Summify

Summify Heads to Launch@Grow: Grow Conference 2011

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 12:46:00 -0700

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 Grow Conference in Vancouver, BC.

61 startups from across Canada entered the Launch@Grow contest and public voting ended July 16. The top 25 leaders who rocked the most votes moved onto the semi-finals where they have been picked a part by Canadian and Silicon Valley judges.

With only 15 days left until The Launch@GROW Launch Party the results are in. The top 15 startups walking down the entrepreneurial red carpet (there’s less botox) are:

Unbounce
Summify
Rocketr
Tiipz
ToggleMe with Tradable Bits
Storypanda
MentionMapp
Hoseanna
Food.ee
Cargoh
Warranty Life
Jostle.me
ZapTap
Hipsell
Wishpond

Techvibes will be highlighting these companies over the next two weeks with startup profiles. Vancouver’s Unbounce led during public voting, so Techvibes jumped the gun yesterday with the first of their 15 startup profiles.

Congratulations to all of our fellow startups! It’s time to GROW. See you there!

Team Summify Expands

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 09:00:06 -0700

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 opportunity to join two uber cool founders at ground level as they build an internet company. There’s something about the unknown, the chance to make a difference, or is it just the free lunch? Either way, we’re amped to be apart of a team we believe in. Here we are: the new kids on the block.

Mark Chua - Software Engineer
Joining us back in April, Mark has a degree in Computer Science from SFU and China’s Zhejiang University. Outside of the office he enjoys origami and playing badminton. We had him at “free lunch.”

Nimalan Mahendran - Software Engineer
It was a natural celebration when Nimalan joined us on July 4. We may not be Americans, who doesn’t like fireworks? Previously Nimalan worked at SAP and graduated from UBC with a MSC in Machine Learning, as well as a BMath in Computer Science from Waterloo. You may find him distance running in home-made sandals or planning a trip to Antarctica to visit penguins. We’ll remind him to take a plane.

Robin Campbell - Community Guy
In a room full of hackers, Robin is the odd guy out. Prior to joining the Summify family in June, Robin was building the Canadian breakdance community through Famouscircle.com, organizing international events and managing online content. Graduating with a BCom in Entrepreneurship, he plans to shake things up a little. Office bootcamp, West Coast adventures and salsa lessons are not out of the question. He recently celebrated the 10 year anniversary of his breakdance crew, Filthee Feet.

Summify iPhone Update 1.1

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 17:34:00 -0700

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 iPod Touch and iPhone 3G users
-Easier access to featured accounts

We love to hear how your Summifying is going. Please continue rating the app and sharing your feedback with us: team(at)summify(dot)com.

Summify Gets RSS: The Only Feed You Will Ever Need

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 11:17:00 -0700

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
Firefox 4+
Safari

So what should I do with my RSS feed? Share your news with friends and followers!

1) Anyone can add your Summary to their Google Reader or other RSS feed reader account using this format: http://summify.com/USERNAME/latest?format=rss

2) Display your Summary on your blog. Simply add the URL of your RSS feed into an RSS widget provided by your blogging platform.

Lastly, before sharing your Summary with the rest of the World, take a quick look at our latest filters that can help you eliminate unwanted stories: http://smf.is/5odaJ

Happy Summifying!

Summify Launches iPhone App

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 06:00:06 -0700

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. Most notable are the large images and standout headlines, designed to keep your focus on what’s important - the stories. You will also enjoy the intuitive navigation, automatic summary notifications, and the ability to manage settings right from your iPhone. The all-new, graphically rich redesign is just a sneak peak of what is yet to come.

Rating and Feedback

Now the rest is up to you! Try out the app and take a second to rate it if you like it!
Good ratings help get Summify in front of more people who might find it really useful. If you’re not quite satisfied with the app, we’re always here to listen. Consider yourself an extension of the team here at Summify. If you don’t speak up, everyone could be missing out on a great idea or improvement. Just drop us an email at team@summify.com with your feedback - we love to hear it all!

Screenshots:

News Summary (left), Reactions found under each individual story (right)

Individual Story (left), Share Screen (right)

Summify Goes Hollywood

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 16:19:02 -0700

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!

