Vesess

For much of CurdBee’s lifespan, SSL secure billing has been a PRO feature. Then again, when CurdBee went live, the web was a very different place. Most webmail providers only secured their login process and nearly everyone still transmitted everything except passwords as plain text. We offered SSL secured billing to all CurdBee PRO users.

Those days are over.

Secure web transactions are no longer a feature of web applications. They are a must. So, starting this holiday season, CurdBee offers free TLS/SSL secured billing for all users*.

Head over to http://youraccount.curdbee.com and notice that it quickly becomes https://. Security shouldn’t be optional, right?

We’ve also made sure that your cookies are encrypted as well, and this means that nobody can use session hijacking techniques like those deployed Firesheep, the Firefox extension developed to demonstrate the problem. This means that existing PRO users will also have a safer SSL experience starting today.

So, why are we giving a former value-added feature for free? Because times change and business models should as well. CurdBee PRO has a ton of great features that make upgrading more than worthwhile, but we just felt that security should be a given, not a plus.

We hope you enjoy this new feature, and as always, we’d love to hear what you have to say!

*Please note that users who use a custom domain for their CurdBee account URL will not be able to access invoices via SSL at this time.

We’ve spent the past few weeks hacking away at our billing backend, and we’re finally ready to roll out a big update to all our current CurdBee PRO users. This change, which will go live on 1st December, 2010, will apply to both new and existing CurdBee PRO subscribers.

Don’t worry, it’s not a price hike! We just wanted to stick to our mantra and make the billing process even simpler.

When we originally launched CurdBee PRO, we thought the best option would be to charge for PRO subscription upfront while charging for modules in arrears, based on usage – basically charging at the end of the month instead at the beginning.

For example, if a user converted to CurdBee PRO from on 14th day of the current month and added the Estimates Module on the same day as well, he or she was charged $2.70 for PRO edition on 14th itself and charged $2.70 for the Module on the next billing date which is the 1st day of next month. Of course, on the same day, he or she was also charged $5.00 for PRO for the next month.

Confusing, right? We wanted to change that.

The real problem was when PRO subscriptions and/or Modules were cancelled and/or downgraded halfway through a billing cycle. Since modules are always post-charged, it confused people who ended up thinking that there were unauthorized charges on their credit card statements even after their downgrade and/or cancellation. We realised the process was broken.

So, we fixed it. Starting from 1st December 2010, we will always bill in advance for both PRO and all Modules you add to your account.

Going back to our example above, in this instance, the user will be charged a pro-rated amount of $5.40 on the 14th, the date he or she signed up. This charge will be for both CurdBee PRO and the Module he or she enabled. On the 1st of the following month, the user will be charged the fully monthly charge of $10, and this pattern will continue for as long as he or she has these features enabled.

The Billing Change and You
When this billing change goes into effect on the 1st of December, our monthly users will be charged both for the Modules they used in November, and for the Modules they are going to use in December.

Here’s a summary of what you will be billed for on the 1st.

1. CurdBee PRO Subscription – Charged In advance for December 2010
2. Modules – Charged in advance for December 2010
3. Modules – Charged in arrears for November 2010

We’ve tried to make it as simple as possible, but if you have any questions please do tweet or drop us a line.

Yup, our annual Black Friday deal is here. Happy Thanksgiving!

This week’s CurdBee Weekly features new CurdBee PRO user Elena of Findmyart. We also look at our newly launched data migration solution, CurdBee Bridge, and finally encourage you to answer the question of the hour which can be found at the bottom of this post.

User Spotlight – Elena C. Vieriu

An artist by birth and graphic designer by profession, Elena won her CurdBee PRO subscription in the recent AppStorm giveaway. Below, we talk to her about her work and how CurdBee helps make her life easier. Read on!

Hi Elena, and welcome to the CurdBee Weekly! You’re the first artist we’re featuring here, so why not tell our readers a little bit about how you got into professional graphic design?

Hello, I am a Romanian graphic designer currently living in Florida. I have been doing traditional art since a very young age but after graduating High-school and University both with a major in Decorative Arts/Textile Design I couldn’t quite cope with the “starving artist” concept. I was curious to know what I could do with my skills. I had traditional drawing and color theory knowledge but it didn’t seem to apply practically in the real world. Therefore I started looking around, trying to figure out what I could do to actually make a living. I found that I could still do the things I loved, based on my skills in graphic design.

