Upingme\’s Progress - Blog

There have been some interesting posts on blogs that we read that apply to Upingme:

You must have a plan for escaping the Technosphere

To a degree, it didn’t matter how many posts we got on TechCrunch, LifeHacker or Scoble; we would still be stuck in the same Technosphere duking it out with Google, 30Boxes and everyone else. You can make a nice living just pimping your wares in the technosphere (which is what I’m attempting with SlimTimer) but if you ever want to gain any real traction as an online calendar service you have to target the cubicle dwellers and their Outlook calendars that only exist outside the sphere. Techie users are fickle, transient and demanding. You can spend all of your time implementing ATOM feeds and hCalendar export and never be the better for it.

From here about the history of Kiko, an online calendar service. We agree with this completely. Whilst its exiting and even useful to get a buzz going about what we are doing, (mostly for the feedback) none of that buzz, especially in the above mentioned sphere actually connets with our users.

We have a tool coming online that pushes the Upingmge idea directly to our user base… more on that very soon.

We side completely with David Heinemeier Hansson in his ‘its not over for startups’ take. Anyone that fears ‘the big players’ in any field is not thinking correctly. Now more than ever it is possible to unseat a giant; you simply have to have a good enough idea and the correct timing and momentum. If we were to take at face value that everyone should ’stay out of Google’s way’ then Google itself would not exist, because there would have been someone, some naysayer in 1996 saying “Stay out of Infoseek’s way”. The same goes for Skype. If the stated plan of Skype was to unseat every big telephone carrier in the world…you get the picture.

We are slowly getting the word about Upingme out to the movers, shakers and interested parties. Reuters has done a televison piece on us, and Emily Chang is the first Blogger to pick up on us. Reaction so far is 100% positive. We will post Upingme appearances here as we find them and as time allows!

You can now get a reminder of your password; simply send:

U password

to the upingme number and the system will send you your password.

We have had some excellent suggestions over the last few days, and are folding them them into the system over the next two weeks. These improvements will streamline the commands and do some other stuff; watch this space!

The basis of our API is now online for testing: sign up take it for a spin and let us know what you think.

Thanks to all of our beta testers for their feedback! We have made most of the changes suggested and have squashed or are squaching (yes ’squaching’) the bugs they found, including an unstyled page.

Speaking of unstyled pages, the message page displayed to a logged in user has a form within which she can enter text to extend her message. This is a suboptimal implimentation. It would be MUCH better to have some sexy AJAX in there to handle this, and we will certainly do it; in the meantime, when you enter text to a message, the system throws back the form to you with the text you sucessfully entered. The original text that you posted via SMS stays the same; the form only changes the extenstion.