To give you a little background, our Android developer, Nick Bradbury, drew a fairly popular comic strip during college called Dexter. Unfortunately he had to eventually give up this pursuit (software development is much better at paying the bills!), but we can look back on his old comics as he posts them to the Dexter board on Glassboard.

Folks are more than welcome to join the board. In fact, it’s a good way to use Glassboard if you’re not very familiar with it and you don’t yet have others you know using the app. The invite code is ‘dexter’.

The perfect storm has led me to spending way too much time (and money) on reading comic books lately. First, my nearly-six-year-old daughter has graduated from Owly to X-Men (she likes Storm the best) and I wouldn’t be a good father if I didn’t know if the Phoenix was presently alive or dead. Second, Comixology on the iPad has made purchasing comic books instant gratification without taking up any shared bookshelf space.

I’ve found a group of friendly comic book reading grown-ups locally. Rather than clutter up our Twitter feed with discussion of the Marvel Universe, I set up a Glassboard to share what we are reading and enjoying (or not enjoying). It allows us to post reviews, comment easily, bookmark ideas of books to read later, and even attach excerpts of the comics to a post. Most importantly, I can read, post, and comment all without leaving the iPad.

When I get a new comic, I’ll start reading it in Comixology. If I find a particular page I like, I’ll take a screenshot of it by pressing the “On/Off” Switch and the Home button on my iPad simultaneously. Then I continue reading. After I’m done, I open the Photos app and sort through the screenshots for the best one to post.

For example, reading through the classic X-Men “Mutant Massacre” storyline, I find particularly anachronistic page of Rogue visiting Bloomingdales (click for big):

I don’t want to share the whole page, just the top left panel, so I crop it and hit save.

I launch Glassboard from the convenient “Save to Home Screen” icon and type up a quick review.

Even though this is not a native iPad application, the image attachment functionality works just like you’d expect it to. Tap on the camera icon, pick your photo from the iPad’s Photo Library, hit send, and you are done.

It even looks great on the Glassboard app for iPhone.

Adding this image makes all the difference. Often a single panel chosen by a friend is all the “review” you need to decide if a comic is worth reading.

If I had to go to a different device to share my thoughts, I’d never do it. The combination of Comixology and Glassboard on my iPad allows me share my thoughts before I forget to, directly to the people who would enjoy reading them the most.

Now we’re seeing more educators making it clear that Glassboard is a great tool for teaching. This history blog touts Glassboard as useful for small groups of students to have discussions and study together. This teacher is using Glassboard as a means to gather feedback from students for an assignment.

There are a few reasons, as I see it, that are driving this education-focused adoption of Glassboard:

1. The privacy aspect.

Glassboard in inherently private and always has been. For educators and parents, this is a critical feature for keeping students safe and focused.

2. Glassboard isn’t just another social network, it’s a resource so teams can get things done more effectively.

Can you think of many students who would want to friend their teachers on Facebook? I sure can’t. Since Glassboard is so easy to sign up for, teachers can get their students on to a class board in a matter of minutes and the discussion can continue to take place outside of the other networks that everyone uses for social pursuits.

3. Educators, as chairperson of a board, are empowered as moderators.

Since a chairperson can control who has access to the board, as well as the ability to delete posts made by others, Glassboard is easily moderated by the teacher. Also, once a class or a project is complete they can choose to delete a board and start over fresh with a new crop of students.

4. Technology is infiltrating the classroom!

More and more, students are gaining access to iPads and other technologies to enhance learning. As this approach grows in popularity, so too will apps that enable learning. With Glassboard as a discussion tool in the classroom, students are better able to communicate with educators and their peers.

Our Android developer, Nick Bradbury, shares his thoughts on this trend:
“It’s definitely been a boost for both my kids (my daughter started at the same school this year). My kids are exposed to a *much* more visual way of learning, which I think is far better than the way I learned. Instead of staring at static text books, they’re able to learn from interactive examples. In class, teachers project their iPads onto a SmartBoard, which enables them to display online video without the hassle of the projectors we grew up with. Most of their assignments are completed and submitted on their iPads.

They’re using Pages, iMovie and similar apps to create documents and multimedia presentations that are easily shared with other classmates. Some of these projects are team-based, but quite often they don’t need to get together to complete their work – they just do it online from home. One of the coolest things was my son’s Spanish class, where the teacher had “tagged” dozens of objects around the room. The kids aimed their iPhone cameras at the objects, and the Spanish name of the objects appeared on-screen (aim it at a chair, and see the Spanish word for chair).”

Viva la silla!

STRATA is a newly formed photography collective based in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco, Ca. The group consists of six like-minded street photographers and photojournalists who want to use their combined strengths to raise public awareness of the craft and generate new business opportunities, whether they come from commissions, assignments or print and book sales.

