Gearing Up for Pygmalion

The codename for the relaunch of servicetattler is "Pygmalion". Pygmalion was a Cypriot sculptor who carved a woman out of ivory. According to Ovid, after seeing the Propoetides prostituting themselves, he was ‘not interested in women’, but his statue was so realistic that he fell in love with it. He offered the statue gifts and eventually prayed to Venus (Aphrodite). She took sympathy with him and brought the statue to life. —wikipedia

LBS has really heated up, and we think we are on to something big, because we are going to allow businesses to give special offers directly to their best customers. You can always opt out, but we think that what facebook did for friends we can do for businesses and customers by giving them access to customer sentiment in the real world in real time, and then providing a way for the two to improve their relationship over time.

So we are creating tools that let businesses track that sentiment, and if they are screwing up, they get instant feedback on when and where it happens. If they are doing good, they can use our service to reward their best customers. Like a frequent flier program, but for the small businesses. More to come soon.


We are trying to do some things to take advantage of cloud computing architecture, loose coupling, EC2 scalability, rolling releases, and ETL as a way to insulate schema changes from release to release.

We plan to use this staging area as a place for us to test the new application base to both our consumers and businesses. More to come on this in the next couple of weeks, but to give a hint we plan to create an opportunity for people to have fun tattling with each other in groups to test the new software, and hopefully get free stuff for doing it.

Hopefully this approach will result in long term flexibility and a great customer experience. Which really is the goal.