Future Agro Challenge (FAC) is the largest global competition that discovers innovative fundable food, agtech, and agriculture ventures from various corners of the globe.
https://fac.startuptablelands.org/
Startup Tablelands
Startup Tablelands is “Enabling Innovation & Entrepreneurship in rural & remote communities.” It is a volunteer organisation that needed a modern website that was easy and efficient for the drivers to update. It needed to be integrated with Mailchimp and Eventbrite.
The site uses https:// which makes it safer and gives a small advantage in google results.
It has various automations including:
- twitter follows automatically added to a google sheet.
- new members automatically added to a google sheet.
- automations within mailchimp.
- behind the scenes changes in the group’s google calendar events are sent as a slack reminder.
Why I love Airtable
I loved Airtable from the moment I saw it.
Clever software with a fantastic user interface, it is part spreadsheet, part database and all collaboration
It lives in the cloud (obviously) and is a beautifully elegant piece of software.
There are still bits about it that frustrate me, but usually they are on their roadmap.
The team are very responsive and react positively.
I was initially motivated to write this post after watching a video at https://angel.co/airtable by one of the co-founders, Andrew Ofstad
His interest is in sophisticated software with a simple user interface.
He says that a lot of modern software has simple functionality and simple user interface, for example, a push for pizza app – you push a button and then get a pizza.
Other software has sophisticated functionality but very complex UI, for instance, Photoshop – extremely powerful software but it takes you a long time to learn the interface to get the full benefit of the power of the software.
Before co-founding Airtable, Andrew had worked on Google Maps.
The video shows a fascinating story of how Google Maps progressed – we all get used to just how good Google Maps is now, and forget the iterations take him to get to today’s version.
One of Airtable’s design philosophies is based on a Google Map’s one, where they give themselves constraints limits and use just a few pieces of user interface.
With Google Maps this was very hard to do well – but we have all benefited from the work that has gone into it.
The Airtable team have excelled (pun intended) with this.
At Google Maps they thought “what if the map was the actual user interface”, they wanted people to interact with the map directly so the rule sort of became:
- Create Constraints
- Direct manipulation
- As little User Interface as possible
After he left Google Maps Andrew co-founded Airtable which he described as “basically a database if anyone can use”
Airtable has followed the “what if the map was the actual user interface” idea with “what if the spreadsheet was the actual user interface”.
The result is an easy, and spreadsheet-like way to build a powerful database.
In 2016 Airtable got $52 million in funding; Business Insider Australia said: “This Silicon Valley sleeper hit app just got $52 million to do for spreadsheets what Microsoft did for computers.”
They added: “The secret to Airtable’s success, according to its CEO, Howie Liu, is that it makes it easy to make a custom app. Every cell of an Airtable spreadsheet can store anything, including photos and lists. Adding an interface on top can turn it into a simple but powerful app – without coding.”
I use Airtable for a huge variety of tasks:
- Backend database for websites
- Collaborative, transparent database for volunteer groups
- To display other modern collaborative software
- As an easy external user interface for websites (Airtable is embedded in a website but updated via the Airtable interface).
- And many more
It also has a great many templates that anyone can use, the Airtable Universe to showcase great examples.
They state on their website that it “has built-in support for many popular apps, a robust API, and can be configured to work with over 450 websites and apps via Zapier.”
A very elegant piece of software run by clever people.
Loom videos
Loom is one of my favourite bits of software
It’s a really quick and easy way to make screencast videos
I use it:
- to show clients how software works and how to setup software
- to explain to software manufacturers my issues or problems
- to showcase website progress on my website
Its beauty lies in its simplicity; it can be used for longer videos but I find it most useful for short (less than 5 minute) videos.
I use it for all my new clients now as well as my collaborative software show them how to do something eg Slack, Evernote, Airtable etc
They’ve just brought in simple editing so you can trim your videos now
All in all, it is an elegant, very useful piece of software.
The beta version is experimenting with public folders. This is my public Boldacious Digital folder.
I do have many other Loom (some on Boldacious Digital Youtube channel) videos but I find it’s so easy and quick to use that I do very focused videos for a specific client about a specific issue with their website or collaborative cloud software.
Tame your computer Lunch & Learn
Boldacious ran a “Tame your computer Lunch & Learn” on 20th Feb 2018
- Train your computer to work the way you work — with the right software!
- Sync your computer with your brain.
- Let Seamus and his second brain, Evernote, show you how.
Modern software allows you to customise how you view your information — to a greater degree than ever before.
You can now use it in a way that suits the way your brain works.
Evernote is one of the best information management systems currently available.
It allows you to collect, store and find your information quickly and easily.
But most of all, it is incredibly customisable, so you can setup your own system for filing and finding all your personal and business information you want at your fingertips.
Seamus is an Evernote Certified Consultant.
He and his second brain (Evernote) will show you how to TAME YOUR COMPUTER!
The event was a great success – 13 people attended
Much interest in Evernote, with a couple of attendees signing up.
It was a well presented informative workshop and I think most if not all got something out of it