HotSchedules is a web-based scheduling solution to help your business streamline your staff scheduling process, while providing your staff and management with effective communication and labor management tools to efficiently manage your time and labor costs.
Since the release of our scheduling application for BlackBerry and iPhone, HotSchedules users have been asking us when we’d have a version for Android mobile devices. Well, today we’re proud to announce the official launch of the much-anticipated Android app, available in the Android Market for $2.99.
We’re thrilled to join the thriving Android community, especially as recent figures show that one of every three phones being sold now is powered by Android.
HotSchedules is all about making the chore of restaurant scheduling as quick and simple as pushing a button, and we hope our Android app will make HotSchedules an even more powerful tool for our users.
Like our other mobile apps, the initial release of the Android app is focused on employee-level access first. Manager functionality including dashboard access is coming in a future update. We’re exploring adding Google Calendar integration as well.
In the meantime, we want to hear your thoughts about the new app and any ideas you have for improving it. Give us a shout on Twitter or Facebook—both are great resources for discussing HotSchedules with other users and keeping track of what’s coming next.
It's that time again! We've drawn the third winner of our 10k Facebook Fans by 10/10/10 contest. Congratulations to Cam Copeland of Tubby's Ice Cream in Wayne, Maine for being randomly selected as the prize winner for this round. We'll be sending Cam our prize package of gift cards combining our two favorite things, restaurants and technology. For everyone else that answered, we really appreciate your feedback, and don't forget you can enter again with each question we post bi-weekly.
Before we move on to our next question -- which is very near and dear to us -- I want to thank you all for taking the time to participate in our contest. Our objective in trying to get more users to become "fans" is really tied to the ultimate goal of increasing our engagement with our customers. We love doing giveaways for our loyal user base, but we also want you to know that we are looking to build a two-way street for dialogue year-round, whether it's part of a contest or not. Each one of your comments will help us become a better service and product for all our users, from the top-level corporate management all the way to hourly restaurant employees.
A great recent example of this: last year, we held a "My Life, My Schedule" video contest in which we received some really great submissions (check them out at the HotSchedules YouTube channel) which we showed at our annual user's conference in the fall. We recently received another video, and while the contest is long over, we really appreciated the submission, and it reminded us how lucky we are to have such a great, engaged user base that enjoys communicating with us. Check out Andrew D'Amato's recent video here, and we strongly encourage you to engage with our team year-round, whether it's through comments on the Facebook page, questions on our Community Forum, videos, songs, art, etc! We love hearing from you and sharing your feedback and creativity.
Now, on to the next question of our Facebook contest. We are almost to 3,000 fans, so we're steadily working toward our goal! If we reach 10k by 10/10/10, everyone who enters will be put into a drawing to win an iPad, so spread the word. For a quick reminder on the rules, click here.
Question #4:
The oil tragedy on the Gulf Coast has severely affected residents and businesses in the area -- certainly including restaurants. For users that live and work in the region, how has the incident directly impacted your life/job/restaurant? For those of you not in the affected area, what have you done or could you possibly do to help those who are?
This question will be active on Facebook until July 28, when we'll randomly select the winner and post the next question. In the meantime, please post your responses there -- we really look forward to hearing from you, and our thoughts go out to all HotSchedules users affected by the oil disaster.
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