We {heart} our Testers

First up, a big shout out to all our testers! Thanks for all your efforts, the free gifts at the end will all be worth it, not forgetting the bragging rights to depriving us of sleep and outside contact due to all your great bug findings and feature ideas... Here at Groopit HQ, rubber ducks and all, we salute you.

More exciting news - we used Groopit to successfully run an 'ask the audience' style pitch event ("Pitch and Mix") here at the University of Edinburgh last night. After each budding student entrepreneur's talk, members of the audience voted over text message whether to award 1,2 or 3 points and the winner got a bottle of champagne. Marvelous! It was our largest live poll yet, so we're very excited that it worked.

In other news, the Stanford Baseball I brought back from California last week is wreaking havoc on office health and safety, but that's another story...

Refresh Edinburgh

The whole groopit team had the pleasure of attending Refresh Edinburgh yesterday, an informal event for the web development community in and around Edinburgh. The setting turned out to be how we'd pictured our dream office one day - wooden floors and wacky play-things everywhere, and the atmosphere was just right for the healthy banter and discussion we'd all come for.

There were some interesting talks, a few of which really did a good job of passing on some well-learned and transferable lessons (including James and Alex from GoogleSightseeing.com and Meri Williams on project management for busy geeks, amongst others). On the other hand, some talks were shameless plugs to get people to sign up to the speaker's website. Well, actually, that was just our talk. But we hope people enjoyed our presentation and the rubber duck throwing. It was wonderful to get some positive comments and suggestions for important points to think about from the people there. We're currently looking to build a community of understanding early users and we're hoping some of the folk who heard us at Refresh will help us out there. We just need to think of something to do with the left over ducks...

All credit to Matt and John for organising the thing, we're all looking forward to loads more Refresh events in the future.

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.