CUBED: A home-grown tablet for education, and expanding your office with AT&T

Today I’m headed back to school in my hometown of Baltimore, MD, to meet the people behind the software 1sqbox (One Square Box). 1sqbox created tablet-centric software that connects teachers, students, and even the school administration together so everyone can see what’s going on inside the school all through a single tablet interface. The software works with students of all ages from K-12, but 1sqbox also created the tablet itself so it’s an all-in-one solution! The founders have done all that, and more—they’re also taking on the responsibility of handling all of the training as well and with the business growing its becoming harder and harder to communicate with everyone they’re working with in an efficient way.

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Mario Armstrong’s CUBED — Pronto Forms

It’s not often I’m told that when visiting a business I need to pack some old boots! But business today isn’t all clean office environments and suits—it’s dirty work too, like Veteran Compost in Aberdeen, Maryland. Justen Garrity, founder of Veteran Compost, is a veteran of the Iraq war who came back after the crash to find there were no jobs and no real sources of employment left for him. Working a day job and on the weekends while going to school at night, Justen built an amazing business collecting food scraps from local businesses and turning them into compost for local farms to purchase.

Like a lot of businesses, Justen tracks almost everything on paper—pickup times, compost temperatures, almost everything is written down and stored in manila envelopes. While this is fine for a business that’s just getting started, as your business grows you have more and more information you’re trying to process and handle. Enter Pronto Forms from AT&T. Pronto Forms is all about eliminating paperwork and digitizing all of the forms your employees fill our so that you can store everything in a single location and access it quickly and easily. Employees can even capture photographs or signatures on the go! If you’re on the fence, the cool thing is that you can try Pronto Forms for free for 30 days and see if it will really work for your business.

Mario Armstrong’s CUBED — AT&T Connect

In this episode of CUBED, I visit Barb at Clapp Communications, a boutique public relations agency. Barb is having trouble communicating with a team split between two offices, one in Baltimore and the other in Charlotte, with employees constantly traveling all over the map to meet each other and to meet with clients. Does this situation sound familiar? These days, offices are much more decentralized and connecting everyone on your team regularly and reliably can be difficult.

Enter AT&T Connect. Connect is an integrated audio, web, and video conferencing solution that can help to bring your team together and help you work more efficiently when everyone can’t be in the same place at the same time. With low per-minute costs and deep integration with Outlook, AT&T connect provides conference tools no matter what platforms and devices your business uses, whether its PC, Mac, Android, iPhone, iPad or Android. But it’s more than just a Skype alternative—AT&T Connect brings in tons of features like whiteboarding, shared presentations, and file sharing to make an AT&T Connect meeting just as productive and useful as a real world one. Plus, if some colleagues or clients can’t make it to the meeting, the whole thing can be recorded and shared via email! How great is that?