Sorry for the inconvenience, and thank you for your patience! You can follow us at @UserVoice for updates.

[UPDATE - 2:38 PST]

We had to take down our site for about 10 minutes to perform some emergency maintenance. Everything is back up and running now, but we will continue to closely monitor the database in case any issues arise. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us on Twitter or at support [at] uservoice.com.

Here are just a few of the benefits:

• Quick installation of UserVoice
• Automatic Single Sign On through Google’s universal navigation
• Centralized administration

The new integration now allows Google Apps customers to quickly implement UserVoice for their sites. Previously, admins had to set up Single Sign On through programing a short line of JavaScript. Now, simply by signing up through Google Apps, UserVoice’s Single Sign On is already implemented for your domain.

This is just the beginning of our integration with more to come, but we are happy to announce our latest features.

Check out our press release here:

San Francisco, CA – March 9, 2010 — UserVoice today announced its availability through the Google Apps Marketplace™, Google’s recently launched online storefront for Google Apps™ products and services. UserVoice’s integration with Google Apps makes it the most convenient way to give UserVoice ideas easy traction within Google Apps. UserVoice is a feature-rich web application that allows users to manage their data from anywhere in the world with just a browser and an internet connection. With UserVoice, companies can collect feedback from anywhere and aggregate ideas into actionable items for product or organizational development.

“UserVoice was designed to reduce the barriers associated with collecting feedback, so integrating with Google Apps was a logical choice for us,” says Rich White, company CEO. “By adding UserVoice to the Google Apps Marketplace, we’ve streamlined the feedback and decision-making process for organizations.”

“We are very excited to have UserVoice in the Google Apps Marketplace,” adds Scott McMullan, Google Apps Partner Lead for Google Enterprise. “Through the Google Apps Marketplace, software vendors like UserVoice are helping us build a rich ecosystem of integrated apps that work seamlessly with Google Apps, allowing IT administrators to leverage the benefits of cloud computing and extend Google Apps to meet more of their business needs. We are happy to offer UserVoice to the millions of Google Apps users who have embraced the cloud.”

The Google Apps Marketplace makes it easy for more than 2 million Google Apps customers to discover, purchase and deploy integrated business applications and related professional services. By integrating with user account and application data stored in Google Apps, these cloud applications provide a simpler user experience, increase business efficiency, and reduce administrative overhead. To learn more, visit google.com/appsmarketplace.

ABOUT USERVOICE
Tracking over 7 million votes on 400,000 ideas for nearly 35,000 organizations, San Francisco- based UserVoice is the leading web application for involving customers, clients, and constituents in decision-making. UserVoice communities are the leading method of turning customer feedback into an actionable list. The new integration into Google Apps allows organizations to implement a simple feedback system into any Google Site. To learn more about the integration visit the Google Apps Marketplace™.

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Google, Google Apps Marketplace, Google Apps, Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Video are trademarks of Google Inc.

If you have any concerns please contact support AT uservoice.com.

Simply put that means if you’re not a website with more than 10M pageviews a month, then you have unlimited usage. If you are, we want to talk to you about your goals so we can provide excellent service for your account.

What does that mean for accounts moving forward?

Go out there and start listening to your users! We hope these changes enable all UserVoice customers to get as much usage out of the service without worry, while ensuring that we can provide a high level of service to all customers.

- Rich

Through the Online Public Engagement Grant Program, at least five (5) grantees will be awarded free use of the UserVoice platform plus implementation training – an up to $10,000.00 value. Applications will be received on a “rolling basis” with “Phase I” of the grant period concluding on March 8, 2010. New grant phases may be opened as availability permits.

We have been about engagement since the day we first designed this product, and we’re happy to have a partner like Common Sense California to help put the product in the hands of public sector leaders who can really use it to engage their residents in making important local decisions.

To learn how to apply check out the CSC UserVoice application.

