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We reached the 1000 commits milestone!

Written by Swizec Teller on August 18, 2010

Deciding to launch LazyReadr this September has made for one hectic fun-filled and not very relaxing summer.

As a result Hamax made the 1000th commit to our svn repository yesterday. And I owe him a batch of home made muffins for it even though at least 50% of all the commits were mine, but hey, that’s how bounties work right?

The repo was created a year ago when the then-team switched from working on Twitulater to working on something completely new and applying to Seedcamp. The product and the idea sucked big time and we didn’t get much further than the Seedcamp shortlistings. But it was the beginning of something much greater. It was the beginning of an era.

Our mission: understand the internet!

The first attempt looked a bit like this:

But that didn’t work out very well and we scrapped the idea right after we got back from London. We then tried to make a tool for sharing stuff online. Surely that way we’ll be able to understand what goes on in this crazy world right?

Here’s what it looked like at first when it was a Firefox add-on:

Yep, not very appetizing at all. But it got a lot better with our second attempt:

This one got us into the mini Seedcamp finals at Prague. That was lots of fun.

But then summer rolled in and we realized that, hey, it’s time to go after the big one. Let’s make that LazyReadr we’ve been talking about for ages. And let’s make it an iPad app too! Yeah!

Wooo.

So we’re making it. We totally are. And it’s going right to the App Store this September. That’s in like two weeks or something! And then we’re taking it to Silicon Valley in October … but that’s a different story.

And last but not least, here’s a lovely visualization of everything that went on throughout all of these fun times. You can see team members coming and going, you can see when we’re really working hard, when university takes its toll …. oh yeah, a lot can be deduced from these strange floating names [developers] and blobs [files-theyre-working-on] and everything. Quite a lot.

First 1000 revisions of Preona from preona on Vimeo.

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Our very awesome countdown board is quite awesome

Written by Swizec Teller on July 21, 2010

Last night, or quite possibly two nights ago, I was very bored at night. So much so that I watched Street Customs on Discovery Channel. For those who don’t know, it’s a show about a very cool entrepreneur who got a 3000$ loan from his gramps and transformed them into a huge worldwide car customising business in a few short years.

Brilliant guy; the show though isn’t quite up my alley.

Anyhow, watching that I noticed they’re using a very cool motivation device in their shop. Up just below the ceiling is a plastic timebomb-like device with a giant LCD display counting down days, hours, minutes and seconds until the deadline.

It’s a great way to put some pressure on the team. Everyone can see how little time is left. The countdown timer is a whole lot different from some insane boss/founder/CEO person who keeps urging you along and saying how little time there’s left. Hell, sometimes even that guy might have trouble feeling the pressure.

Introduce the timer!

Therefore the next natural step was taking one of our whiteboards at Preona and turning it into a huge Countdown Board. Huger even that the one Ryan Friedlinghaus uses at West Coast Customs. We weren’t using it much anyway because the sofa gets in the way of comfortable writing.

But to make things even more interesting … our Countdown Board includes a list of the bigger milestones we have to pass before the time runs out :)

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Preona is giving away free iPads!

Written by Swizec Teller on July 14, 2010
Behold the iPad in All Its Glory
Image via Wikipedia

Carving out a niche for yourself in the modern online world is extremely difficult we reckong it might be a dash easier to do in an upcoming market that’s not quite well formed yet and then working on from there.

This is why we are bringing our awesomeness to the iPad. (and I also happen to be writing this from one)

Determined as hell to come out of the woodwork with LazyReadr by the end of the summer, we are still missing one crucial ingredient in the mix.

Alfa/beta testers!

But good testers are difficult to find! So here’s the deal: if you volunteer to help us with testing and discovering what users like, we are giving you an iPad.

For at least a week you get to live with our app and our iPad, then tell us what it was like. We might even buy you a beer to help you talk.

Then, at the end of the summer, our favourite tester gets to keep the iPad forever.

Naturally we also accept testers who already own an iPad. You just get a beer-two-three though :)

We’re officially starting testing in two weeks, so drop us a line in the comments, via twitter or by email if you’re interested in becoming our awesome test bunny.

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London startup expedition

Written by Swizec Teller on July 5, 2010
The "nostalgic tram" no. 91 runs thr...
Image via Wikipedia

Just shy of a fortnight ago we participated in a Slovenian startup expedition to London. It was a day of great historical events and magnificent happenings.

Slovenia got pushed out of the world cup of footballs.

But other than that the expedition was a whole lot of fun. We got to meet a lot of people we talked to at the Prague Seedcamp, awesomer still, some of them remembered us from as far back as the Seedcamp shortlistings in London last September. That was very awesome indeed, shows we’re doing something right.

And we love doing stuff right.

Other than that we got a great opportunity to find out we’re actually getting competent at pitching what we’re doing … at least a little bit … well enough that people commented they really liked our presentation. But not enough for people to start taking their checkbooks out and giving us money.

Oh well.

But there was one very important thing we got out of the whole experience. It was the fact that we need to stop being silly about what we’re doing. We need to board ourselves up in the basement for the next two months and make something. Just being great looking and awesome blokes all around will not be enough for the Silicon Valley trip this autumn. Not by far.

