There are also two recent blog posts we've made which might be helpful. The first is about the funding, and second is our 2013 Year-In-Review, which highlights what we've been working on.
That's very true. But sometimes, it works well to post on startup-centric sites, if you have a product aimed at startups. I just posted my new app here on HN to get some feedback - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7251627
I was the tech guy so I would import the CSV files to MailChimp.
If it came to actually edit records, our secretary-type would open up Excel, edit, then send it to me as a CSV. I'd then just re-upload and tell MailChimp to update changed records, and ignore duplicates.
If you made the site show that it's Excel editing in real-time that would be more convincing and less intimidating to the Secretary-type.
You have struck the nail on the head. I have wished for this exact thing - a better grid-oriented text capturing device - so many times. By inverting the focus, you have helped me look at it in a way that might just be the thing I needed. Thank you so much.
Drop me a line at the email in my profile... I'm really interested in how you go about this. I've thought about exactly this product, but stuck on the "If you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" effect, which is why businesses use horrid Excel for this duty in the first place. How do you get them to buy in? Your multi-platform approach might be the answer.
ps: Have you used any of 37signals' products? Look to them for UI simplicity. I think there's a real danger in adding too much functionality here.
At least for me, what would be really valuable is the ability to easily add data from WA to a cell. For example you could type "population of Russia" into a cell, and it would grab the integer from WA for the math. Really a low-latency, tabular form of Wolfram Alpha would be the spreadsheet of tomorrow alone.
I've come across several data format conversion issues, in my personal use cases and of others. Would a reliable format conversion app be of value on its own?
My company uses the French version of MS Office and after upgrading, I can't quite get it to generate CSV files in the right encoding needed to work with the company's proprietary software. So I need to go through the hassle of manually generating the CSV files in the correct format. An easy way to work with different encodings and formats will be especially useful for collaboration.
One thing that would be simple and useful is the ability to generate or convert between different CSV file formats. For example, French CSV files use semicolons instead of commas to separate values, and use commas as decimal points.
Yeah, probably. A closely related problem is cleaning up data. Something that can detect unclosed quotes and/or unclosed HTML tags. Something that can figure out when a word should be capitalized or lowercase.
Here's another problem: how do you make a field in a CSV that when you convert the document into JSON, the field becomes an array?
Thanks lazloth. I've already read all of those threads and taken those measures to protect my account in the future, almost all of which I was already doing before my account got hacked.
I only turned to HN because none of this helped me track down the cause of the breach in the first place. But I appreciate your help.
As I noted in my post, I have already looked at the login activity list, and there's nothing other than my own IPs and sessions.
I have a similar domain via google apps setting that you have. I just don't understand how they got hold of my contacts, and don't know what I can do to prevent them from spamming my contacts again.
You will probably be amazed at the number of web sites and phone apps that have had access to your contact list - just to get something done. Easy to forget when and when.
Could even be that it was someone you know who has your email address who gave their contact list to this spammer (directly or indirectly). The bad guys could then have simply picked one email address as the from and got to it spamming the rest.
