Why write a review?

There are two reasons that I decided to write this review. Normally, I choose to review sites I’ve discovered, products that I like, services I think would be of use to my readers. This service certainly matches that criterion.

The second reason is because of what Edward Lejun, the founder of Setster, wrote to me. He explained that he’s worked on the product for about a year, is looking to expand and add new features, and was wondering if I could help him out. As a fellow entrepreneur, I’m happy to oblige, to help another entrepreneur reach success.

The Product

Setster is an online appointment scheduler, which can be added to sites, and allows you, the visitor to the site, to book appointments by seeing the schedule and selecting an available slot. Based on the type of appointment you request, an appropriate amount of time is allocated.

This product certainly has a variety of applications, from making medical or dental appointments, to scheduling dates. This is precisely the type of service I would want if I were running an office and didn’t want to hire an appointment secretary to schedule my day. It lets clients know your availability, it allows you to control your exposure, and clients in general would like to know that when they call, you’ve blocked your schedule to give them your undivided attention.

The price of the service is pretty good too. There’s a free plan, which allows a single user to book up to 10 appointments per month. Upgrading to Pro Personal gives you an additional 40 appointments at $9.95 per month ,while upgrading to Pro Business gives you 300 appointments and 5 user accounts for $29.95 per month. Changes to your account level can be made at any time, subject to certain conditions.

The balance is pretty good, although a change I would recommend is to remove the limit on the Pro Business account in terms of how many appointments are allowed. As a business owner, that’s not something I want to think about (although 300 appointments works out to about 2 appointments per user per day, but in a doctor’s office, for example, that might not be anywhere close to enough).

Because the service was built with the Intuit Workspace, there’s good integration with other Intuit products, specifically, Quickbooks Online. This also will help Edward Lajun reach a large number of potential clients, so growth should occur as long as he maintains the quality of the application.

Where I think the product could use some help is in terms of what information is provided when an appointment is booked. Currently, there are a limited number of fields. Perhaps adding the ability to attach a file to the appointment would be useful, so that additional information can be provided if necessary.

All in all, I believe that Edward Lajun and Setster have built a viable product that will save its users money and hassle, and it’s merely a matter of good exposure that will propel them to great success.

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I was recently given two Kindles by a client as part of a project, and in the process, was able to play around a fair bit with both the large and small Kindle. (For those who are aware, only the smaller of the Kindles is available here in Canada right now, and I had to get the Kindles shipped to me from the US.)

I’ve had the readers for about 6 weeks now, which is more than enough time to discover the joys and, unfortunately, the flaws in the product. However, I’ll let my experience speak for itself.

I first tried reading a normal book on the devices, and found it to be a joy, especially while commuting. I’m not a big fan of writing in books, so the annotation feature and the fact that it’s a tiny, difficult to use keyboard don’t really matter to me. Even while wearing gloves, I could still navigate smoothly, and found that the device does live up the expectation of easy reading in all lighting conditions.

The smaller device is more compact, and therefor my first choice while commuting. However, with only a 6-inch screen, not much text can fit there at once, meaning that you need to scroll constantly to the next screen. The larger version is much larger, and therefore fits more text, but I didn’t like holding it the whole time. (What can I say? I’m lazy, and find the extra few ounces to be too much. Plus, there’s the jostling on the train to deal with, and I’m worried about dropping it.)

What really bugged me, though, is the lack of foreign language support. I wanted to load a text with a mix of English and Hebrew in it, but found that the only way to do that would be to generate a PDF from it, which are not as versatile as generating content in the Amazon format. To me, this one point pushed me to look at other options. Unfortunately, though, Amazon is not alone in its lack of support for foreign languages, and my guess is that it’s only a matter of time before the devices get a software update to support this as well.

For the curious, the screen uses something called digital ink, which means that it’s not affected by ambient light conditions. The larger Kindle can hold about 3,500 books, and the smaller can hold about 1,500. The battery is pretty good, lasting about a week when reading for several hours a day (sorry, I can’t get more specific, as I have not measured it). It connects to the 3G network for downloading content, and you can shop for additional material directly from the Kindle, or order material from the Amazon website and it will be delivered to your Kindle.

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