That’s why we’re buying an iPad or two in the upcoming weeks.

But more about that some other time :)

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Summer is here

Written by Peter Čuhalev on June 18, 2010
Sun Catcher

Image by ecstaticist via Flickr

Warm weather, sun and rain outside, but we keep on working and developing at preona. Last few months were really quite busy, we developed a new LazySharer interface which we will release soon. There are a few beta testers already out there and if you want to try it out, do drop us a comment and you’ll get a chance to test it.

We have also an updated team, we are now a team of four. We got a new Backend and Frontend programmers so that we can focus and develop more efficiently.

Our next product has also gone into development – LazyReadr. It’s your personal online journalist. Its focus is to condense and give you just the news you actually want to read, without the unneeded sorting by yourself. It does so by observing the user and some clever AI algorithms in the back. We’ll show and tell more at a later time.

As far as how the company is doing, it received a government grant this week. So we now have some initial founding to further develop our products.

That is for now, more news next week, after we come back from pitching to VCs in London, where we are going through Slovenian Chamber of Commerce and Brezmejnik competition.

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Public Profiles for LazySharer launched

Written by Peter Čuhalev on April 28, 2010

Public Profile of LazySharerLast few weeks, we have been working hard on a new feature you can also share and show others. That are your own personal public profiles. If you ever used LazySharer then you have one. To locate it, share a new link and then click on your avatar icon in LazyBar to get to it, and yes it’s temporary till we roll out all the features.

On a Public Profile (this one is mine), you can see all the links you shared, the info about if your friends shared the same link and other things also in LazyBar, plus an addition of statistics of clicks on your links if you hover the “pie” icon. We give you all the tags you used and you can filter through them for the best recipes. To not be only a list, there are also Badges to be won for different shares and sharers. But more on badges next time.

For now go and check your profile and please give us some feedback. Is there any more stats you would like to see, something more, maybe less? We’ll appreciate your comments.

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LazyBar, shortener and updates

Written by Peter Čuhalev on April 12, 2010

So what has been happening around with preona lately. No we haven’t fallen asleep, but we were busy improving and making things faster and prettier for everyone.

On a very popular request we put out our own shortener [ laz.ly ], which we like to think it could read lazily, but in reality we know its lazly, but you can’t always get the best domain names.

LazyBarWith laz.ly, we also later improved and updated our LazyBar. Its the small few pixels big bar at the top that says some relevant information to the link you shared. It is now prettier, with only icons for descriptions, so it’s not as cluttered anymore (hover over for descriptions). It shows, who first shared the link with LazySharer, how many shares were of the link on all networks we support all together, next one is estimated reading time, so if you want to know how long it’s gonna take you to read it, you can quickly glance at that time, as it comes from how long other users were reading the articles, a new one is also that now you can browse through multiple related articles, instead of just one. And also a really new one is that it shows also the friends that shared the same link as you, but you have to be connected with LazySharer, cause we need to know who your friends are. On the other side, we also added Reshare so you can just click and send the same link on to your friends and a test feature of Readability where the service strips everything except the main text content, so you focus on reading. Whou, quite a big list of new things there.

To not be too long about additional features, we also added bit.ly integration to LazySharer, so you can now use your own account. A logout button has been added, so if you use a public computer, click that one to logout after sharing. Oh, and as always, tag recommendations are even quicker now.

That is it for the day, we give you also a funny link to watch [ http://laz.ly/I2 ] as its monday. If you have any comments on how we should drive the development further on with LazySharer, just write us a comment below.

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Seedcamp Prague

Written by Peter Čuhalev on March 7, 2010
Panoramic view of Prague Castle
Image via Wikipedia

This week we went to Prague as part of the Mini Seedcamp Prague event. We were selected as one of the 20 finalist to pitch our products, ideas and get some feedback and comments from different mentors, VCs and entrepreneur from the whole Europe.

The event was great, a few hour ride up to Prague from Ljubljana, make that an 8 hour and we were there. Some coffee and then on to the pitch, we pitched LazySharer as a sharing application for every browser with advanced features of tagging and smart learning of your use. Most people got the idea, but the real question was, how are we going to monetize it and make money. This question popped up at every mentoring session and at some we also developed a strategy how to get more viral through a more newer use of social media and just ditch the whole Ad-sense and advertising thing.

Plans for further development you say? Well we’re taking in the feedback that we received and rearranging some of the market strategies and developing the technology further. As such we hope to put some use-cases out asap and an API to open the technology to some test users and with that also get some inside technology feedback.

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Shiny New Preona Pages

Written by Peter Čuhalev on February 20, 2010
Banana Muffins
Image by rexipe via Flickr

There has been a lot happening around lately at preona. We have been improving and developing LazySharer with full speed. Testing and trying new features and paths with our beta users. Thanks to all of you that provided us with feedback and pushed us to make it more user oriented and useful for all of you.

We also put out a new webpage to go with our identity, being nice and friendly, with colours that complement our fluffy muffin. It is a start and there will still be lots of updates and development on the pages as well as product descriptions.

We’d love to hear some feedback from you, more or less anything about muffins, colours, products and synaptic web. Leave a word or two below in the comments, or poke us: Peter, Swizec or Atrej, around to chat.

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