Videocast company update

In this linked video, F3 Technologies, Inc.’s officers give a range of updates on F3 the company, on its individual software platforms — including expanded revenue models — and even on a new product that we aim to roll out in the next few months, Website Tournament. We look forward to posting more videos like these occasionally. Please feel free to share them via e-mail, social media such as Twitter and Facebook, and especially via your own channel on FargoTube.

F3 exec discusses property-management platform in interview

Tune in to hear F3 Chief Operating Officer Paul Campbell and Tony Golden discussing advances in our Interaction Community Systems online communications and management application for homeowners associations and churches.

Paul explains how we’ve refocused Interaction‘s business model to expand our marketing outreach: automated registration and online demos in order to reach out to churches and individual HOAs in a manner that’s both more convenient for them and more cost-effective for us. This will also allow us more time to target property-management companies, thus reaching “not 100, but 1,000 or 10,000”  HOAs, as Paul put it.

Example management dashboard

Paul and Tony discuss the key function we’ve introduced for management companies: the ICS management dashboard. A dashboard is sort of a internal home page — the first screen that you see after logging into an online platform, which gives you an overview of all the functions available to you. I saw mine in WordPress after logging on and just before clicking through to create this post. F3 developed the management dashboard with input from property managers who want to get a more thorough and immediate understanding of what’s happening and what needs to be done in each of their HOAs.

ICS’s new automation, new marketing focus, new dashboard coincide with new payment processing capabilities and an updated and newly redesigned website. Please check it out after listening to Paul’s interview if you haven’t done so already.

Newly automated sign-up process for ICS

Homeowner associations, property managers and churches can now create online communities in Interaction Community Systems with just a few clicks, thanks to a major update to ICS that live earlier this week.

We expect the automation to encourage more groups to create communities and begin using ICS. Moreover, this frees up time for F3 Technologies staff to focus on expanding the reach of all of our platforms, for example FargoTube and its potential to help musicians and other artists to develop their careers.

We included a few more details in the press release we put out this morning.

The update has been in development for several months and in intensive testing for a couple of weeks. We’ve added several new features along the way. All of this amounts big benefits — for ICS users, potential users, and for F3 Technologies.

New features in Interaction Community Systems

F3 makes a point of continually revising and updating all three of its major platforms. Most recently, that has meant adding several new features to Interaction Community Systems. ICS now has everything from accounting and babysitting requests to recipe lists and video galleries. You can see several user views in this screenshot gallery.

We’re also adding new tools that allow professionals to manage multiple communities simply and efficiently. You can see these and other features of ICS’s management platform here.

Answers to several questions about ICS

F3 investors and readers have this blog have posed several good questions about Interaction Community Systems this week, so I’ll take a crack at answering them here.

We’ve continued to add new communities to ICS at a pace comparable to the modest pace we saw through 2009 and early 2010. Our current sales pipeline leads us to believe that this pace will continue for the next couple of months.

We believe the pace will pick up substantially this year after we introduce automation that makes registration easier and faster for individual communities and even property management companies with multiple communities. We’re on track to complete the automation and have it active by early February.

When the automation is active, we plan to beef up marketing for ICS, with a particular focus on direct marketing to property managers. One aspect of the update will let ICS users select communications and accounting modules. This will mean additional flexibility for our clients, more clients, and more revenue for F3 Technologies.

Focusing on F3’s three platforms

A regular reader asked us yesterday about F3’s three main platforms — Interaction Community Systems, FargoTube and the Interactive Defense System — and how we’re dividing our resources among them. It was a good question, so I’m posting the answer here.

While we continue to update and refine all three periodically, we have been putting somewhat more time into FargoTube and IDS than into ICS because the first two are new platforms and we’ve made a point of getting them up to speed. Furthermore, we believe these two are cutting-edge platforms. The markets for them are brand-new, with significant upsides, so it has been important to move quickly.

In contrast, Interaction Community Systems is one of several online management platforms for homeowners associations and other membership groups, and the relatively saturated state of that market may moderate ICS’s potential for growth.

Nonetheless, we believe ICS has significant advantages over its competitors, including the integrated nature of its accounting, paymenting, communications and management functions; and lower price points. These strengths make ICS an especially useful platform for property managers who want to manage and interact with their various communities efficiently. For this reason and because property managers have lower acquisition costs per dollar of revenue, we have been focusing more heavily on selling to property managers than to individual communities.

Additionally, we believe ICS is benefiting indirectly from our new focus on the IDS platform. IDS’s adoption by a city or law-enforcement agency acclimates residents of that city to an interface that is very similar to that of ICS. The two platforms can be linked quite easily in areas where community associations and public-safety agencies are using them.

