August 2011
1 post
Summify Heads to Launch@Grow: Grow Conference 2011
The Grow Conference is a unique three-day conference that brings together the top minds in business, entrepreneurship, technology, and capital to inspire and engage the next generation of disruptive entrepreneurs. Startups from all over the map have been eagerly awaiting the results of the Launch@GROW Contest: the opportunity for 15 top startups to showoff at the Opening Reception to the 2011...
July 2011
4 posts
4 tags
Team Summify Expands
For some of us, nothing beats the atmosphere of energy and learning offered by an early stage start-up. With the recent launch of the iPhone app and many more releases on the way, it’s an exciting time at Summify, so exciting that we almost forgot to introduce ourselves!
Although we’re from entirely different backgrounds, the common thread that brought us all together was the...
Summify iPhone Update 1.1
We’d like to send out a big Thank You to all of you Summifyers and fans for spreading the word about the app, rating it, and sending your valuable feedback. One amazing Summifyer even created a Chrome Extension for Instapaper, thanks @bdotdub! We’ve listened and pumped out some key improvements:
-Highly anticipated support for Instapaper (via the share screen)
-Bug fixes for...
Summify Gets RSS: The Only Feed You Will Ever Need
The RSS feed of your summary has arrived! It has been a popular request over the last few months, so let’s cut the chat and get straight to the goods.
The link to your RSS feed: http://summify.com/USERNAME/latest?format=rss
Simply replace “USERNAME” with the name you see in the address bar of your web summary:
How to find the RSS feed in your browser: Chrome Firefox 3...
4 tags
Summify Launches iPhone App
July 8, 2011
After receiving mountains of requests for a mobile app, we set off to discover the best way to make your social summaries mobile. Three months later, we have some exciting results to share with you. Summify for iPhone is here!
Our goal was to create an app that would deliver a beautiful user experience and make it easy to consume the five or ten stories that matter most....
June 2011
1 post
Summify Goes Hollywood
Pictures are great, but Videos are even better. Anytime we introduce new features to the Summify experience, expect to see a blockbuster demo posted in living color. Although we learn fast, it may take us some time to release them in 3D - bear with us ;)
Our First Tutorial: Filters and the Dislike Button
As always, keep letting us know how your Summifying is going. More updates on the way!
May 2011
1 post
New Features: Filters, Dislike, Love Button
The Summify algorithms rely heavily on implicit signals to summarize the most important news for you: which friends shared which stories, how important are they to you, what do you like clicking on, and a dozen more factors.
Most of the time that’s more than enough, but sometimes people tell us that they’d like to explicitly tell us which stories aren’t good for them. We know...
March 2011
4 posts
Less Stories, More Funding!
The last few months at Summify have been really groundbreaking and we wanted to share some of the exciting updates with you!
More Funding
We have raised a seed round from a great group of investors and here is the full list is in no particular order:
Accel Partners, represented by Andrew Braccia. These guys are one of the most respected VC firms in the Valley and it’s an amazing vote of...
Tech entrepreneurs stuck in immigration limbo →
Mr. Wertz said it was his experience trying to invest in a group of entrepreneurs from Romania that convinced him the system was broken. He describes them as brilliant. They had worked for Google and Facebook and were keen on Vancouver for its proximity to Silicon Valley and its environment and quality of life.
“We had tons of trouble getting them a visa to stay here,” he said. “It has been an...
Bye-bye Summify Web, hello Web Summary!
It’s all about the Summary!
Remeber those awesome email digests you’re getting? Well, we’re now calling that a Summary (Pretty clever, eh?) and we’re making it a core part of our product. You might have noticed some of the recent improvements to the email:
We detect and extract images from stories for a more visual experience
We show you one of the comments from your...
Downtime Postmortem
As many people have noticed, we had an outage this morning starting from 07:23 AM PST to 14:05 PM PST (~7 hours). That’s some serious downtime and we’d like to attempt to explain what happened.