Detail your work flow for us – where do your designs begin, and how do they make their way to becoming the finished pieces you have up in your portfolio?

For each design I try to know as much as possible about the project and what is expected from me. First I look for inspiration & images that relate to my subject and create a Mood Board. Depending on the type of project, there is usually some sketching involved. For logo design I tend to have a longer process since, to me, logo designs are by far the most complex projects. Once the sketches look promising, I import 2 or 3 of them in Illustrator and start the digital versions.

I also design book covers, a medium which I see as a very good way of combining art and design. I have a great passion for books, and I can see myself doing this for the rest of my life. I come from a family of intellectuals where art and reading were very important and greatly encouraged. Any type of book, digital or paper, needs a cover and it brings me lots of joy to design it.

You’re an artist who produces paintings that make their way into exhibitions, and also a designer who produces everything from logos to book jackets. How do you balance art as a passion and design as a business and has this tension in any way changed the way you look at both fields?

Art helped me succeed as a designer, as the same color and shape theory applies in the design field. The only difference is that we design for clients and not for ourselves. I paint and draw when I need to get away from everything but my time is invested a lot in my business and I’m constantly improving my skills. I’m currently trying to also learn web design. It’s a long journey but I find it exciting and it keeps me motivated. I would say that curiosity and the need to know got me where I am. We can never stop learning!

What is most challenging about being a freelance creative in today’s market?

It’s a tough market, but I believe there is room for each of us. The biggest challenge is trying to make people understand why design costs as much as it does and why we are not working for free. Many do not understand the time and effort that goes into each piece. I believe in helping charities but I do not support free work without reason.

More of Elena’s art can be found in her online portfolio.

Tell us a bit about your toolset, including both online and offline software that you use everyday.

I try not to use too many applications but the ones I rely on for keeping my business running are:

• CurdBee for invoicing, very easy to use and professional.
• For keeping track of expenses and earnings, I use Outright.
• For time tracking I use Paymo.
• Design software: Photoshop, Illustartor, InDesign
• Design tools: Wacom Intous 4, sketching pad, colored pencils, watercolor, etc.

You recently won a CurdBee PRO subscription in the AppStorm giveaway. Which of the new features at your disposal are you enjoying the most right now?

Thank you for the CurdBee pro subscription! I love the way it looks, with no branding and the fact that I can accept payment methods other than Paylpal. The biggest asset to me is that CurdBee is easy to use – no fuss, no trying to figure out anything, it’s straight forward. The estimates feature is pretty valuable too.

If you could change one thing about CurdBee, what would it be?

A feature for creating design proposals would be something I would use for sure.

What is your professional analysis of CurdBee’s visual presence? What areas do you think we can improve in?

I think it’s fun, I loved that from the very beginning. I loved the bee character and the playfulness of it, I wouldn’t change a thing.

Thank you for having me!

Bee Supported – Using CurdBee Bridge to Import Data from Freshbooks and Blinksale

Yesterday, we launched CurdBee Bridge, a tool that makes data migration from Freshbooks and Blinksale super easy. While you can head over to CurdBee Bridge and get started right away, this neat little support article will help a lot if you get stuck along the way.

Buzz Back

We’re back again this week with the same question as before –

We got some replies last week, but if you haven’t had your say yet, we definitely want to hear your opinion as well! All our users are important to us, so if you want to get in touch and tell us what you think, please leave a comment below or tweet and mail us.

At CurdBee, we’ve always been concerned with openness, and a big part of that is making sure that your data is accessible to you at all times. From our import and export via CSV feature to our fully documented API, we’ve tried to make getting your data in and out of CurdBee as easy as possible.

Of course, while CurdBee did support CSV import from its early days, this was often a hassle and required a lot of post-import formatting, a task that became problematic if you had more than a few dozen records. Thus, with this in mind, and also remembering that a lot of our new users these days switch over to us from other popular online invoicing services like Freshbooks and Blinksale, we thought it was time to make data migration super easy, and with CurdBee Bridge, it is.

A much requested feature, CurdBee Bridge connects your CurdBee account with other online invoicing platforms via their native APIs and allows you to import your clients, items and invoices in a few simple clicks. Although you can currently only import data from Freshbooks and Blinksale, rest assured that we’ll be adding more platforms based on demand.

To make your life ever easier, we have compiled a support article covering all the steps involved in the process. Of course, if you still need any help in getting started with CurdBee Bridge, just visit our support section. A lot of you asked for this feature and we sincerely hope that a lot of you are happy right now!

