SCOOTER - A BETTER WAY TO ORGANISE CONTACTS, RELATIONSHIPS AND LIFE
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Overview
Scooter is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application that offers all the functionality of sales force automation, marketing automation, and customer service and support. Its unique advantage is an industry specific templating system that allows business to easily buy data from on another and integrate their customer relationship history easily.Life is defined by relationships and activities. Business is about managing relationships and activities in order to make money. Traditionally businesses keep all their customer data in their own databases. If the business dies, the data dies with it.
Scooter CRM brings on a paradigm shift. By specifying a database and templating system, vertical markets can have specific templates. This will allow new entrants to a market to set up just by getting Cream as a free download from their trade association, easily purchase customer data from others and integrate the customer histories from the different data sources into one system.
Scooter improves on this paradigm by defining a standard way to store Customer Relationship Management data so that new firms can purchase useful customer databases. In industries like recruitment and real estate, there is a recognised "itch cycle" of people moving houses and jobs at regular intervals. There is also a high failure rate for companies in these areas. By having their recruiters and real estate brokers use standardised customer data, job hunters and house sellers could be saved a lot of hassle.
Development
Currently the gold standard of CRM is provided by Salesforce.com and the service is provided for free for individuals. At a minimum, Scooter will have to provide all of the functionality of Salesforce.com but in a desktop application. Scooter will be based on C# using Mono on Linux and .Net on Windows. It is a desktop system running in its own client application. The first key milestone is database design.