New Features: Filters, Dislike, Love Button

Wed, 04 May 2011 17:22:00 -0700

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 what you mean - when you only want to read 5 stories, you want all of them to be great! Today, we’re pleased to introduce 2 new features to help with that: Filters and Dislike. Here’s how they work:

Domain Filters

Domain filters allow you to hide certain domains (e.g. foxnews.com) from appearing in your summary. Just click the “View this in your browser” button in your email and hover over the domain and you’ll see a small X button:

Source Filters

Sometimes you might not want to hide a domain, but hide a specific person. Previously you had to unfollow/unfriend them, but now you can just hide them by hovering over their avatar and clicking the X button:

Please note that this only affects Summify and it doesn’t actually un-follow them on Twitter, Facebook, or Google Reader.

Finally, you can remove and manage your existing filters at http://summify.com/filter.

Dislike

Hiding a story or a person is a really strong negative signal, but sometimes you don’t want to be so decisive. For those times, we created a nice Dislike button that appears near the title of the story:

You might be asking, why a dislike button and not a like one? Well, you already tell us that you like a story when you click on it and you spend time reading it, but it’s surprisingly hard for us to figure when you don’t like a story… maybe you’ve already seen it, maybe it’s not interesting, who knows?

Love Button

A lot of people have told us they love Summify, so we’ve added a button that makes it really easy for you to spread the word. Just click these nice big shiny buttons in your emails or on the web:

That’s it for today, expect some more exciting news in the near future!

Less Stories, More Funding!

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 09:58:57 -0700

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 confidence for us
Rob Glaser, Founder of Real Networks and Co-founder of SocialEyes
Stewart Butterfield, Co-Founder of TinySpeck and Flickr (sold to Yahoo)
Steve Olechowski, Co-Founder of FeedBurner (sold to Google)
Boris Wertz, Founder of W Media Ventures, a Vancouver-based angel fund and COO of AbeBooks (Sold to Amazon)
Michael Edwards, Co-founder of Sosido Networks
Brent Holliday, Head of Technology Practice at Capital West Partners
Jim Fletcher, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital

It wasn’t that long ago that we were back in Romania dreaming of startup ideas and hoping someday we’d get to work with such great industry leaders. It’s truly amazing to us how far we’ve come. While the investment will help Summify accelerate its growth, the experience our investors bring to the table is even more important to us.

By the way, did we mention we’re hiring?

Less Stories

Like just about everybody we know, we’ve been struggling to keep up with the avalanche of updates coming at us in the news, on Facebook, Twitter and RSS. It’s amazing that people have just sort of gotten used to so much noise and so little signal. It’s impossible to keep up and it’s only getting worse!

We first thought the solution was to build a better social news reader, so we did that. After we released it, we realized that we had built the wrong thing. Our users didn’t really want another news reader, another destination site to check every day… they just wanted the serendipity offered by our results!

The nature of social media is such that even the most devoted users miss more than half of what comes at them, so we established the idea that you can’t and shouldn’t read everything - read just the good stuff! It stands to reason that the good stuff is usually what your friends and your sources are talking about the most.

We rebuilt Summify by mixing these two ideas together and we think we have hit on something magical. With Summify, you can know what’s going on by just looking at an intelligent summary of the news, only 5 to 10 stories, every few hours!

Obviously, we had to put a lot effort in making sure it doesn’t become a popularity contest, and we think we’ve struck the right balance of highly relevant and diverse stories. Sign up, check it out and please tell us what you think!

Tech entrepreneurs stuck in immigration limbo

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 19:17:51 -0700

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 ongoing saga. People were spending probably 20 per cent of their time on immigration visa issues while they could have been building a company.”

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/time-to-lead/shareTweet/article1960705/

Bye-bye Summify Web, hello Web Summary!

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 14:32:08 -0700

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 friends (tip: hover on their faces to see each one)
You can now get your summary more often (twice or 3 times a day)

Social Bar

When reading a story it’s always useful to have context - as such, we’ve built the Summify Social Bar!
You can see it at the top of any story from Summify. It allows you to see which of your friends shared the story, what did they say about it, how many retweets and likes does the story have and you can also share directly from the bar. (tip: you can share to all networks at once if you’re logged in)

Web Summary

You’ve told us that getting a relevant summary in your inbox is great, but sometimes we want functionality that’s just not possible in an email.
As such, we’ve put the summary on the web and we’re going to use it a a building block for a whole new set of amazing features!
If you received an email summary in the last 16 hours, you probably have a web version as well and it should be available at http://summify.com/summary

“Sunsetting” Summify Web

We’ve realised that a summary across every platform (email, web, mobile) is the best way to deliver relevant news without the feeling of being overwhelmed. (less is more)
As such, we’re sorry to announce that we’ll be shutting down the “realtime news reader” Summify Web.Effective March 25th 2011, the product will cease to operate. You don’t need to take any action and we apologize for any inconvenience this will cause you!