In the spirit of constant evolution and always on awesomeness, we’re here with another CurdBee update. Look below to see the major (and minor) enhancements that the Bee just received.

Partial Payments

Finance is a complicated field, and while we’re all about making things simple, sometimes a little flexibility can go a long way. The inclusion of the partial payments option means that CurdBee PRO users can now give their clients the option of paying the bills a little (or a lot) a time. Now, whenever you’re creating an invoice, just check Allow partial payments to allow the recipient to pay the due amount in instalments of their choice.

Before you ask, yes, this works for Recurring Profiles as well – enable the feature and all new invoices created via the profile will automatically open with the partial payment option already enabled.

In typical CurdBee style, we’ve gone ahead and done some streamlining as well. The invoice and payment screens are now separate on the client’s end, and the user must click the Make a Payment button to proceed to the new payment page. There, clients can choose their payment gateway of choice, enter an amount they’d like to pay, and get on with it!

We think this new setup offers a more intuitive approach and we hope that our users and their clients will have a better CurdBee experience as a result of it.

Of course, this new functionality necessitates a new invoice state as well – Partially Paid, and you’ll begin to see the half light green / half dark green circle next to invoices as clients begin to take advantage of the option to pay in instalments. Ultimately, we hope that this new feature will make getting paid for what you do just that much easier. If you’d like to get to know this functionality a little better, go ahead and take a look at the related CurdBee support article.

Authorize.net Module Enhancements

As of this update, the full billing address of each client is captured when he or she makes a payment using the Authorize.net gateway. You can use the captured address to enforce AVS checks on the payments, and this may be particularly useful if you are worried about fraudulent payments.

Invoice Summary in Email Templates

A minor but useful feature, the new {{invoice-summary}} and {{estimate-summary}} variables are available to use on email templates, and means that your email notifications can now be that much more descriptive.

Well, that’s about all for this update. Like the new features? Have a complaint? We’d love to hear from you either way so mail and tweet at us if you’ve got anything to say. Till next time, happy invoicing!

One of the most common pitfalls for startups is to focus solely on technical superiority of their solution forgetting the requirements and changing nature of the customer. The following case study of Iridium confirms exactly this point with a mammoth price tag to the lose.

At $5.2-billion Iridium was one of the largest, boldest and audacious startup bets ever made. Conceived in 1987 by Motorola and spun out in 1990 as a separate company, Iridium planned to build a mobile telephone system that would work anywhere on earth.

But nine months after the first call was made in 1998, Iridium was in Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It crashed back down to earth as one of the largest startup failures on record. What went wrong?

No Business Plan Survives First Contact With A Customer – The 5.2 billion dollar mistake.

The Weekly took a break last week because we were busy with the Partial Payments Update, but we’re back with some cool stuff for you to read. In this issue, Caribbean photographer and CurdBee user Gladstone Taylor says hello and then we jump right into what people think about our newest update. Finally we wrap it up with an open question to our users. Go on then, jump right in!

User Spotlight – Gladstone Taylor

One of the joys of running a service for freelancers and small businesses is meeting cool new people all the time. While in our two previous weekly interviews we spoke to a designer and a marketeer, this time we’re going to meet someone a little different. A photographer who specialises in weddings, events and people, Gladstone Taylor hails from sunny Jamaica and among other things also uses CurdBee. Below, we get to know him and ask him why he chose to join the hive.

Introduce yourself to our readers. Who is Gladstone Taylor? What makes him tick?
I’m a 24 year old creative that recently moved from a technical field of web application programming, my previous occupation of four years. I’ve been practising photography on an amatuer level for as long as I can remember and got really serious about it within the last 3 years. Currently I freelance for a local newspaper company in Jamaica as well as provide photography services for my own client base.

How did you hear about CurdBee, and as a photographer, why did you choose it over the other invoicing options available to you?
I heard about Curdbee from another creative and friend Monique Powell, the brain behind Roaming Donkey. I was at the time using Blinksale and testing Freshbooks. On introduction to CurdBee, I switched instantly because of the simplicity of the interface and just how intuitive it was. Freshbooks was overkill for my needs and Blinksale just didn’t hit the spot like CurdBee did for me.

Why do you use CurdBee Standard Edition instead of PRO? Are there no advanced features you’d find useful, or are you just waiting for the right time to upgrade?
I use Curdbee standard because paypal isn’t a payment option when you choose to upgrade. However I have tried the pro edition and did love it. I enjoyed the ability to create estimates the most instead of actually making an invoice and then the client decides to cancel or shop around.

