getting to know us, and... Alastair Campbell

The weeks are really flying by here. Can't believe the blog started on Monday, and since then we've done some very useful user trials, been to the International Student Enterprise Summit (where we heard Alastair Campbell, amongst others, speak), met some cool new people and setup meetings with more, and done so much development that we're almost ready to put the site out there for general sign ups. One of the coolest latest editions is that we've adopted a more 'blog'-based approach to the activity log on the group's internal homepage (rather than boxing things up) and it's looking great. If that doesn't mean much to you it will when you sign up and see it!

Just to fill you in a bit more on our situation, we're based at the ETTC at the University of Edinburgh, UK. We're a team of four very handsome, very dedicated, very over-worked (which tends to affect the handsomeness) guys trying hard to complete the site for a launch to some friends and colleagues soon. We're all really looking forward to just putting it out there and seeing how it gets used. The aim is that it'll help the groups that use it do more together more easily, but it'll only do that well once we've heard from as many of our users as possible. Watch this space!

I wanted to go into a bit more history but it's actually time to deploy the latest version for a bit more testing before hitting the pub, so let's leave that for another post.

groopit gets a blog

So when this lunchtime, chicken baguette in hand, we discovered other people had been blogging about groopit we thought we'd better get our act together and do some ourselves. Sorry, what I meant to say (for the benefit of would-be investors, funding bodies and parents) was that joining the blogosphere with a corporate blog was part of groopit's online marketing strategy from the beginning, and it was just coincidence that its timetabled launch date of 5th March 2007 coincided with the first online chatter about our humble site for groups arising from the weekend's demo at BarCamp Scotland. That sounds better.

I plan to post the ins and outs, ups and downs, and tasty teasers of what we're doing here at groopit HQ, and from our uncertain beginnings here and now I hope some tales from the road ahead will prove an interesting lunchtime read for you.