Thank you for your support and stay tuned for the next update from Summify!

Downtime Postmortem

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 22:04:23 -0700

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)

Unfortunately, on the same machine we had our MySQL instance which stores user data and is required by all our services. At some point this morning the load increased 5x, the machine became unresponsive and eventually hanged, taking down all the other services with it.

We have email alerts for these kind of situations (we’re using Monit, Munin, and BlameStella) but they don’t really help while you’re sleeping. We’ve noticed the issue and started to work on it as soon as we woke up.

We take these problems very seriously and we’re really sorry about the outage! We’ve learned something important today and we’re working hard to prevent further issues.

How are we going to prevent it?

Keep MySQL and other critical services on separate, dedicated boxes
Setup phone and SMS alerts with PagerDuty so we can wake up
Avoid high loads by re-distributing some of our services to new machines

Thank you for your patience! If you have any questions or feedback email us at team@summify.com

Configure your Digest, Collapsed Stories and more

Sun, 19 Dec 2010 05:04:56 -0800

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 at which it’s being sent. If you don’t like the default settings, go ahead and change them.

Collapsed Stories

We all love diversity, so it’s never fun when the stories in your digest are dominated by one source. Starting today, we collapse stories from the same domain and only show the most popular story from each one. Don’t worry, you can see still see the titles of the collapsed stories if you really like that domain.

70M+ Stories Served

Last time we “talked”, we told you that Summify has crawled, aggregated and processed over 25 million news stories from Twitter, Facebook and RSS feeds! We’re pleased to announce that we’re now well over70 million stories and it’s growing strong!

One more thing…

We know that reading is an inherently mobile activity (read on the bus, while waiting at the doctor’s, etc.), so we’ve started working on Summify Mobile! It’s still in development, but you will soon be able to read your Top News on the go!
You can add your email address if you want to be the first to be notified when we launch!

Happy Holidays from Team Summify!

Introducing the new Summify!

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 19:24:00 -0700

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 this new design. As always, we’d love to hear your feedback on this change, just login to check it out.

One more thing…

As we get ready for prime time, we wanted to share one interesting number with you: over the past 3 months, Summify has crawled, aggregated and processed over 25 million news stories from Twitter, Facebook and RSS feeds!

We’re very grateful to all of our early adopters for helping us reach this milestone and we look forward to see this number grow at an accelerated pace!

Web UI Designer Needed

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 17:23:07 -0700

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, MobileMe)
You can come up with ingenious UI solutions, and create wireframes. (Napkins are OK!)
You have a solid understanding of current rich Internet application and web technologies: HTML, CSS, Javascript.
You can make stuff fade, slide, morph and squish.
You enjoy working with bleeding edge technology in a lean startup environment. (With cold beer.)

Responsibilities

You’ll be in charge with defining the user experience at Summify.

About Us

We’re an early stage startup based in Vancouver, BC, backed by Bootup Labs and W Media Ventures. We’re team of two hacker entrepreneurs from Romania, passionate about online software and Internet startups. We’ve interned at Google and Microsoft and we’ve kicked ass in programming contests like IOI and TopCoder. We turned down some cozy job offers and moved half-way across the world for an incredible opportunity.

We’re building a next generation news-reader that has a unique approach to solving information overload. Summify ranks and curates all the news that’s coming to you via Twitter and Google Reader feeds using data and signals it gathers from your social network. The important stuff bubbles up at the top, so you can read it first.

Curation and personalization are the cornerstones of a new age of web applications. Just recently Gmail launched the Priority Inbox, Facebook is pushing for instant personalization. More than ever, people are getting overwhelmed by information. This is an incredible opportunity and we’re excited to take part in it.

How’s it going to work?

