Constant Contact Is Phasing Out Bantam Live

Got this email from Constant Contact:

Hi stowe,

Thanks for letting us share the latest updates with you. We’ve certainly been busy here at Constant Contact since our February acquisition of Bantam Live. And over the next year, we’ll be transitioning and integrating Bantam Live’s technology into our new contact management and marketing engagement services for small businesses.

As part of that transition process, our plans call for a phasing out of the current version of Bantam Live by July 1, 2011. Your account, of course, will remain free to use until then. And because you’re a valued customer, we intend to provide you with a significant discount when we release the new product in the first half of 2012.

In the days and weeks ahead, you’ll need to export all the data from your Bantam Live account. But don’t worry. We’ve upgraded our world-class support to make this process as seamless as possible. If you have any problems, we’re here to help. Just email support@bantamlive.com.

We apologize for this short-term inconvenience. And we look forward to delivering a powerful new product set next year to help you connect with your customers and grow your business.

Please log in to your account to learn more in the special Q&A section.

Thank you,

The Constant Contact Team

I covered Bantam Live in the Streams In Business Report (available free online at the present time), and thought at the time that the tool was vey interesting. I guess Constant Contact thinks so too, since the are integrating the techbnology into their going forward plans for the company. It’s a bit disruptive to shut down a service that users have come to rely on, however, even if the company doesn’t want to keep supporting users on a platform that will be undergoing significant changes.

Free Access To ‘Streams In Business Report’ This Week Only

To celebrate the launch of Podio tonight (at the Podio Store, 224 6th in San Francisco) I am going to provide free access to my report, Streams In Business, this week only. The report provides in-depth scenario-based evaluations of the following products: Podio, Bantam Live, Cohuman, Flowr, IBM Connections, Mangoapps, Socialcast, and Yammer.

Here’s one comment about Podio, from the report:

The combination of rich user-defined or user-customizable applications and Podio’s mechanisms for easily filtering the datasets being managed by their apps seems to be to be an amazingly powerful environment for managing everyday workflows, and sharing the stream of activities that form the basis of today’s work.

If you’d like to read just the Podio chapter, it is accessible here. It may be helpful to read the scenarios description that I use to evaluate the products in the report, here.

The full report is managed in a Box.net folder, located at http://www.box.net/shared/ko7v7z6gvr and the password to open it is ‘antimony’. Box.net supports download an entire folder, or you can download the files independently.

Please leave comment or questions on this blog post, if you’d like.