What other desktop and web applications do you use on a regular basis?
Web apps: the Google docs suite

Desktop applications: Photoshop, Lightroom, Google Chrome and Seesmic for twitter

Bee Supported

Our latest update brings in the option to let clients pay up in instalments, and here’s how you can take advantage of the feature.

1. Create a new invoice. If you’re new to CurdBee, you may want to check out this guide on creating and sending your first invoice.
2. As usual, fill the relevant fields you would require when creating an invoice and scroll down to Payment Options where you may need to check the check box next to Allow partial payments to allow this option for the out going invoice.

[Read Article]

Hive Mind

In Hive Mind this week we’re going to boast a little about our release early, release often philosophy and the positive user feedback it often generates. Here’s what people had to say about our recent Partial Payments Update.

@curdbee Thank you for listening to your users and CONSISTENTLY making your products better and simpler. You continue to impress!

Quick props to another favorite web app: @curdbee – nice work guys.

Whoo Hoo ! Estimates and partial payments with www.curdbee.com @curdbee online invoicing…

@curdbee I love you!

That’s not all, though – our giveaway on AppStorm got some people excited as well. Congratulations to Melissa, Elena and Jackstin on winning a $150 CurdBee bundle featuring a year’s subscription of PRO and the Authorize.net and Estimates Modules.

Melissa: A free Pro Curdbee account would be fantastic!

I’ve been eyeing it for a bit, I love the features at such a low cost. The domain support is fantastic, and I just love the overall feel of Curdbee.

I’m starting up a small web hosting company and would need all the help I could get as a two-team start up. I think having a Pro Curdbee account tied to my domain would be very professional, and it would keep down a bit of the start up cost. A little goes a long way!

Nothing else puts a smile on our face like seeing a new startup take on the world, and we’re glad that CurdBee will be helping yet another SME get off the ground. Good luck, Host My Heart. Hope you guys have a cracker first month!

Finally, user Wes is hungry for stats and wants to know if we’ll introduce a feature that allows him to “see what items are past due (red flags), how much is past due, and filter income by month, quarter, and year.”

We’re stoked to say that yes, this feature is currently in development, and when released will most probably be available to all users. In typical CurdBee style though, we’ll also release a Module which offers more advanced features, including cool stuff like graphs. Excited about the Statistics Module? Let us know and keep reading the weekly for more updates on it.

Buzz Back

We debut our community feedback feature this week by asking a very important question –

So, why are we asking? We’re putting together something sweet for Thanksgiving, and we want to make sure that we give as many of you as possible exactly what you want. To that end, also please feel free to leave your thoughts below or tweet and mail us.

Image thanks to Rethinking the Mobile Web by Bryan Rieger.

Apps and the web have always had an uneasy relationship. While the application remained supreme for years, the Web 2.0 pundits promised us a future where the web would rise and take its place and users would only need a browser to do everything.

We’re still waiting for that day, and not only have applications remained, but they are now more popular than ever, and not just on the desktop. What happened?

The smartphone happened.

iOS or Android, Angry Birds or the NY Times, pick your poison, because they’re here to stay. Billions of downloads, hundreds of thousands of native apps and thousands of ways to make fart noises. Our world has changed forever. With the personal computer now sharing space with many other devices, we’re constantly being asked to look beyond the browser and focus on developing applications for those platforms.

But we won’t (and yet we will), and here’s why.

Inclusiveness

While there certainly are applications that cannot easily be duplicated in the browser of today because of platform (3D games) and connectivity (offline reading) limitations, there area a lot of native apps that are actually just front ends for websites. In fact, most websites these days have an iOS app, an Android app, and if you’re lucky, a Blackberry app.

That’s great (if you’re happy developing for less than 10% of mobile users)!

Nokia, the manufacturer with the largest worldwide market share as of Q1 2010 runs Symbian on its high end phones, and Symbian is by most accounts a dead or dying platform in terms of native apps. But people buy these phones, and people use them. We could develop native apps for iOS, Android, Blackberry, Symbian and Windows Mobile, but that would still leave out non-smartphone users. So we’d need to put together a mobile site as well. But why as well? Why not just go with a mobile site?

