SmartyStreets Company Blog

Over the past six months we’ve made some very dramatic changes and improvements.  First and foremost, we changed our  name from Qualified Address to SmartyStreets. After that we launched a slick new interface which automagically detects your file format and content so you don’t have to be confined to using a custom/restrictive format when processing a file with us. We have also introduced properly cased street names (Main St vs MAIN ST) and we followed up by creating a new REST+JSON-based endpoint for LiveAddress API users instead of the horrible, old SOAP+XML endpoint (yuck).  Last, but definitely not least, we’re now giving away our services 100% completely free to non-profit institutions.  That’s pretty awesome.  Oh.  And did I mention that we know offer latitude/longitude geocoding at no extra charge?

Notwithstanding all of these changes, our main website has remained the same and has started to show some age. So we invested some time into making it simple, easy, and attractive.  We recently launched the new website and have had some great response to how intuitive it is.  Here’s a smarty list of what’s new on the site:

• Commercials–a video is worth a thousand words.  Check out the new commercials!
• 1. Price Quote
• 2. Disneyland
• 3. Updates
• Knowledge Base
• Everything you (never) wanted to know about address verification can be found in our exhaustive glossary. Always wanted to know more about DPV, or the DPBC, or CASS-Certification but never knew where to turn?  Look no further!
• Products
• Up till now, we’ve had 2 product lines: LiveAddress (our API), and CASS-Certified Scrubbing. The truth is, both did the same thing but were used differently. For simplicity, we’ve united them under a common banner: LiveAddress.
• LiveAddress API is still LiveAddress API. This is for websites, programs, and automated queries.
• CASS-Certified Scrubbing is now LiveAddress for Lists. This is for Excel, CSV, and other types of files that have a lot of addresses in them.
• Completely re-designed, our new product pages present more useful information in a more effective way. We have heard your pleas and, once again, made significant improvements.
• Did you know that both LiveAddress for Lists and LiveAddress API are free? We don’t limit you to a trial period anymore: For any list with up to 42 addresses, it’s totally free. For any API subscriptions less than 250 queries/mo, it’s totally free.
• Pricing
• We’ve simplified the pricing tiers for both LiveAddress products. As always, we didn’t raise any prices, but now you don’t have to feel overwhelmed trying to choose from too many options.

• Product demos
• Now featured on our homepage is an interactive address verification demo. Enter any address and view some of the actual myriad of results that LiveAddress can provide.
• Legal Stuff
• No one (well, almost no one) enjoys reading privacy policies, terms of service, and service level agreements.  We’ve tried to make our policies as simple as possible and have even gone so far as to provide plain-English translations of the legalese for you.  Enjoy!
• Contact information
• Want to know the location of our rebel base?  The new contact page includes a map pinpointing our location as well as some of our favorite spots around town.
• Unlimited List processing
• For users that have millions or hundreds of millions of addresses to process, our LiveAddress for Lists unlimited plan will let your wallet breathe easy.
• Don’t forget our LiveAddress API still has its popular unlimited plan, an economical solution for high-volume users.
• Oh, and if you’re non-profit or education, it’s totally free for you. Any of it, all of it.

On the technical side, our site employs some of the latest web technologies, including HTML 5, CSS 3 and of course, jQuery. We’re starting to phase out support for older browsers like Internet Explorer 7 and below, but most of you who keep software up-to-date should have a great experience on our new website. We made it to be more appealing, aesthetically pleasing, and intuitive. We’ll constantly be tweaking and improving upon the design, so check back often and expect the best to get even better.  Enjoy the new website!

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You’ve been asking for it and it’s finally here: free address verification.

I know what you’re thinking, we’re crazy. And you’d be right, because we are crazy—crazy awesome.

As of today, we are now offering completely free address verification  to non-profit organizations and educational institutions, including public schools, school districts, and higher education.  Read all the details to get started.

There are two small catches to be aware of:

1. You have to be a real non-profit, supporting the general good of society. Organizations involved in any questionable or objectionable endeavors are excluded from this offer.
2. We ask that you let others know about this offer—whether they belong to non-profit or traditional institutions. You’re welcome to use any method of communication including tweets, blogs, or even traditional word-of-mouth to spread the word about our address verification services.