We want a world-class designer, so we’re flexible with how we’re going to work together. We’re OK with part-time, limited time, or project based. Nevertheless we do require that you come by our nice office at least a few hours a week. (163 W Hastings, Vancouver, BC)

What next?

Send us an email (team@summify.com), or ping us on twitter. Make sure to include a link to your awesome portfolio.

Hold on, Summify is back!

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 12:31:00 -0700

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 going to roll them out in small batches so that we can test our system, so it’s probably going to take a couple of weeks for us to go through all of them. If you signed up for an invite you will receive one soon, just have patience.

So, what’s a Social News Reader?

People are increasingly getting their news from the social networks they’re part of (Twitter, Facebook, etc.), but this is rapidly getting overwhelming. If you’re connected with a few hundred people and companies, it’s hard to stay on top of the news they share. There’s currently no way to get the important stuff without going through all your news.

Summify gives you a river of news in a way that you can consume it in minutes, rather than hours. The important stuff bubbles up at the top so, however much time you have at your disposal, you always know you’re reading the important stuff first.

It’s a HTML5 web app (only modern browsers supported, sorry!). It aggregates all your incoming news from your Twitter and Google Reader account (Facebook and Google Buzz support on the way!). It then curates your news feed by using the social reactions gathered from your networks. The important news makes it to the Top News section. There’s also a Recent News section that allows you to see everything in chronological order.

I tell you, it’s awesome! (for a product in private beta)

Isn’t RSS dead? Isn’t the news industry dying?

While RSS has been declared dead and the news industry is slowly dying, that doesn’t mean that people have stopped reading their news. On the contrary, people are getting more and more news and they can’t really keep up with it. We know the road to solving personalized news is paved with dead startups, but we believe that by capitalizing on some new trends in the industry (people are using their social network to curate their news, mobile smartphones and touchpads enable you to read stuff anywhere) we have a really good chance of solving this problem!

Private beta again?

Some of you might remember that we started out at Bootup Labs in January with a very different product. One of the benefits of being in an incubator is that you can quickly get feedback, learn from it and iterate - and that’s just what we did. We realized our product wasn’t differentiated enough and it wasn’t what the publisher market wanted - we had a really good solution for the wrong problem. :)

Thanks to good mentorship and advice we looked at what we’re passionate (hint: we’re huge news junkies!) and we took all the lessons we learned from the previous product and applied them here. Only time will tell if this was the right move, but we’re much more confident about this new product!

I guess you can call this change a “pivot”, apparently it’s all the rage right now in the startup world!

We love feedback! Give Summify a try once you receive your invite and let us know what you think!

Distributed CEO

Sun, 28 Mar 2010 00:00:37 -0700

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!

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 23:49:00 -0700

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 know there are still a lot of things to improve on but the process will be a lot more enjoyable from now on. It’s a whole new world when you have users that can give you feedback, so we really want you to try out Summify!

What’s Summify?

We know it’s been a long wait, so we wanted to remind you what we do. Currently, Summify is a plugin/widget for blogs and websites. If you have a site you can “summify it” and you instantly enable your readers (including those using an iPhone!) to preview any external link from your pages.

We help your readers quickly understand what lies behind a link by showing contextually relevant summaries. This means that Summify identifies that part of the target page that makes the most sense in the article that linked to it.

We also do a bunch of custom previews. If it’s an Youtube, a picture or a Twitter username your readers can see it right away without having to leave the site. We’ll be releasing a lot more of these custom previews in the following weeks.

See it in action!

You can see how Summify works on this blog and our showcase sites.

Did you receive your invite?

We’ve sent invites to everyone on our private beta list. If you’ve subscribed but you didn’t get an email from us, please let us know!

We need all the feedback we can get, so make sure you make your voice heard on our feedback page or send us an email if you need anything specific.

ReadFu becomes Summify

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 18:22:00 -0700

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):

Oh, wait! What’s Summify? Well, Summify is the new ReadFu! Ever since we started pitching ReadFu to people we’ve soon noticed a few issues with that name:

People find it hard to understand. We were asked quite a few times how exactly do you spell it and it was always funny to say “It’s Read + Fu, like in Kung Fu”.
It’s deceiving. Our name is composed from a common word and something ambiguous. People get the impression that it’s descriptive (because of “read”) when it’s actually not.
Kung Fu theming was too edgy. There was no connection between us and Kung Fu.