So, what happened?
Yesterday, in order to cope with the increased volume of links we added more crawler processes on one of our machines. (more details about our infrastructure)
...
December 2010
1 post
Configure your Digest, Collapsed Stories and more
Based on user feedback, we found out that people love the email digests we send! So we decided to take this feature, make it even more awesome, and transform into a standalone product: Summify Digest. But don’t take our word for it, have a look at what’s new…
Configure your Digest
You can now configure your minimum and maximum number of stories in a digest, as well as the time...
November 2010
1 post
Introducing the new Summify!
Today we’re happy to announce the new Summify design! You should see significant changes to the user interface, beginning with a completely refreshed story navigation and a more visually pleasing woody style. :-) Here’s a screenshot:
Navigation between stories was one of the biggest problems we discovered in our private beta, so we made a substantial investment in fixing it with...
September 2010
1 post
Web UI Designer Needed
Part-time / Freelancers / Limited Hires welcome
Here at Summify we love great design and we understand it’s essential for the success of a web app. We’re looking for a talented UI designer that can create beautiful and enjoyable user interfaces!
About You
You can design and implement beautiful, simple and enjoyable interfaces. (Here’s a few apps we really like: tumblr, Reeder App, Quora,...
August 2010
1 post
Hold on, Summify is back!
A lot of people have been asking us what have we been up to here in Vancouver in the past couple of months. Well, we’ve been really busy building our new product - a Social News Reader - and we’re finally ready to share it with the world!
As of today we’re starting to send out invites to people who have subscribed on our invite list (it’s on the home page). We’re...
March 2010
3 posts
Distributed CEO →
My 3 weeks of being CEO will expire on Monday and I will pass the CEO hat to Mircea. It’s been a crazy and fun period for us! I had the chance to manage one “intimate” beta launch and one private beta launch. It all ended up with an awesome private beta party this Friday — 55 beers and 1…
Summify in private beta!
We have great news to share with you: Summify is now officially in private beta, starting today, 23rd March 2010! Woohoo!
After weeks of hard work we finally have something that we can share with more people! It took us a full week of “intimate” beta to detect and squash all the major bugs (Thank you Bootup Labs crew for the awesome feedback!), but now we’re ready to go!
We...
ReadFu becomes Summify
During the past few weeks we’ve been working very hard (13+ hours / day) to get our private beta out and we’re getting really close!
Right now we’re in “intimate beta” mode. A few of our friends from Bootup Labs were crazy enough to test Summify on their blogs. Check it out (it should work from an iPhone too):
http://bmannconsulting.com
http://bootup.ca
...
February 2010
1 post
ReadFu in School - First 2 Weeks
For all intents and purposes, startups incubators are becoming the new schools for entrepreneurship and it sure feels this way so far at Bootup Labs!
It’s been an awesome two weeks, jam-packed with events, new people, and excitement, just like when you start school! :) To give you an idea of how intense it was, let’s go through the most important things that have happened so far:
On...
January 2010
2 posts
Big in Romania
Since the announcement in December that we’ve been accepted into Bootup Labs ReadFu has been getting quite a bit of press coverage in Romania, our home country.
We hope our story will inspire entrepreneurs from Romania and that more companies will apply to Bootup Labs (next cohort is in May) or similar incubators!
We did some interviews, both online and on TV, and we’ve tried to be...
WatchCan’t wait to move into the new offices!
statusly:
The Bootup Entrepreneurial Society’s lovely Sonia Ryan and Strutta’s Jordan Behan were kind enough to film a quick office tour of our new place!
December 2009
1 post
Hello World!
Hello and welcome to ReadFu!
ReadFu helps you rapidly surf through web pages that contain lots of links.
With ReadFu, every time you click an link you get a contextual summary and stats of the target page. This helps you decide which links are relevant to you without opening dozens of tabs.
ReadFu took root in Romania and is built by Cristian, Mircea and Silviu, a team of young professionals...