Intuit Partner Platform team blog

Universal Mind Wins Intuit WorkPlace Application Contest

At the Adobe MAX08 conference we were very excited to announce Universal Mind’s “Customer Explorer” application as the winner of the Intuit WorkPlace contest. We think this app is pretty amazing – it had to be to win the contest as it beat some stiff competition with a total of ten apps built on the Intuit Partner Platform making it to the final contest review round.

A Big Thanks

A huge thanks to all the developers who entered the app contest. The process was a challenging one for them – they were developing on Beta bits, services and moving targets as our team was preparing the platform to go live. We really appreciate their patience and perseverance and all of the quality feedback they provided throughout. We hope to bring you more examples of their work in the coming weeks.

And also a big thanks to the contest judges: Oliver Marks (writes the Collaboration blog at ZDNet), Mario Morejon (Senior Technical Editor at everythingchannel.com) and Ryan Stewart (Platform Evangelist at Adobe) who took the time to review the ten finalist applications and talk with the developers as part of the judging process.

Now…About the Winning App

Customer Explorer allows customers to quickly see geographic and temporal trends in user's QuickBooks customer data. Users can view interactive heat maps of their balances and filter by time, job status or job type and drill down to specific customer and job details. Street and satellite imagery in the application is provided by MapQuest. Users can also view thematic demographic data provided by Placebase's Pushpin data and mapping service, which includes median household income, in context with their own customer data.

The prize included $5,000 cash, a place at the Intuit booth at MAX08 to demo the winning application (plus covering travel expenses) and an opportunity to take part in the Intuit Partner Platform speaker session at the conference. It also got some deserved attention by press and media (see Slick data-visualizer launched for QuickBooks users).

A preview release of Customer Explorer is available for free on Intuit WorkPlace so you can play with it right now.

Meet One of the Winning Devs

Today we took the opportunity to talk to Doug McCune, Principle Software Engineer at Universal Mind - one of the developers involved in creating the contest-winning Customer Explorer application. At yesterday’s speaking session he mentioned a few things I thought would be cool to share you, so video’d our conversation:

Congratulations to Tom Link (Universal Mind’s CTO), Doug McCune (in this video) and the rest of the Universal Mind team!!

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Update: see a video of the app in action at Universal Mind's blog.

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The Intuit Developer Relations Team

Tour de Flex app includes Intuit Partner Platform code sample

Adobe's Tour de Flex is a desktop application (running on AIR) for exploring Flex capabilities and resources, including the core Flex components, Adobe AIR and data integration, as well as a variety of third-party components, effects, skins, and more.

The app includes over 200 runnable samples, each with source code, links to documentation, and includes Intuit Partner Platform code samples.

The code sample used is from the same sample app James Ward (Adobe Technical Evangelist for Flex) put together and blogged earlier in the week - thanks James!

(via Robert McDonald)

Intuit, Flex RIAs and the Cloud

James Ward, Technical Evangelist for Flex at Adobe, has recorded a couple of intro videos for developers new to the Intuit Partner Platform (IPP). In introducing the videos, James wrote:

“The future of software is services in the cloud and rich Internet application on the client. Adobe has pulled back the curtain and given us a glimpse of this with new products like photoshop.com and acrobat.com. Intuit is beginning to do the same with QuickBase and Flex through the Intuit Partner Platform. For developers this means that applications can be built with Flex and live in the cloud. These applications can even integrate with QuickBooks. Intuit has built an Eclipse plugin that works with Flex Builder. This makes it extremely easy to build cloud-based Flex applications”

Check out the videos:

Part 1: Creating a Workplace application with Adobe AIR and Flex

Part 2: Creating a Workplace widget for the browser and the desktop

Intuit Partner Platform – Open for Business

Phew! After about a year of pretty heavy strategy and really heavy engineering work, I’m proud to announce the Intuit Partner Platform (IPP) is open for business.   What is IPP you ask?  Well, it’s the fastest and easiest way for you to build a SaaS business.  Here’s the way I think about building a SaaS business –

Three simple steps to success:

1) Get a great idea – we can share some of our research on what Small businesses are telling us they need – but your entrepreneurial inspiration is critical

2) Build your great idea on a solid platform – IPP gives you robust hosting, a database with prebuilt  functionality, a UI layer with Adobe Flex, integration with QuickBooks data, integrated billing service, etc. etc.

3) Get lots and lots of customers – Even the best application, built on the best technology, won’t get you very far if no one comes to buy it.  What makes the Intuit Partner Platform truly unique is access to our channels of Small Business customers. We have about 25 million employees within our 4 million QuickBooks customers alone – and we want to drive them to buy your apps. 

In listening to our customers, they are demanding applications that solve their business needs – “right for me” applications.  We can’t build all of those ourselves – but we can build a great platform and a great channel for you to build lots of great apps that solve for our customer’s needs.  So what you see today is V1 – open for business. There is a lot more to come, but we’re ready for prime-time now.  We have a few developers that we’ve been working with for a while that have apps in the marketplace – try them out – play around with the materials we have on the website – download the SDK - then get your idea ready and give us a call.   We’ll help you refine that idea and design a killer app for the small business world – We’re open for business and ready to drive users to your app – give us an app and let’s get started!

Alex Chriss

Business Leader, Intuit Partner Platform

 

Architecture of RIA from JAOO

Ryan Stewart helped us find this great blog post and presentation by Josh Holmes and Jim Ward at JAOO on the topic of architecting rich Internet applications covering both the design architecture as well as the application architecture. Well worth a read - the slides are below if you want the quick version...Architecture of RIA from JAOO

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: josh holmes;james)

Join the Intuit Partner Platform team at Adobe MAX

This year, the Intuit Partner Platform is delighted to be a Gold sponsor of Adobe MAX, San Francisco (Nov 16-19).

We'll be at booth 313...so join us there to learn more about the Intuit Partner Platform (IPP), see what other developers have built and to meet with the platform team.

In addition, we've got two sessions lined up, plus we're sponsoring the pre-event bash. See you there!

Sessions

1. Birds Of a Feather Session: Monday, November 17^th, 8:30 PM

Topic: Making Money with Adobe Flex - Building a business, not just an application. Come to this session to share ideas and best practices for the monetization of your skills (...er, that means make money) as a Flex developer. Learn how to turn your great idea(s) into a great business.

Host/Moderator: Peter Vogel and Alex Barnett of the Intuit Partner Platform team is joined by Tom Link, CTO of Universal Mind.

2. Introduction to Intuit Partner Platform (60 mins), Tuesday, November 18th, 3:00 PM

Summary: Learn how to build rich Internet applications on the Intuit Partner Platform using Adobe FLEX and QuickBooks data.  Watch live as an Intuit Partner Platform architect creates a Rich Internet Application in real time.  Learn about this huge business opportunity for developers and meet SaaS businesses that have already adopted this platform including the winner of our RIA contest!

Speaker: Peter Vogel, Group Manager, Developer Tools Architect, IDN and Intuit Partner Platform.

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Intuit is also sponsoring the Invitation Only Pre-Event cocktail reception at Jillian’s.

Date:  Sunday, November 16th

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See you all there!

The Intuit Partner Platform team