SmartyStreets Company Blog

Consider the following fact:

Because your usage of our LiveAddress API is (probably) determined by traffic and transactions from your customers, you may not be able to predict if your LiveAddress subscription will have enough credits to match demand in any given month.

The obvious problem here is that, had you been able to predict the future, you might have been able save a good deal of money by purchasing fewer credits. If thoughts like this keep you awake at night, you can rest assured that you will no longer need those sleeping pills! 

While our annual plans are a significant discount compared to the monthly plans, we’d like to ease the financial and logistical burdens further for those users who anticipate high traffic on their sites. To do this, we will now be offering a more accessible and affordable unlimited annual plan.  This plan is available from the LiveAddress product page as well as from your account.  

With this plan you are allowed unlimited LiveAddress usage. Wait, what’s that you ask?

Should LiveAddress subscribers be worried that this offer will become so popular that SmartyStreets’ servers won’t be able to handle the increased load?

How thoughtful of you to ask. Again, no need to lose sleep. Our infrastructure is configured in such a way that it’s very easy for us to augment our processing capacity to meet demand. Bring it on.

Just imagine, once your unlimited annual subscription is activated, the only way you would ever encounter a subscription-related service interruption is if the credit card on your account expires.  Of course,  we will email you a reminder when renewal time approaches so that you’ll have time to update your billing information.

And as an added bonus, those who purchase the unlimited annual LiveAddress subscription are also granted unlimited access to our CASS-Certified Scrubbing service. So what are you waiting for? Sign up today for unlimited address verification, and start saving money.

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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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Even though we’re very satisfied with our new free preview feature, we’re taking this feature to the next level.  

How about this: a nicely rendered preview that doesn’t require you to download a .zip archive, extract the file you want, and then open your favorite spreadsheet application just to see the first 42 records.  So now when you click on the ‘free preview’ link you’ll see something like this:  

(this example is contrived, these aren’t real people)

Neat, huh?  As the picture illustrates, you can still download the preview file as well as the complete list.  This feature is available for any list currently in your account.  What are you waiting for?  Go try out our newest address verification feature!

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For a long time, our address verification customers have had to deal with one extremely wide output file when downloading scrubbed lists.  This meant wading through all sorts of codified mailing industry information just to get to the data you want—the verified addresses!

So, as a solution to this, we’re now providing several files with each download:

• simple-mailable file (yep, this just includes the good addresses)
• simple-duplicates file (yep, you guessed it, just the duplicates)
• simple-rejected file (seeing a pattern?)

These files only include the essential fields needed to get a mailing out the door—such as the Street Address, City, State, ZIP Code, Delivery Point Barcode, and any Name or ID fields you may have provided.

Now, because the address junkies out there are probably starting to bite their nails with anxiety and worry, let us reassure you we are also still providing the same output file we’ve always provided, and it’s now called:

• everything

Pretty simple, huh?

Each of these files is explained in more detail on our wiki, but the best way to familiarize yourself with the new files is to see and use them. So head over to your account, and process a list!

We hope this update simplifies your workflow!

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For a while now, our address scrubbing service has only deducted scrubbing credits from your account when you download the finished list—a huge improvement over the previous method of deducting credits when the list is submitted for processing.  We’ve also been providing a free trial for a long time, but we really haven’t been very proud of the free trial—here’s why:

• You have to go through checkout to get it (even though you’re not charged)
• The free trial only provides 25 credits, which means that your test list can’t have more than 25 addresses
• Once you used up the 25 credits they are gone forever…

So, get ready for something revolutionary!

…Drum roll, please……….

We will now be offering a free downloadable preview for every list you process!  This preview will include the first 42 records from your file.  Gone are the days of a one-time, multi-step, limited free trial!  It’s like you now get a free trial with every list you process!  So, if you’re not satisfied with the address verification results in the preview, you don’t have to download the full output and you’ll never have to pay for that list (you can just delete it from your account using our slick new interface).

We believe that you should feel totally comfortable with what we provide before you make any monetary commitment.  Now, get back to your account and process some lists to see the previews!

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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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