Conference call recording

Thank you to all of you who participated in our conference call yesterday afternoon. For those who weren’t able to join us, we’re providing a link to the recording.

Updates on updates to FargoTube and Interaction Community Systems

An F3 investor asked me whether we’ve finished streamlining the processes of creating a community on Interaction Community Systems and uploading content to FargoTube.  The answer is “no,” but we’re getting close, and we expect both updates to go live in mid-October.

The gist of the Interaction update is that homeowners associations, property managers, churches and other membership-based groups can set up their online communities without having to call us. A community representative enters its information — including members’ names, addresses, and e-mail addresses — and can start using Interaction almost immediately. The representative also provides credit-card information, though we don’t charge during an initial 30-day trial period.

The new process will save us staff time, and we believe most clients will find it much more convenient, though they’re still welcome to call us if and when they need assistance.

The FargoTube update goes beyond the streamlining of content acquisition, but I’ll discuss only that one aspect here and now:

The new interface will walk the content owner through the process step by step. It will focus on the content, rather than the social network built around that content. Content owners will still have the option to create social networks — known as “fan sites” — around their content, either immediately or later, and we strongly encourage that because it helps to make FargoTube a unique experience for fans. But we also want to keep the content owner from feeling overwhelmed at the beginning.

The site’s new organization will also encourage users to check out videos that they might not have discovered otherwise, for example by displaying links to the fan sites of artists in the same genre as what the user has been viewing.

In the meantime, a new module to go live within a few days will allow content owners to set up online stores to sell t-shirts, coffee mugs and other paraphernalia.

Busy news day for F3’s HOA management platform

Two pieces of big news today for Interaction Community Systems, our platform for managing communications and finances for homeowners associations.

You may have seen our press release this morning about our new relationship with TransFirst, the national payment processor. TransFirst processes $30 billion in transactions annually. The company has a special focus on community banks, which the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. defines as institutions with assets of less than $1 billion. HOAs and property managers are local entities by definition, making them bread-and-butter customers for community banks. So it’s safe to assume that several million of the $30 billion is in the form of HOA dues and HOAs’ payments to landscapers, roofers, plumbers, property managers and other vendors. The Interaction platform probably won’t be exposed immediately to all of that, but F3 will try to expand the relationship if all goes well.

Fewer of you probably saw Interaction mentioned in the fifth paragraph of the August 20 article in the Chicago Tribune (circulation 515,000) about the trend toward automation and digitization among HOAs and property managers. I myself saw it just this morning.

Here’s the article’s “nut graf,” journalistic lingo for the summary paragraph following the lead-in anecdote about a paperless property manager:

“Over the past decade, community associations have been performing more and more of their operational tasks electronically. Owners go online to pay assessments, request maintenance, read the monthly newsletter and download the rules. Managers move money, solicit bids and send reports. Procedures like these save money and labor by providing easy storage and transfer of information and less time spent on the telephone.”

It’s worth noting that Interaction performs all of the tasks that I italicized in the passage above, and a lot more. It also lets administrators prepare accounting reports for analysis, and includes several functions found in more purely social networks — messaging, “walls” and photo sharing, for example.

Stepping through the gates of HOA paradise

Our sales team was in south Florida this week, drumming up new clients for Interaction Community Systems, our online platform for managing homeowners associations’ communications and finances.

Paul and Stephanie met with three property-management companies. To some extent, these represent a new sort of growth for Interaction because a property manager almost always represents multiple HOAs, frequently paying based on the number of HOAs. These three manage a total of about 50.

“It’s always been a focus for us in the past,” Paul told me this morning after returning to Atlanta. “We just hadn’t had the opportunity” to approach as many property managers as we’re doing now. One of the three companies was referred from a bank where we’ve worked to establish relationships.

Another of the three, the smallest, signed with us after seeing an advertisement on a news and advocacy website for HOAs across the nation. The ad campaign is one of several new marketing initiatives that F3 has launched this year for its online services.

The new client is a new property-management company that has one HOA and expects to add four or five by the end of the year and 20 or so in 2011. The second company has 40 HOAs, and the third has a half-dozen or so.

I think these three companies are a pretty good illustration of Interaction’s flexibility. Individual HOAs can use it to self-manage for as little as $25 a month. Property managers can create an online community for each HOA they manage, and usually receive a 10-15 percent discount. F3 also offers a modified version of Interaction that churches can use to manage membership rosters, communications, donations and expenses.

Florida is a particularly important growth market for Interaction because of its sheer number of HOAs–I’ve seen figures as high as 20,000. The new client is our first in southern Florida, adding to the 120 communities that Interaction has in Georgia and elsewhere.