  If there are blocks of text that are similar, either identical word for word or closely paraphrased, the submission is flagged as unoriginal and questions are no doubt asked of the author.  When I read about TurnItIn, I thought “what an excellent idea” – finally, using the massive computing power and storage resources we have available in the Internet age, we can have a compendium of works that can be used to evaluate the originality supposed of new creations.

I then learned that TurnItIn has another feature – it actually collects work that have been submitted – so every student that writes an essay for a university that uses the service has their work put permanently on file for comparison with future submissions by other students.  I began to consider the legal implications of this behaviour.  Effectively, TurnItIn violates the copyrights owned by every student that has ever submitted a piece of work via their University or college.  Just like a teenager that has amassed a huge quantity of stolen digital music from around the Internet, TurnItIn has collected a truly colossal volume of works.  They aren’t just holding these works for themselves either – they are essentially monetising this collection by making it a cornerstone of their service – without this collected data, TurnItIn wouldn’t have such a strong selling point in this market.

Continue reading

Lest We Forget

~       11 / 11 / 2011      ~

Guardian.co.uk goes Facebook Open Graph mad

Since Facebook introduced Open Graph, I have noticed that a number of websites have started to adopt it to plug their articles and other content to consumers on Facebook.

To save you scrolling to the bottom:
You can download my Anti-Guardian FB App User Script for this here.
It works with TamperMonkey in Chrome and GreaseMonkey in Firefox.

If you’re not familiar with what exactly Open Graph is – here’s a brief explanation.  Imagine the original Facebook “Like” thing  as a graph – lots of you could construct a huge diagram with the vertices representing the people and things that can be “liked” and the edges representing the actual “likings” that people have set.  Previously there was only that type of edge – a like. Now with Open Graph, there’s as many as the Facebook application developers like – read, browsed, viewed, listened to, downloaded… It’s a nice idea.

Setting up Open Graph for an Application

Setting up Open Graph for an Application

This is all well and good, and it makes Facebook a little more interesting, as well as making Facebook applications a little more tied-in to websites and their interactions with Facebook users.  But… and it’s a big but…

The Guardian (and other news sources) have completely overdone it.  They have set up system whereby a person reads an article via their Facebook app, and their timeline gets spammed with this fact.  Other people see this on their timeline, click it and are redirected to the Guardian Facebook app (despite the <a /> element having the title attribute being set to the http://www.guardian.co.uk/… address that you would expect to be sent to).  Users then need to sell their soul to the Guardian Facebook application to read the article, or go trawling off to Google to try and find the same article on the real guardian.co.uk website.  Pain.. or.. what?

Open Graph: The Guardian takes it one step too far

Open Graph: The Guardian takes it one step too far

It also has a particularly nasty side effect of showing everyone what articles you are reading – and I think that’s a bit of an invasion of privacy.

So – I have slapped together a quick solution using Greasemonkey for Firefox, jQuery and some nice integration stub .js for using jQuery in GM user scripts from this guy.

Here’s another chance to download my User Script for this here.
It works with TamperMonkey in Chrome and GreaseMonkey in Firefox.

Sort it out Guardian – seriously – you’re one of the better newspapers in the UK and this kind of forced social media integration and privacy invasion hurts my head.