From day one Steve Goldenberg, STRATA member and CEO and Founder of Interfolio, recommended the group try Glassboard during our first overnight trip to document the boardwalk in Ocean City, MD. What we were initially drawn to was the fact that it is a private messaging service. Unlike Twitter or text messages, there were no distractions and the conversations between members were easily contained and referenced.

We traveled in two cars and could converse back and forth while on the road. Once in Ocean City we split up to photograph the beach. With Glassboard it was easy for us to keep in touch with each other whether it was for meeting up for lunch, heading back to the hotel or letting others know what kind of shooting opportunities we were discovering.

When we returned home, we continued to use Glassboard as the preferred means of communication between members. We use it to communicate about building our website, www.stratacollective.com, setting up meetings, critiquing images and letting others know what kind of events are breaking in DC or the Bay area.

Glassboard has been integral in the set up of STRATA and has been useful in many different scenarios. Since we are a small group we haven’t had any need to create multiple boards, but we would assume this could be very helpful for larger groups who want to categorize their conversations between teams or subject matters.

With that said there are some features we would like to see added to Glassboard. First and foremost is a search capability. Since we literally use this product as our main communication vehicle we have built quite an archive of messages. As of right now there is no quick way to find content that is a week or more old without having to manually scan all of our old messages to find what we are looking for. Equally frustrating is that the App version only stores your last 50 message topics. It would be nice to be able to access the archive on the go.

[Note from Jenny: Both search and archiving are great features we'd also love to see in a future version of the app! We like to hear what people want out of Glassboard so we know what to work towards.]

We will continue to use Glassboard on assignment and for general business matters, and we look forward to the upcoming premium version of Glassboard which promises new features.

Note: This post was vetted by STRATA members using Glassboard. All images in this post were taken in Ocean City, Md., during STRATA’s first experience with Glassboard. If you would like to see more of our work and individual portfolios please visit www.stratacollective.com.

Ottmar writes, “We are musicians (http://ottmarliebert.com) and are currently doing a five week tour in the Western United States.

One of the reasons we use Glassboard is that I have been using NetNewsWire and MarsEdit forever, and I trust Brent Simmons to do this right. If, for example, Facebook had decided to do a private Glassboard-like service I would not trust their intentions.”

Their latest album is called “Dune,” and you can listen to some of it here. There are also some live board-recordings from their Spring tour you should check out, and you can download an album (for free!) that Ottmar recorded with Iraqi oud player Rahim AlHaj.

Keep an eye out for when Ottmar will be in your town. Heads up, people in Mexico!

Many of us at Double Encore have made occasional use of Glassboard for various purposes since it initially came out, but WWDC presented the perfect opportunity to get everybody on board. A couple weeks prior to WWDC, we had every employee that would be attending the conference join our DE WWDC 2012 board. It immediately showed its usefulness as we started using it to discuss things like dinner plans or coordinating adventures for the Sunday before.

While this was handy and nice to have, the app really started to shine once the conference started. We could have the team spread across two floors and six rooms, and still keep in touch. We were all doing our own thing, but we were still at the conference as a team and could still share what we were learning and photos and all of our excitement with one another.

After the sessions you could just look at Glassboard to see what people were up to next. Or throw out helpful reminders like “don’t forget your Push IO wrist band for the party” (which I would have if not for that reminder). Jay even decided to start letting everybody know when he was back at the hotel safely each night, usually around 2 or 3am… which prompted several of us to find the Quiet Hours for Notifications setting.

A week in San Francisco for WWDC is full of varying and different opportunities for everybody to experience their own conference, and Glassboard allowed us to do that as a team. For us, Glassboard added a great deal of value to the whole experience and I think it opened our eyes up a bit to other ways that we may want to try utilizing it with the team.

Mike Hay, from Black Pixel:

“Using Glassboard to organize loose groups of people at WWDC was excellent. The product features were perfect for that use.

The app was reliable and fast. Notifications and messages arrived at the same time (a feature others can’t match) and the app did not crash in a week of use.”

Justin Williams, of Second Gear Software:

“There were three apps I found to be essential during WWDC 12 and Glassboard was one of them. Coordinating what sessions my team was attending during the day as well as what hijinks my friends and colleagues were getting into at night is way easier than in previous years thanks to Sepia Labs.”

And finally, Jacqui Cheng of Ars Technica, via Daring Fireball:

“Glassboard was so great at WWDC this year. At this point I don’t know how I did conferences without it.”

People had constructive criticism for us too. That’s why I love showing off an app like Glassboard to other software developers. They are honest and can astutely describe what they would change in the app. Thanks everyone for your continued feedback. We really appreciate it!

Tell us how you Glassboard by sending us a message at stories@glassboard.com.