Of course, not having smartphone specific apps means social media experts will like us less and we wont be able to provide brand ambassadors with compelling conversation hooks to enter into communities and fuel advocacy. We will however be able to focus heavily on creating a compelling mobile experience for all our users.

We’re going to strip the Bee down to its basics and then wrap it in different paper for different platforms, browsers and screen resolutions. We want to make sure that your favourite online invoicing experience is maintained across all your platforms. We’re going to use lots of jquery goodness, plenty of great UX design and yes, we’ll be generous with the sprinkles too. It’s going to be totally yummy.

Simplicity

Developing a gateway that caters to every major mobile OS and browser combination out there isn’t going to be easy, but there’s going to be one major advantage when we’re done.

It’ll be the same web application.

When we push an update you’ll get it with your next refresh. When we fix a bug it’ll disappear from everyone’s install at the same time. When we send you OMG plz Upgrade to PRO now thx! notifications, everyone will see them simultaneously.

At CurdBee we’ve always prided ourselves on evolving constantly and being responsive to our users’ needs, and having a mobile version that is just a variant of our real web app makes it a lot easier to make things happen fast. We’ve followed this model all along with CurdBee and there’s no reason we’d give it up during the development of CurdBee Mobile.

Finally, we don’t like the concept of app stores. Our development process is entirely user-centred and in the end what we want to do is spend less time making sure we pass app store guidelines and spend more time developing software that users love to use.

Ultimately, all this also means that the entire process is simpler for us and will allow us to focus on what we like doing best – making CurdBee more awesome.

Openness

The web is cool because not only can you find quick fixes for work problems you’re stuck with, but you can also spend an entire morning reading Twitter and looking at Lolcats. Indeed, choice is the essence of the web and having a solid mobile gateway to CurdBee means that you have choice, and then some.

No app specific bugs or crashes, and many, many options to access your content with. Whether you use a Webkit browser or prefer Opera’s outsourced rendering, whether you’re invoicing from your iPad or logging in from your old Nokia handset, the CurdBee experience will remain (more or less) the same.

When it comes to accessing your account, we want you to have as many options as possible.

So in essence, yes we are developing applications for iOS and Android and Blackberry and Symbian and Windows Mobile. We’re just developing web applications for those platforms (it turns out we’re in good company), and we’re developing them for everyone. We are a web app, we’re going to be a mobile web app soon and yes, we’re pretty excited.

What CurdBee Mobile will look like on your friendly neighbourhood iPhone.

Of course, with our API, we’re sure that there will soon be platform specific solutions that turn up, and as always, we will always help and encourage users who want to get more out of CurdBee. As for us though, it’s the wonderful, wonderful web all the way. Stay tuned for more CurdBee Mobile news in the weeks ahead. Until then, tweet, mail or leave a comment below and let us know what you think!

Today, being Vap Poya day, is a public holiday in Sri Lanka and we’re busy rolling out yet another CurdBee update as usual. In this iteration of the Bee, we have introduced a new activity block to all invoices and estimates, and several other enhancements have been made as well. Here is a brief run down of the changes.

1. Over the past few months, several users asked about the possibility of finding out when exactly some invoice was sent to or viewed by the client. Though we had a recent activity feed on the dashboard, that was not adequate to track a single invoice in detail (especially if you’re a heavy CurdBee user). So now, we have introduced a history block in every invoice. Also, in a move that we hope will increase the usability of the process, each activity now will be tracked with the date and time relative to your business’ local timezone. You can set the Time Zone and a Time Format for your business under Settings > System Preferences.
   
2. Also, with the addition of several new fields, we thought that System Preferences was long overdue for a facelift. If you compare the new screen to its predecessor, you will notice that it’s now less cluttered.
   Our old System Preferences interface…Recently saw a (UX) stylist.
3. Let’s face it – printing invoices is something a lot of us do. Yes, even those of us who claim to run a paperless office. Thus, when you kept asking for printing options, we just felt we had to deliver. With this update you can now set the paper size in CurdBee, and have your clients print your invoices and estimates automagically on the size of paper you specify – A4, US legal, or US letter sized.
4. The Invoice and Estimate Default Notes fields have been removed from Settings -> System Preferences. Instead, setting default notes for invoices and estimates can now be done from the the Create New Invoice/Estimate sections itself. We find this more intuitive, and hope you do too!

Well, that’s the update for you. We had a lot of fun bringing you these minor features, and as always we can’t wait to hear what think of them. Tweet at us or mail us if you’ve got anything to say. Happy invoicing!