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Alpa Agarwal

LavaBlast Software develops custom fully integrated line-of-business applications for the franchise industry.

LavaBlast Software Inc. is a Canadian startup that builds software for the franchise industry. They’ve developed several easy-to-use software applications that are deployed in retail franchise locations and have integrated these with FranchiseBlast, their centralized management solution.

By Alpa Agarwal on Sat, 09/12/09 - 7:04pm.

LavaBlast develops custom software solutions for the franchise industry, spanning self-serve interactive kiosks, point-of-sale systems, and the franchisor & franchisee's e-commerce web sites. These systems are integrated through a web-based, hosted application, FranchiseBlast. FranchiseBlast allows franchisors and franchisees to collaborate. For example, they can change store pricing, update their respective web sites, view sales reports, manage leads and frequent buyer programs, and so on.

LavaBlast already has about half-a-dozen customers, all small or medium sized franchises. What is so interesting about this company is that one of the co-founders wrote software applications to help put him through college. One of his customers was a franchise. This led him to found the company to serve the unmet need. The other interesting thing about this company is their integration of kiosks, point-of-sale systems and e-commerce enabled web sites, allowing their solutions to scale to a large customer-set.

One of LavaBlast's key claims to fame is that because they understand the needs of small and medium-sized franchises, their software is customizable to limit the feature set. This makes it easy-to-use, in turn lowering training costs.

LavaBlast runs on Microsoft SQL Server for which the Microsoft C# data access layer is auto-generated by the SubSonic open source project. The web-based applications are built using ASP.net and JQuery.

 

About The Social Enterprise

Alpa Agarwal is Director, Product Marketing at eBay Inc. In her role she works with the engineering team to release new features to enhance the shopping user experience on eBay.com. Prior to eBay, Alpa worked with the engineering team at Microsoft's MSN.com to release new social & community features, working with partners such as Facebook.

Alpa has also held marketing communications roles in Microsoft's developer division working with startups.

Prior to that, Alpa led a global team at Microsoft to identify market trends. She regularly advised Microsoft’s senior leadership team, including Bill Gates, resulting in new acquisitions, technology investments and strategic corporate shifts.

Prior to joining Microsoft, Alpa founded MarketingCafe.com, an online community for marketers. She also worked at Sprint where she built a successful new product pipeline.

Alpa has taught in various Executive MBA programs, authored numerous articles and been quoted in international business journals. She has an MBA from the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Alpa is based in Silicon Valley and can be reached at Alpa@AlpaAgarwal.com.

 

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