- Daniel

Sorry for the inconvenience,

Team UserVoice

Where?
ZURB HQ
55 N. 3rd Street, Suite 100a
Campbell, CA 95008

When?
Friday, December 4th, 2009
from 12:00-1:30pm PST
Check out what I will be speaking about:

• A framework for quickly testing business ideas and failing fast
• The power of widgets to drive brand awareness
• How to turn your customers into your best distribution channel
• Why sometimes it’s helpful to make features harder to use
• How “connect and close” can be a better fundraising strategy than “divide and conquer”

Hope to see you all out there, and don’t forget to RSVP!

-Rich

No, no it’s not like that *that*. It’s that I’ve finally managed to get out of the office and to be honest… it’s a bit lonely. To remedy that I’ve hatched a plan to combine two of my favorite things: you, our customers (big and small; old, new and future), and free beer (I’ll have a Hefeweizen please).

Here are the stops I’m making on this current tour:

NYC
Where: Cornerstone Tavern
961 2nd Ave
(between 50th St & 51st St)
New York, NY 10022
(212) 888-7403
When: Tomorrow! Friday November 20.
Time: 6 PM
RSVP

London
Where: Bar TBD
Date: Sunday November 22.
Time: 19:00
RSVP

Oslo
Where: Bar TBD
Date: Thursday November 26.
Time: 19:00
RSVP

If you can’t make it to the pub, drop me message me on Twitter (@rrwhite) and maybe we can find another time to meet up.

Don’t see your city here? How about you add it to our newly minted Bar Tour Forum and we’ll hope to see you out there,

Rich(ard) White

Help us congratulate Peter, who represented the City of Santa Cruz at Gov 2.0 today and won the opportunity to present again tomorrow at the Gov 2.0 Summit!

If you didin’t already know, the City of Santa Cruz is solving its budget crisis by asking its citizens for help. Using a UserVoice forum and opening up the books, they have developed a plan and are on their way to getting out of the red. All of this was made possible by the community with the people suggesting and vetting ideas.

The City of Santa Cruz is also entered in the Forrester Groundswell award for impacting society for the better. Vote for them by clicking on their stars at the bottom of the page here: http://bit.ly/gkEd7.

We want to thank everyone who has sent us suggestions and comments for their ongoing contribution to improving our service.

In July we started on a revamp of the admin interface and have added some exciting new features. The most prominent of these are:

Admin

added:

• You will now be able to block users under the tab “users”
• Easy access to widget documentation under the tab “widget” (view)
• Easy access to API under the tab “API” (view)
• You can now Export to Excel admin data (view)
• Add your own “internal comments” on suggestions – not visible to users (view)

fixed:

• default forum set up – long list went off screen
• comment/internal comment count was broken
• link to customized SSO login page  goes to your customized login page
• “internal comment” delete button is working again
• admin couldn’t add suggestion with 0 votes when he ran out of votes – works fine again
• billing info displayed wrong “next payment” dat – shows now the correct payment date
• set default forum tab on “new” – works fine now (view)
• create forum that was already created and deleted – works fine now
• delete forum button – works fine now
• xls files are no longer triggered when clicking on “tabs”

End-User

added

improved search (minimum word length, blacklist)

Translation

improved German, Spanish and French translation

I had the privilege of spending an afternoon with these young entrepreneurs to discuss the value of knowing your customers and explaining how they could use UserVoice to do market research.

*Here’s where you come in. They need your feedback.*

There are 4 sponsoring companies that have provided a problem for the campers and there are 2 teams attacking each problem. Each team has brainstormed some solutions to the sponsor provide problems and setup a forum to collect your ideas (and see if you like theirs). Now they need your input.

If your birthday year is odd please leave feedback for group A:

seriousmaterials.uservoice.com
harateam1.uservoice.com
valenceenergy1.uservoice.com
frs1.uservoice.com

If your birthday year is even please leave feedback for group B:

kevinjobs.uservoice.com
harateam2.uservoice.com
valenceenergy2.uservoice.com
frsteam2.uservoice.com

On behalf of all of the campers, thanks for your help!

