As we wrap up another exciting year, we’d like to take a moment to recap and review some of our highlights over the past 12 months. When we closed out 2014, I anticipated this was going to be an exciting year, but could never have predicted just how much we could have accomplished!
Fulcrum Mobile Solutions Launch
The growth and success of Fulcrum over the past few years has been absolutely phenomenal! Fulcrum has matured into a stable, feature-rich platform, which is well on its way to becoming the go-to solution for mobile geographic field data collection. The launch of Fulcrum Mobile Solutions further solidifies our commitment to the product and our growing community of users, partners, and advocates.
Growing The Team
Team Fulcrum continues to grow, with a focus on engineering, integration, marketing, product development, and sales. Our aggressive growth strategy will certainly continue to provide employment opportunities and we are always on the hunt for new talent! We are particularly interested in mobile developers, software engineers, and inside sales specialists. If you are curious about joining the team, please get in touch and let’s schedule a chat.
New Plans & Payment Options
We’ve learned a lot over the past few years about what folks are looking for with regards to field data collection. We make it a point to directly and regularly engage with our users and listen to what they have to say. While we can’t always please everyone all the time, our roadmap continues to be largely driven by user feedback.
The evolution of Fulcrum into a full featured platform, supporting a wide variety of users and use cases, necessitated a reevaluation of our original tiered user plan structure. Our new feature-based plans were launched in October, and have been extremely popular. This simple and predictable price per user per month tied to 3 feature plans makes every feature available to all of our users, regardless of plan size. We made these changes to our plans in order to allow all of our users to gain access to the most powerful features in Fulcrum, without having to have a large team or a large budget.
In addition to the new plan offerings, we added the ability to purchase account credits. Credits allow you to purchase Fulcrum on your own payment schedule, quarterly or annually, based on how your purchasing manager prefers to buy.
Updated Developer Documentation & Tools
We’ve updated and open sourced our developer documentation to make it easier for developers to find and contribute information. Advanced features such as calculation fields and webhooks have made developing for the Fulcrum platform significantly more interesting and we encourage developers to contribute their knowledge and expertise to the growing community of Fulcrum hackers.
Follow our work on GitHub as we continue to release more open integration tools and one-off projects. We’re just getting started 😉
Partnerships
As we continue to grow, strategic partnerships remain a high priority. We have long standing partnerships with a variety of our users and industry colleagues, but will be focusing on establishing a more formal partnership program in 2016. We are always looking for partners who want to build out services on top of the Fulcrum platform and help market our product within your industry.
Feature Updates
January
- Added photo quality settings on Android
- Field validation improvements including pattern matching with regex and min/max validations
February
- Introduction of Calculated Fields
- Set Up Zapier Integrations for easily integrating Fulcrum with a variety of other services
March
- Child Record History for better data auditing
April
May
June – September
October
November – December
- Stay tuned in January 2016!
User Showcase
In case you missed my post on Unleashing Human Potential back in July, I wanted to share a sample of the variety of work our users are accomplishing with Fulcrum.
- The HALO Trust has incorporated Fulcrum into their ordnance-clearing operations in Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Laos, Zimbabwe, and the West Bank. This technology helps them to better assess the impact of landmines in particular areas, is used to log strike footprints, and record locations of found ordinances.
- GEMS World Academy in Chicago is incorporating Fulcrum into their comprehensive program of Field Studies for students in grades K-12. The school believes that for students to become global citizens, they must explore, ask questions, observe, empathize and act in the world without borders. Check out this educational blog post by Thomas Steele-Maley for more information.
- Desert Channels Queensland is actively using Fulcrum to track invasive plant species and nuisance wildlife to assist landowners across the Queensland section of the Lake Eyre Basin in Australia. Check out their promotional video for additional information.
- The International Dark Sky Association is collecting data on sea turtle nesting sites and nearby artificial light pollution, which can confuse turtle hatchlings trying to find their way to the sea. This data helps drive mitigation programs and environmentally responsible outdoor lighting campaigns.
- Village Earth is working with Native Americans on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota to conduct detailed household surveys to challenge existing Federal Census data. Check out their promotional video for additional information.
- Premier Utility Services has surveyed 4,000 miles of gas pipeline and inspected well over half a million gas meters with field inspectors equipped with Fulcrum.
- Nest Builders International has conducted over 20,000 field surveys as part of an initiative to help residents in Freetown, Sierra Leone gain better access to clean water.
- House Of Hope Community Development Corporation is using Fulcrum to record information directly from the streets in support of their initiatives to research and combat homelessness in Rhode Island.
- The Built Environment and Health Research Group at Columbia University (BEH) is using Fulcrum to undertake a Community Health Diagnosis for the Rio das Pedras area in Brazil. This informal community of 63,500 residents is lacking many key municipal services and researchers want to collect more data on environmental and health conditions. Check out this needs assessment blog post by Daniel Sheehan for more information.
- The Portland Police Bureau Bike Theft Task Force is conducting an extensive survey on bicycles and cyclist bike locking habits throughout Portland to help combat bike theft. Check out this bike theft blog post by J Allard for more information.
What’s Next for 2016
Our roadmap for the coming year is both aggressive and impressive! We’ve spent the past few years building solid tools focused primarily on data collection challenges, and now we’re ready to take it a step further. Our 2016 initiatives include providing better mechanisms to access and interact with your data, both at the record level as well as the organization level. We will be adding more functionality for workflow scripting, both on the mobile device, as well as back in the office, for even greater customization and integration opportunities.
We want Fulcrum to be your go-to solution for field data management, so we will be making it even easier to integrate with existing systems and workflows without having to deal with as many ETL hurdles. As with all of our initiatives, we will continue to focus on making Fulcrum easy to use out-of-the-box as a standalone product, in addition to providing advanced integration points for enterprise level implementation.