Enjoy.

 

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We’ve been busy the last few weeks working on some cool new features for our address verification service.

Auto-mapping
The first big feature has been a long time coming: auto-mapping. Auto-mapping is the ability for our system to detect the contents of your file in order to figure out what your columns mean. For example, if your column says “Owner’s Street Address 1″, we’ll be able to look at that, and determine that it’s really the primary street address of your file.

Auto-mapping saves a ton of time. In fact, in most cases you can now upload your file, click “Import List,” and you’re done. There’s no more dealing with the hassle of telling us what each column in your file represents. How simple is that?

Compressed files
Processing really large files has been somewhat of a pain in previous iterations of our list-import process. Prior to last month’s release, there wasn’t even a progress bar. Yuck. But even with a progress bar (which is now visible in modern browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, and Safari), it was still painfully slow to upload a file 200 MB or larger.

Now we offer the the ability to upload your compressed file. Simply take your file—be it Excel, CSV, or tab-delimited text—and compress it using your operating system’s “zipping” capability. Then upload that file to our site. We currently accept files up to 512 MB in size (that’s a lot of addresses!) using this process. If you need to process something larger, you can make arrangements with us for an alternate upload method. We’ve also got a release on the horizon that will address really large files in a much better fashion than manual HTTP uploads.

Drag & drop uploads
Finally!

The old school way of clicking on the upload button and navigating to the file in the upload window is…painful. Now, with modern browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, you can simply drag your file from the desktop to the website, and a file upload drop zone will appear. Drop the file in the drop zone, and the file will begin uploading.

*Internet Explorer users, we’re sorry, but you may have to wait a bit for us to iron out some compatibility issues.*

Conclusion
Each of these changes are small, but collectively they add up to a greatly streamlined user experience. And that’s what we want—a seamless, clean, fast user experience where the sum total = awesome.  Enjoy.

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Last week we launched a complete overhaul of our entire list processing system. It’s been a long time coming, and is probably one of the most requested changes from our customers.

The new system we built is magnitudes faster than our previous system (because it scales almost linearly), and is better able to recognize the various kinds of files used by our customers—especially lists in Excel 2007 format and later.

Another huge improvement is our new consolidated dashboard view with all of your list activity. In our previous system, the upload process was distinct and separate from the management and administration of the various lists. Now, everything is combined into a unified view. There’s no more need to switch back and forth between the various screens, because everything is right there.

Lastly, the file upload and import process has been completely re-engineered. In the previous system, the file upload process was about eight steps over eight different screens. The new process is exactly three steps on a single screen—upload your file, map your columns, and import.

We’re super excited about the productivity gains that this release gives our customers. But more importantly, it becomes a platform on which we can more quickly release additional capabilities and features.  We’ve got a lot of great plans for new features, and now we can more forward with them.

As previously mentioned, this release has been a long time coming. And now that it’s here, we’re in a much better position to start focusing on delivering more awesomeness so that our address verification customers be delivering awesome too.

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Qualified Address is now SmartyStreets. But, by now, you’ve probably guessed that. With any kind of name change or re-branding there are bound to be questions.

What’s Wrong With The Old Name?
Qualified Address was a pretty good name, and it has served us well for years. But as we have grown and our culture has evolved, we have come to realize that the name Qualified Address no longer adequately conveys who we are or where we are going as a company.

Frankly speaking, Qualified Address was a little too…well…boring. And that’s not who we are. When we come into work everyday, we bring our “A-Game”. When we talk or interact with you, our customers, we want you to feel the excitement about what we do. We don’t mind talking about our flair or the fact that we won’t put cover pages on our TPS reports.  Address verification is what we do.

Why “SmartyStreets”?
First and foremost, we wanted something unique and memorable (not to mention “Google-able”). We wanted something that conveys what we do as a company, while still allowing our personality to show through. SmartyStreets is all of that and then some, all wrapped up in one neat little package.

