Covering Bases

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Welcome Eden Halperin!

We’re thrilled to welcome Eden Halperin to the Airtable team. After stints as the lead designer at Base CRM and senior designer and engineer at Mapbox, he’s joining Airtable as our new Director of Product and Design. A St Louis native and graduate of the Liberal Arts and Management program at Indiana University Bloomington, when Eden isn’t in the office he enjoys biking, tinkering with product ideas, and spending time with his Vizsla, Benji.

As a designer, Eden loves working on simplifying complex user experiences. He learned to code at a young age, building subjectively beautiful websites with Dreamweaver, and still believes that designers should learn to code, if only to better understand their medium. At Airtable, he’s excited to help transform the experience of working with structured data on the web.

Eden’s Vizsla, Benji.

Want to work with Eden and the rest of the Airtable team? We’re hiring.

How a Full-Time Mother and Home Educator Finds Balance Using Airtable

From a field trip in the Smoky Mountains.

“We wanted to customize the learning experiences for our children around the things that are most important to our family,” says Krista Wanderman, home educator and mother of two. “Homeschooling also offered the flexibility to arrange our schedule,” she adds.

The Apex of Event Organization: How Siemer and Associates Uses Airtable

Each fall, a select group of influential figures and executives from across the digital media and technology industries descends upon Southern California.

Over the course of two days at the Siemer Summit, they hear from 30 featured speakers and 116 entrepreneurs presenting their new companies; participate in countless roundtable discussions; and celebrate the Wavemaker Awards, a culminating ceremony that draws on 50 judges from across the industry to awards startups in categories like “IPO of the Year” and “Most disruptive company brought to scale.” (Last year’s winner was Tinder.)

The exclusive event not only builds relationships for its host, Siemer and Associates, a boutique merchant bank offering financial guidance to leading internet and digital media companies, but it also provides a space for key players in different industries to meet, exchange ideas and learn from each other.

For Sura Hart, Marketing Manager at Siemer and lead organizer for the event, it means a whole lot of work.

Introducing Calendar View

Okay, we’re not saying we’re basing our product roadmap on the technological achievements of the ancient Babylonians or anything, but it does seem right that after nailing down records management for the post-clay-tablet era, we’re moving on to calendars.

Starting today, you’ll see a new view type nestled beside forms and grids: calendar! When you create a new calendar view, you can pick a date field to plot your records on a monthly calendar.

See your publication schedule in calendar form in just a few clicks.

Using Airtable to manage editorial content

Editorial calendars are an indispensable tool for streamlining the entire publishing process and ensuring a consistent output of content. From brainstorming ideas, to sending drafts off for editing, to managing art assets, to scheduling and rescheduling articles—a good editorial calendar can make your publication-related tasks a whole lot easier.

A New View of Arts Organization

The following post comes courtesy of author and database expert Stuart Gripman. Gripman has been wrangling databases for over two decades, first at FileMaker and later as the founder of Crooked Arm Consulting, a database consulting firm that has helped everyone from the U.S. space program to fine art patrons, system administrators, digital projection cinemas, vintners, oenophiles, aspiring mixologists, data recovery practitioners, architects, commercial artists, and a Grammy award-winning ensemble. He’s the author of multiple books on FileMaker, including the beloved ‘Missing Manual’ series.

One of the greatest advantages Airtable holds over spreadsheets and documents is real-time multi-user access to all the information in a Base. It’s easy to grasp how compelling that is, but wielding it effectively sometimes requires a little planning. Multiple users usually means multiple roles, each with its own needs. Showing all the information to all the users all the time is inefficient and potentially problematic. So how do we give each job role just enough information to achieve their objectives? Views.

Students, meet your match: How ScholarMatch made Airtable work for them, Part 2

This is the second of a two-part series on ScholarMatch. For more on ScholarMatch, and their use of Airtable for managing donations, see Part 1.

Getting with the program

The barriers faced by ScholarMatch’s students aren’t just financial. More often than not, aspiring college graduates from low-income backgrounds lack access to the counseling services necessary to get through the college admissions process successfully. How do you write a personal statement that’ll impress an admissions committee? Ace the standardized tests? And if you get accepted, how do you navigate the labyrinthine systems of financial aid applications?

Students, meet your match: How ScholarMatch made Airtable work for them, Part 1

The story in four sentences

Background: ScholarMatch, a small nonprofit serving underprivileged students by crowdfunding college scholarships, started using an Airtable database as an inexpensive and flexible software solution for managing donors and donations. As the organization grew larger, and broadened its mission to include comprehensive college counseling services, ScholarMatch was able to easily adapt its database to fit its changing needs.

How they’re using Airtable: ScholarMatch keeps all the information related to their students, donors, donations, program schedules and attendance, volunteers, alumni, press mentions, and much, much more in a comprehensive database, which allows them to see quickly how these different categories are interconnected in meaningful ways.

Why it matters: Especially for a nonprofit without the budget to pay for an outside tech consultant to set up custom database software, Airtable provides a solution which is robust enough to handle complex problems and versatile enough to scale with a growing organization.

How Yext stays ahead of the competition with Airtable

When Howard Lerman founded Yext in 2006, his goal was simple: “build an impactful, great company with super talented people.” That mission has fueled the company for ten years, from its early days offering lead generation for local businesses, through its pay-per-call technology, which it spun off under the name Felix and sold to IAC, to its present-day status as the leading provider of location data management services to businesses of all sizes worldwide.

Welcome Jonathan Hsieh!

We’re delighted to welcome Jonathan as the newest member of the Airtable team, where he’s joining us as a marketing manager. Previously, Jonathan led product marketing at Sift Science and worked as a consultant to Fortune 500 companies in the TMT (technology, media, and media) sectors at Altman Vilandrie & Company. In his spare time, Jonathan enjoys hiking, testing out new recipes in the kitchen, and exploring the hidden gems of San Francisco.

The Right Sort of API Updates

Today we released some improvements to our API designed to improve the way you can list and select records.

With these new parameters, you can filter, sort and otherwise limit the number of records returned in a more precise way.

Welcome Katherine Duh!

We’re excited to bring Katherine Duh onto the Airtable team as a marketing manager. She’s been thoroughly converted by the awesome power of databases and is looking forward to upgrading her scattered collections of confusing spreadsheets.

Introducing the Airtable iPad App

Update: Airtable is officially a featured productivity app in the App Store for both iPhone and iPad!

Today, we introduce our new iPad app. It’s only been a few weeks since we launched our redesigned iPhone application (check it out!) but this is something different: an entirely new way of organizing and interacting with the information that matters most to you.

A Brief History of Barcodes

1948

It’s 1948 and Norman Joseph Woodland has a problem. A graduate student at Drexel Institute of Technology, he’s supposed to be teaching— but he can’t stop thinking about a simple problem: how to automatically distinguish between products at checkout. After a few false starts involving ink that glows under UV light, he quits his job and cashes out of the stock market to pursue his ideas. Soon, with a novel combination of existing technologies including Morse Code and a 1920s-era system for playing movie soundtracks, he’s able to create (and interpret) the first linear barcode. It’s too expensive, and the lightbulb necessary to help read the barcode is so hot and bright it could cause eye damage, but it works.