To understand how they are using Glassboard, we first need to understand the context of how they are using it. The Fantasy Football Draft season is very short, lasting about two months leading up to the beginning of the NFL season. As Ted puts it, “The good news is that Draft Analyzer is a must-have for people putting together their Fantasy Football teams. The bad news is that they are doing it all at the same time.” During the peak sales season there are literally thousands of questions that come in at all hours of the day, especially nights and weekends when customers are at home. To handle the load, ASM hires several people in different time zones to answer the onslaught of feedback.

Ted and his team use an internal ticketing system to help manage support cases — but this system doesn’t provide for ad hoc questions for internal escalation: “It provides only a partial solution for us and actually ends up increasing our workloads as we spend more time managing the tickets than our customers.” And while ASM does their best to train their support people, there are always questions or situations that need escalation to the rest of the team. Many times it’s just a quick, “what do I do here,” but sometimes the escalation needs higher level customer service. As a result, ASM needed a system that could enable a fluid, ongoing dialog with the others on the team, or as Ted puts it, “a system that would make the dialog as fluent as if we were all in the same room at the same time.”

In the past, the company relied on email, but it wasn’t ideal. Of the many reasons why email doesn’t work, the most important is that email does not support the urgency or the focus needed to answer the escalations. Email also does not provide a central location for others to review, so when new employees came in there was no history to learn from. “We quickly became buried under hundreds of saved email threads from numerous recipients answering slightly different versions of the same questions.”

ASM also looked into chat services, but that required everyone to be online at the same time, so it was a non-starter. ASM needed an asynchronous communications service.

To make matters more difficult, all of the employees were off-site, so they needed a service that was cloud-based. And because of the nature of escalations on nights and weekends, they needed a system that could be easily accessed both from the web as well as from mobile devices, so that no matter where other team members were, they could be kept in the loop. “If a customer needs help for their fantasy football draft in a few hours or their money back, I need to get the answer to the support team immediately, not in a few hours when I check my email again. The Glassboard mobile app notifies me of the issue and I can respond as easily as replying to a text message.”

We’re honored that ASM has chosen Glassboard! Do you have an interesting way that you’re using Glassboard? Tell us about it! stories@glassboard.com

“At Sepia Labs we’ve been using Glassboard since the first alphas of 1.0 — and we’ve found it’s a great way to work together. We hardly use email at all.

We do use some other services: Lighthouse and Google Docs, for instance. Glassboard doesn’t replace a bug-tracker, and it’s not a spreadsheet app or word processor. But it is a great way for a team to communicate.

One of the things that’s made a big difference is the web app. We’re at our desks a lot of the time, and the web app is convenient and easy.

One small example of how we use Glassboard:

Recently we needed to re-do the big graphic for the app’s page on Google Play. I posted it to our internal group. People replied. I posted another version. People replied. Etc. — until we finished. It didn’t matter if people were at their desks or not — they could all see the graphic and make comments with feedback.

We also use Glassboard to share links — like to Nick’s recent interview in the Knoxville newspaper, or to industry stories we should all know about.

We coordinate. Ask questions. Debate features. Write up our ideas. Talk strategy. Brainstorm about blog posts. Tell jokes.

I consider our use of Glassboard as an advantage we have over other teams — we work together better than any other team I’ve been a part of. It’s remarkable.

And that’s why I’ve said on my blog that I believe this is the future of working together. Because I’ve been living it, and it’s awesome.”

If you’re in software development, you’ve probably had to manage a beta at some point (although I must admit, in my own early days of coding I never did a whole lot of testing). There are needs of both the developers and the customer that can’t always be fulfilled via email. What software developers need is something that enables them to:

1. Distribute a beta privately to the customer

2. Provide an easy means for the customer to provide feedback

3. Route issues and questions to the right people (sales? support? etc.)

Shawn Platkus, a senior software developer at Xitron, saw Glassboard as a means to do all this. Here is what he had to say about using Glassboard for beta testing:

When I release a new beta version to the customer, I simply post a thread in Glassboard stating the version and date that the product was delivered and include the download link to the version.

Our customer had a few initial hurdles getting the software up and running, and he posted his questions along with a screenshot to our board and I was able to respond immediately and relay the solution to him within minutes.

He then goes on:

Another win for me with using Glassboard is that I invited the sales rep for this customer to be on our Glassboard board. The customer posted in a comment that he would like to have two additional licenses of our product so that a couple of his employees could test the product on their workstations. As the developer, I have no way of generating licenses or making the decision to even allow him to have extra licenses. Getting this accomplished through email would have taken a lot of my time routing emails to the right places and then following up on the process. However with our sales rep on our Glassboard board, he saw the message from our customer before I did and responded that he would handle getting him the extra licenses to use.

So far Glassboard has been all win for me in managing this beta process. One issue I hit almost immediately was the 1000 character limit, but then the next day I saw a post where the limit was increased to 10,000 characters[Shh! Don't tell anyone, but that's the new character limit in the web app]. That’s going to be plenty for bug reports and feedback, so the one hurdle I had with using Glassboard for this has already been resolved.