Here’s the fun part. Now that you’ve seen the name SmartyStreets, we’d like you to try and forget it. Seriously! Just try to not remember the name. That’s how we came to pick SmartyStreets in the first place. No matter how hard we tried, we kept coming back to it because we couldn’t get it out of our heads. SmartyStreets. SmartyStreets. SmartyStreets. See? It’s stuck.

The other reason that we went with SmartyStreets is that it plays well with the concept of “street smarts,” which means having a lot of actual experience. In our case, we have a lot of experience related to streets and addresses. So what better name than something that conveys the level of expertise we have about streets and addresses in general?

New Name, Same Awesome
For us, this name change represents business as usual. And by “business as usual” we mean our continuing to deliver all of the awesome in new, interesting, and fun (un-boring) ways. We hope you enjoy it too. Tell us what you think. We want to hear all of your feedback.

Really.

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As part of our initiative to overhaul our product line and to deliver more business value to our customers, we have recently added the ability to append county information to our CASS Certified Scrubbing product.

Customers have been asking about this for quite awhile. Our original plans were to have “add-on” booster/extension packs that you would purchase for a small fee to append county information and other kinds to your file. By consolidating our product line, the way forward is much more clear than extension packs and add-on “boosters”. Instead of making plug-ins and charging extra for each one, we’ll simply include them for free. Gotta love that, right?

All of this is part of our much larger initiative to vastly simplify and enhance the entire user experience that customers have with us. We want to be your address verification company of choice because we “bring it”, always delivering the value you deserve. Also, rocking the establishment gets everyone—especially us—excited about what we’re doing.

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The next few weeks (and few months for that matter) are going to be very big for Qualified Address. We have a number of significant improvements and changes in the pipeline that we know you’ll love.

In preparation for these changes we have started to somewhat consolidate our product offerings. After careful analysis and consideration of our target market, of customer behavior, and of our interactions with several of our current customers, we have decided to move away from offering NCOA.

Yes, you read that right. We’re going to discontinue offering our NCOA product. First, let me reassure you that this is not a move that we have taken lightly, especially because we have spent several years in development on this product. There were a number of significant factors that contributed to our decision. One of the biggest things that we found was that NCOA is a relatively confusing product; the market perception of what NCOA can do for your address list is somewhat misleading to customers.

The confusion surrounds the need to definitively and precisely identify the individual, family, or company that resides at a particular address. The problem is that NCOA doesn’t actually do this. NCOA does exactly one thing: it gives the new address for a person/family/company, provided that you have an old address. Many take this to mean that you can identify where someone lives. But again, you can’t. To further compound the problem, the NCOA database only contains about four years of history, which means that NCOA will return the same result for someone that moved 4.5 years ago as someone that has never moved: “No Match”. Does this mean John Smith lives at the address provided? Not necessarily.

Furthermore, as part of the NCOA license agreement, the USPS requires us to disclose information to them for all those customers who have purchased NCOA processing. One of the final nails in the NCOA coffin was that we found we were spending an abundant amount of time on the product, both because of the complexity and overhead it imposed for USPS-related reporting, and because of oversight and customer re-education (as a result of the aforementioned misconceptions). The bottom line was clear: NCOA was quickly becoming a big time vacuum for us, and was preventing us from delivering real business value to our customers.

That’s not to say that NCOA doesn’t deliver any business value. It does. It’s just not the expected value that customers want it to deliver, and we found that it was preventing us from moving forward.

Our ultimate goal is to become a single-product company. Crazy, right? While this may sound silly at first, there is actually a good deal of wisdom that can be found herein. With just one single address verification product, you—the customer—can more easily focus on what that one product can do for you and how much of it you want to purchase, rather than trying to understand the difference between the various capabilities of multiple products and their respective pricing schemes. Furthermore, as we introduce new features and capabilities to our “one true product”, you will automatically receive those capabilities at no extra charge. For example, if we decide in the near future to re-introduce NCOA, all customers would receive NCOA at no extra charge. How cool is that?

The next few months are going to be ones of dramatic improvement for the company as we focus our efforts and energies on the great experience we want everyone to have on our website. What do you think? Is this a terrible idea? Should those pushing these changes forward be fired or promoted?

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