Invitations and information - here's the new version of Allies!

In the latest version of Allies, we’ve focused on two things; Invitations and Information.

Two areas that we’ve been dying to get to over the last year. But as in any endeavour strapped for cash, you have to do things in a particular order. We’ve spent the previous nine months turning Allies into a very stable platform. Now it is time to address the bottlenecks; inviting others to the service and filling ut up with useful information.

As the fundamental idea of Allies is simplified sharing, our job is to make it happen. With this installation, we think we’ve accomplished that.

First off, as of today, you can import information from any given calendar (or school app or sports app for your teams) into Allies. As long as your service offers the possibility to subscribe to it (either to your Microsoft Exchange, Google or IOS-calendar, you’re in business.

However, subscribing to a calendar sounds more convenient than it is. Not too many people are doing it, and to stop a subscription is even harder.

In Allies, one person subscribes on behalf of the whole group and all events are then added to the timeline. After doing so, each individual chooses what to save to their phones. Next up is simplifying how to find the proper calendar feed for each group. It is currently in the works, so hang on.

Right, on to Invitations.

We are all familiar with the standard way of inviting someone to a service; firing off an email or a text with a link. However, from our perspective, it is not 100 % satisfactory. Even though email has experienced a renaissance over the last couple of years, it is still a concept laden with problems. Links sometimes get corrupted. Emails are sent straight to the spam folder. Simply put, email was never meant for more than words (kudos to anyone that catches the lame reference), so we added another version - QR-codes.

In a previous life, in advertising, I fought hard for QR-codes. But it was too soon. The software, hard ware and user behaviour simply was not there, rendering QR-codes useless. But today all of the above is, and we humans use them more and more.

That is why we’ve added the option to invite others to Allies by using QR-codes. Each group in Allies has its code, all you do is share it, scan it, and that person next to you is on board. Or share the code for your group on social media for others to scan. It’s that easy.