Archive for April, 2008

Milestones

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

We pushed a big ‘ol batch of code to the site last night and are totally excited about the raft of new features and enhancements (not to mention the fact that users can now create projects!).

We are aware that some of our bugs are showing and will be working hard to get those fixed as we approach our two critical milestones. The next big step for us is to invite into our closed Beta a large group of users who have been waiting patiently behind the velvet rope at the door to the site. We want to make sure that we have in place all of the features and enhancements that we have planned pre-launch and that everything is working, polished, and shiny for their arrival. Once they’re in we’ll take a few days to watch the system, see how it behaves under the additional stress and fix any issues that inevitably pop up.

Of course the ultimate milestone is our public launch. We anticipate that we will throw the doors open to the public in the next couple of weeks and are excited about that prospect. It has certainly been a long road for Ross and me and for the team and we are looking forward to the celebration.

The Forums are open for our Beta testers and we’d love to hear what you think and what we can do better. Come on in!

Two-Point-O rising

Monday, April 7th, 2008

We have been working very hard on version 2.0 of our Beta. The “new and improved” crowdSPRING, while still under wraps, will accomplish several important things for us:

1. It will incorporate a full visual redesign, driven by the new homepage design we chose at the end of our public competition,
2. It will greatly simplify our underlying architecture and navigation. We very much believe that the site will be simpler and more intuitive for users to find their way around, and
3. It will (finally) incorporate functionality we have been working on, but that has not yet been switched on.

We had originally planned to launch the crowdSPRING beta site at the end of November. That became January 2nd, then January 31st, then February 15th. When we ultimately launched the Beta on the 4th of March we thought that it would take us 4-6 weeks to get to a public launch. Looks like we’ll make it in 7 (though barely), with April 14th as our goal. But, deadlines are made for the breaking – and our eyes are focused on the prize: a crowdSPRING that is fun, simple, and powerful.

If all goes well for the next 40 hours or so, we will upload the 2.0 version this Wednesday (BTW – the site will be down for a period of time while we migrate data, etc). Our beta participants will see a radically different interface and we are anticipating a lot of feedback in the form of complaints (be gentle, please); suggestions (be creative, please); and bug reports (hopefully not too many, please).

Stick around… cool stuff to come.