widgix - tools for web marketing and research

SurveyGizmo is happy to announce that we now have HIPAA and Safe Harbor certifications.  These are two forms of personal information protection. HIPAA is a US law regarding health information and Safe Harbor is US Department of Commerce program to help business comply with EU privacy laws. Some of you might find it interesting that most of our competitors offering online surveys do not have HIPAA certification and a few don’t have Safe Harbor either, so we’re happy to help.

Safe Harbor

In 1998, The European Union Commission’s Directive on Data Protection went into effect and basically created a set of stringent privacy guidelines for the protection of personal data. It also prohibited the transfer of personal data to non-European Union nations that do not follow those guidelines. In other words our EU friends might not be able to use SurveyGizmo to get their burning questions answered. In steps Safe Harbor registration which bridges the gap between US and EU privacy laws. By meeting the Safe Harbor guidelines we can all get along. The really good news is that SurveyGizmo already met or exceeded these privacy guidelines, but now we have gone through the process to be able to say so.

HIPAA

HIPAA or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 is a US federal law that establishes standards for the privacy and security of health information. Once again SurveyGizmo already abided by the spirit of these protections, but is now all read up, quizzed up, and self-certified in both the HIPAA Privacy Rule and the Security Rule provisions. This means that we meet the guidelines from privacy perspective (we don’t share your data - nuff said) and a security perspective (we protected it and keep it private).

We fall under what is known as a “Business Associate” meaning that we are not the actual entity collecting the PHI (Protected Health Information — in HIPAA-speak), but service the organizations that do so. We used the free and truly wonderful resource from the University of Miami School of Medicine The Privacy / Data Protection Project. It’s full of tons of useful documentation, but they must believe like we do that there is no reason you can’t have some fun while doing some serious learning.

Continue reading about SurveyGizmo, the only online survey tool with both HIPAA and Safe Harbor certifications.

I just got back from SXSW and had the pleasure of meeting David Cohen of  ColoradoStartups and  TechStars at one of the evening parties.  TechStars provides up to $15,000 in seed funding for your online business idea and help you turn it into something real.  Basically you come to Boulder, Colorado for the summer and sit in room with pizza and bang out code. Hopefully at the end there is a prototype ready to show off. There is also the chance to pitch to angel investors and venture capitalists, get incorporated, get legal advice, etc. And for this opportunity TechStars gets 5% of your company and for what they provide it’s a pretty good deal (and very similar to Y Combinator).

The deadline for this summer’s submissions is coming on fast on March 31, 2007, so apply now to TechStars with your new idea.

UPDATE: We hired someone!

Widgix Software is looking for an experienced copywriter to create documentation, tutorials, and maybe do some blogging for our flagship product, SurveyGizmo (http://www.surveygizmo.com). You can see examples of the sort of writing on our wiki & here on our blog

The Job:
The writing is a little bit marketing and little bit technical. The audience we’re writing for is usually non-technical, so having a knack for taking a topic and breaking it down into bite sized pieces anyone can grasp is what we are after. This is definitely not manual writing on how to set your VCR clock! The marketing comes into play deciding what to write about to help our users and to always show them the benefits of upgrading. We like to have a little fun with our tone to keep it light and interesting. Our customers are largely marketers so being able to think like them and know a bit of their lingo is helpful.

Requirements:
Strong writing skills and motivation. Because we market to marketers all applicants must have a firm understanding of basic marketing principles in addition to the marketer’s mindset.

We have a wiki, a blog, and a help forum so there is a ton of writing to do. This will be an ongoing project 10-20 hrs/wk. $15/hour. Look, we know it’s not a lot, but we hope to find someone who likes the company, the work and sees the potential. There is a lot of work to do and you can contribute in just about any area you have an aptitude for.

Our office is on the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, but we are open to ’some’ work taking place at home for the right person. This position is perfect for a stay-at-home-parent who is looking to stay current in marketing & copywriting or a journalism graduate student looking to break into hi-tech startups.

Our company is young, but grew strong & steady during 2006. We are serious about our goals and products, but are an easy going bunch to work with.

*** Local applicants only (you must live near live Boulder). We love India, Serbia, and Silicon Valley, but not for this position. No outside recruiters either please! ***

SurveyGizmo has added support for embedding surveys, polls, and contact forms on MySpace.com. We had so much call for this lattle it was a no brainer feature to add. It was the number one thing people searched the site for… interesting. This also has a lot of potential for using in other websites, social networking sites, or even emails… hmmm. read more about surveys on MySpace.com.

Do you run surveys? Do you have a Mac? Then monitoring & managing your surveys is just one keystroke away thanks to our brand new Apple dashboard survey widget, developed in partnership with wdgty.

For those of you who unfamiliar with the term a widget is a mini-application that runs on the Apple OS X Dashboard. You can toggle to your dashboard by pressing the F12 key. Try it! Your Mac comes with a few basic widgets that tell the time, stocks & local weather. Plus, developers around the world are creating some wonderful tools that have integrated widgets — like SurveyGizmo!

The SurveyGizmo widget for Mac OS X allows you to keep up with progress on your surveys and view in near real time the number of surveys In Progress, Completed, Abandoned, or Partially Completed. You also have handy links to Edit, Reporting, and Preview.

We want to thank our friends over at wdgty who did a great job with the widget and we whole heartedly recommend them. Thanks guys!

Read more about or download the Survey Widget here.

We’ve written a how-to guide on Creating Contact, Support, and Lead Generation forms over at SurveyGizmo today. There is also a tutorial in the wiki for even more on embedding contact forms.

The new contact form and lead gen form templates are great for our WordPress survey plugin users. It provides a great and simple alternative to existing methods of adding a contact form to your WordPress blog.

We released a Survey WordPress plug over at SurveyGizmo this week.The SurveyGizmo plugin can be used to run surveys, polls, contact forms, lead generation forms, newsletter signups, data collection, etc. Keep track of survey stats from the comfort of your WordPress dashboard.

You get all the power of a full featured survey tool (http://www.surveygizmo.com) with 19 question types, email invites, auto-responders, API data access in and out, and more.

You have total control over survey look and feel with a template engine very similar to WordPress. There are all kinds of options for reporting and data export.

SurveyGizmo can also take collected data and post it back to your own CRM database, SalesForce.com, Constant Contact, Aweber, or any other web form/API. The plugin uses the open API, so if it doesn’t suit you - build your own!

Check out the SurveyGizmo WordPress Plugin

We know our apps aren’t perfect. In fact we know better than anyone where the frayed edges are, the dirty little secrets are hidden, and the bodies are buried. And this is as it should be.

We work on improving these areas daily. Now conpare this with a large email service provider we are both familiar with. We’ve dealt with their product for years, and for years we’ve seen the same problems, and gotten the same answers. Total disbelief that their API could really be taking close to a minute to respond was the reaction that persisted this entire time. But hey, who’s complaining?

We’ve certainly been on the other side of the customer service desk, and know how frustrating it is to have to wait for what seems like an eternity for what should be a simple fix. So, our goal here at Widgix is to never have that happen. We know our applications can’t be perfect, and we want your feedback — it is the best way for us to make the applications you want to use. So please, let us know when you’ve got issues with SurveyGizmo and Co-Reg Complete, or when you think of some great new feature you’d like to have. We’re on it!