Daniel here, just checking in from Hollywood. For those of you who don’t know me, I just graduated from Claremont McKenna College and joined UserVoice a couple weeks ago. It’s really good to be a part of the team (take that economy) and we are going to take it to a whole new level. But enough about me, on to something more exciting…

UserVoice just touched down at LAX and is getting ready for a big day tomorrow at Twiistup 6, where Rich will be speaking. After the trek down to SoCal and a nice ride to the Universal Hilton, we are ready to hit up Twiistup. Being back in LA is excellent and an 80 degree weather break from San Francisco is exactly what the doctor ordered (yes, I am used to the heat, having gone to school in Claremont).

This conference is going to be awesome, with 12 companies showcased, us included, and discussion topics with a lot of relevance to young entrepreneurs. With so many cool companies down here, we are looking forward to getting to meet the next generation of promising startups.

If you are going to be there, come find us! We will be setting up a table and Rich will be the one in orange. Also, shout out to Francisco and Jeremiah for setting this up. It’s gonna be great.

- Daniel

There’s certainly some truth to that, but I believe it’s more aptly described as a relay race, an especially grueling relay race where the course itself changes dramatically with each hand off of the baton. Each leg brings new obstacles, and demands that the runners develop skills they didn’t even know existed.

It’s with that in mind that I sit down to write a farewell note to my friend, co-founder and eternal optimist Marcus Nelson as he leaves the UserVoice team to pursue his next dream.

How did we get here?

When we started in late 2007 it was just me & Lance Ivy doing the prototypical designer-developer tag team. A few months later we had a prototype, a little seed money and a concern. I’ve known the pain of building things in the dark and I’m fond of saying “2 people is a project, 3’s (a) company.” I knew we needed someone who could come in and spend his cycles spreading the gospel of UserVoice.

Through local tech events, like SuperHappyDevHouse, I came to meet Marcus and through a certain Craigslist post I found him yet again. He seemed to be the missing ingredient, but like all good engineer types Lance and I thought we needed a test. SXSW was right around the corner, just the test we were looking for. I don’t know what we expected, but it was certainly exceeded. I think I saw Marcus for all of 2 hours over 3 days and each time it was an exasperated Marcus saying “I just met so-and-so… oh and do you have any more cards.” Hurricane Marcus was bearing down on SXSW. He was a force of nature. In the end he gave out every one of his cards and half of mine.

That’s Marcus for you. Put him in a room of smart people and he’s like the Googlebot spidering his way from person to person, bringing back the raw social capital a fledgling startup needs to get noticed.

You might have met Marcus on Twitter

I remember when Marcus introduced me to “the Twitter.” Or at least I remember my reaction. “You’re talking to individual people… like one by one… that’ll never scale. What we need is to talk to bloggers!”. I had some past success with guerrilla blog marketing and naturally that was *the* way to get noticed. Not this stupid big-ass, confusing chat room called Twitter.

Marcus didn’t listen to me and I’m very thankful for that. You *can*… no you *have* to build awareness of your product one person at a time. And it does scale… well at least when you have a b2b model like ours. [psst, tools like UserVoice help scale that 1:1 feeling of connectedness ]. The *individual* relationships that were cultivated over Twitter led to cornerstone customers, future employees, positive press and even investment.

Back to the present

I’ve learned a lot from Marcus over the past 18 months. I’ll never work a room like he does, be quite as optimistic or crack as corny jokes (I’m probably okay with that bit) but I’ve certainly learned a lot about the value of relationships and positive thinking.

Marcus will certainly be missed. But like a runner in the relay, has has cleanly handed off the baton to a new team of great people that have come on board to run this leg. We’ve an exciting new sales team featuring Daniel Kan (you’ll see his bright smiling face on the sign-up page), I’ve turned the designery keys over to the excellent Joshua Rudd and I’ll be stepping into marketing & evangelism. There’s a lot of excitement on the team and on the horizon.

Marcus is off to to new opportunities and places that stretch him to the limit, yet again. As a co-worker and even more so as a friend I hope you’ll join me in wishing him the best.

You can reach Marcus on Twitter (@marcusnelson) and via email (marcusnelson@yahoo.com)

Heading to annother continent, we’re very pleased to announce we’ve made our foray into South America by rolling a Barazilian Portuguese translation.  This completes this suggestion, so I’ll go ahead and retire this idea.  Thank you for helping us out!

Now… Which Continent should we go to next?