So we decided to look for a better name. Luckily people around us were very supportive. We received a lot of great suggestions from Patrick, Jamie, Noah, Daniel and others. We eventually picked Summify, which we believe fits perfectly in our pitch.

There is some hassle doing a renaming though:

Facebook doesn’t allow you to rename your fan page so we have to start over. Please make sure to become of fan of Summify on Facebook so that we can get a proper vanity URL (you have to get 100 Fans to do that).
We have to move our email and docs to the new domain. Our @summify.com emails don’t work yet but we’ll have them up until next week.
We have to print a new set of business cards.
Other small changes that add up

Luckily we hadn’t yet built a brand around ReadFu, our design was still fairly early on and we didn’t have a lot of incoming links. Later on it would have been much harder to do this change.

All in all we’re excited about our new name and we hope you like it too! Summify brings insightful summaries for any link on the web. Doesn’t it sound great?

Make sure to stay tuned, we are sending invites next week and if you’re on the private beta list (big “Sign up” button on the homepage) you’ll get one!

ReadFu in School - First 2 Weeks

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 16:30:00 -0800

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 22nd, a few days before the official start of the program, Mircea went to a “How To Pitch” session organised by the Canadian Financing Forum. Writing an effective pitch for investors is a critical part of a startup, so it was great to be exposed to this early-on.
January 25th was kick-off day! We got to meet all the Bootup crew and all the teams from the January cohort. We’re in damn good company here! :) These guys are really talented and experienced, some with very unusual life stories: an ex-marine turned programmer and entrepreneur, a professional chef, a professional soccer player, a physicist, etc. We are honored to be working alongside these guys, and we have a lot of things to learn from each other!
On January 26th we did something a bit more on the fun side. Boris had the idea of bringing Dave Shea to design beer labels for the January teams. Consequently, we ended up with our own ReadFu Export Lager beer label. Now, we only need the beer! And yes, we WILL brew it!
January 27th was the day we’ve all been waiting for: Guy Kawasaki comes to visit Bootup Labs! Cristian warmed him up with our elevator pitch, we exchanged some questions, he schooled us a bit, and we got a chance to demo our product at the end. He likes what we’re up to, which is a rather encouraging appreciation for us.
On January 28th Silviu went to Bootup Demo Days and saw all the companies from the previous cohorts “graduate” by pitching to VCs. This was a great networking opportunity for us as well.
On February 2nd we had lunch with Lucian Savluc, a Romanian guy working as a web marketing specialist in Vancouver. He is well known as the founder of eLiberatica, one of the top technology conferences in Romania. He was very supportive of us, both as entrepreneurs and as fellow Romanians, just off the boat in Vancouver. Thanks, man!
Startups are fun but every now and then you have to sit down and do some serious business. On February 3rd we met with our awesome lawyer Shahrooz Nabavi from Fasken Martineau to setup all the details of incorporating in Canada. And by the way, Canada is a great place to start a company! (Hint: You get tons of government benefits!)
Our second week was deemed “the homework week.” To get us in the right mindset and have us think really hard about our business, Boris gave us a bunch of stuff to do: an executive summary (you use it when you pitch to investors or customers), a set of milestones, a budget, events plan (what events/conferences do we want to go to), and a hiring plan. Lots of hard work, but we pulled it off and we now have a much clearer picture of our business and product.
The Vancouver startup scene is very active. To get a sense of the events that are happening you can check Meetup. On February 4th we went to such an event, the Vancouver iPhone Developers Meetup. Funny enough, the speaker was Andrei Iancu, a Romanian. We learned a bunch iPhone development stuff and we met new people. For instance, we met the guys at XOMO, the company behind the official 2010 Olympics iPhone App.
On Friday, February 5th we finished our very intensive two weeks by having a few beers with our newfound friend Igor, from Russia. He’s the CEO of Mobify, a great startup from Vancouver. We had a good time!

This is pretty much it. We think the experience here is amazing! If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur we recommend you to apply to Bootup Labs. It’s awesome!

So, what do you think of our first two weeks of school? Want us to get into more details on a specific event? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Big in Romania

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:08:35 -0800

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 as informative as possible regarding the application process. If you feel inspired, you can start “preparing” by reading what’s been said about us:

P.S.: Wouldn’t it be great to be able to preview all these links without having to open a new tab? :)