by Andy Meadows on October 26, 2010
Robert Frost said it best:
I shall be telling this with a sign
Somewhere ages and ages hence;
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
In the crowded and confusing world of short URL services, there remains a handful of players. Amazingly enough, there are new entrants every day, but the landscape is primarily dominated by Hootsuite and Bit.ly. Google recently jumped into the game with their goo.gl shortener, but they have a long way to go. These companies have finally become “businesses” since they only began started charging for their services. They have taken venture funding and taken the freemium route towards profitability. The upside, they have a tremendous number of users (not customers). The downside? They just started the revenue race. They have opted to go one route, while we have taken another.
BudURL is re-launching today as a merged service with a better value proposition than ever before. Our features are powering services for some of the worlds most recognized brands. We have actively listened to our customers who have invested their dollars in our service to evolve our product to meet their needs, and the needs of customers just like them. The result is a product designed from Day One to meet the needs of a growing enterprise.
The Future is Mobile
We are also broadening our entry into the mobile space. Short URLs were originally about connecting websites. Today they are about connecting people to information. Through our integration with QR codes and short URLs, we now provide the ability to create a mobile landing page for each URL. This reduces the steps required to connect prospects with critical data, when and where they need it. No more IT requirements, building pages, hosting services, mobile compliance, etc. We take care of it all. Instead of a short URL being a launchpad, we’re now providing the net on the other end as well. Coupled with our upcoming lead capture and intelligence system, we’re providing an end-to-end campaign management tool unlike any other.
What is Next?
That’s the best part. We have always evolved based on the needs of our customers. If you’d like to help blaze a new trail for your business, you’re in the right spot. Join us today and learn how we can give you the Power to Grow.
by mike on October 13, 2010
We’ve just recently made some system improvements to the BudURL.com site that should drastically cut down on performance issues that the site was seeing in the overnight hours US time. Over the past couple of weeks, we noticed that performance was suffering during this time and decided to take action to alleviate the server load during this time. Two nights ago, we performed a significant upgrade to the system to offload the heaviest process to another server. There was some downtime as our Status page indicated there would be ahead of time, but we feel this was necessary for the overall integrity and longevity of the system. We apologize to all who had been reporting issues during the late-night hours. We are happy to report that last night we did not get a single alert that there were any issues. We believe this will be the norm going forward and welcome anyone to report if they see any issues during the late-night US hours.
You can find our Status update page at: http://support.liveoak360.com/status/updates
Our general support site is at: http://support.liveoak360.com/answers/BudURL.com
Sincerely,
Mike Saenz
by mike on October 6, 2010
Anywhere you see click info with an IP address you will now see a 
image next to the IP address. Clicking this image will take you directly to the page to block this IP for all future clicks.
Enjoy!
Mike
by mike on October 6, 2010
Within the past couple of weeks we have released some new exciting features. Here is a list:
- Want QR codes? We got them! A QR code is now being generated for each link created. Look in the ‘View Stats’ page of a Link.
- Under Settings > People: Account owners can lock out users or classify users as Admins. Users that are marked as Admins will have privileges as the account owner with the exception of billing updates.
- Under Settings > Blocked IPs: All users can enter IPs that they wanted filtered out of their click data. IPs entered apply to all account domains. Also, non-admins must have their IP request approved by an admin.
- Under Settings > Access and Roles: Admins can assign users as ‘Reporting Admins’ per domain. Reporting Admins can view all links and click data for all users across a domain.
- Under Settings > Export Your Links: All users can export all links they created to a CSV file. Feature was previously only available to admins.
- Under Settings > Home Page: Admins can assign their custom domain Home Page to redirect to an external URL
Hope everyone enjoys these great new features. We have many new features on tap in the near future and can’t wait to release them.
Mike Saenz
