aphoot(tm) Instant Gratification Platform

Food Drive Success!

2008-12-23T13:26:00.000-08:00

Diane ran a Give-Back-This-Holiday-Season sprint with our team. It was as simple and fun as it was meaningful---we got to vote on our favorite consensus, which turned out to be the Food Bank of the Bay Area.

We collected donations, which was matched 1:1 from company coffers, then went shopping at Costco. This is something Alan E. does annually with the team at Google, too.

We chatted with Tometrius P. (pictured below) who runs the Second Harvest Food Bank center in San Carlos. The need is up sharply this year, which was expected. Somewhat unexpected was that donations were down. So please pass the word---you can truly make a real difference.

iTunes App Store Reaches 10k Apps

2008-12-03T11:08:00.000-08:00

Wow, Apple has just reached the 10,000 iPhone/iPod-touch application mark!

To celebrate, taptap has created this mosaic of all the apps, can you find Bluepulse in there? (click to see full-size version)

Bluepulse, iPhone and Google's G1

2008-09-23T11:06:00.000-07:00

A friend over at Cast.tv (they're doing awesome things with video search) just Bluepulsed me that her phone contract is nearly up and is torn between getting Apple's iPhone or Google's soon to be released G1.

Given that every man and his blog are talking about the G1 today, here's a comparison with as few stats as possible.

GPS: Both have it, the G1 has compass based street view as well.
App stores: iPhone is approval based (ie: higher quality apps), G1 is open slather (ie: more cool stuff for us nerds)
Music: iPhone has ITMS, G1 has Amazon. Amazon music will be cheaper and starts with 6M DRM free tracks.
Video: ITMS has video, Amazon doesn't (at launch anyway)
Keyboard: iPhone has its touchscreen, G1 has a slider qwerty keyboard
Camera: 2Mp on iPhone, 3Mp on G1
Sync: iPhone has iTunes, G1 has no desktop sync
Storage: iPhone has 8/16GB with no expansion, G1 has 1GB with microSD
Screen: iPhone=3.5" 480X320 , G1=3.17" 480X320 (Sorry, tried to steer clear of numbers)
O/S: iPhone is pretty slick, G1 seems not as slick, both seem functionally similar though.
Form factor: G1 is bigger due to the keyboard
Sexiness factor: 12 months ago you could just about pick up having an iPhone. This will NEVER happen with a G1 ;)
Bluepulse: The Bluepulse iPhone app is available today. For now, G1'ers would be headed to bluepulse.com in their browser.

HTC Dream, AKA T-Mobile G1

So, if regular-phone-user 'I' were in the market for a phone what would I get? Given that the G1 is the first Android device to ship there are bound to be a few kinks, such as (cr)app overload due to the lack of an approval process in their app store, or frustration from the lack of desktop syncing. Coming from a Motorola/Nokia/Sony-Ericsson my bug threshold is pretty low, so while I'm sure these things will get fixed over time, let me know when it's done.

Compare that with the relatively tight controls over the iPhone features/apps and beautifully simple UI. That makes it a great intro to mobile internet, much the same as what Apple did with the desktop a quarter century ago. The iPhone is the way to go for now... unless of course you want some serious quality.

As for what Bluepulse is doing with Android, it's essentially the same as what I wrote a last year - If Android gets good traction and provides a way for us to give our users an even better Bluepulse experience, we're there!

Why so quiet? [Building cool stuff]

2008-09-10T11:48:00.000-07:00

The standard question on everyone's lips at last nights TechCrunch50 party

A challenge for all you people out there!

2008-08-21T16:46:00.000-07:00

As promised, this post will cover the intricacies of How to Plan a Bluepulse Scavenger Hunt. In tandem with the contest, we at Bluepulse would like to challenge everyone to top this story with one of their own! The following is a faithful representation of what transpired on the fateful Friday of July 25th, and we would love to hear YOUR stories and share it with everyone else, with your permission. So, US residents (sorry to everyone else!) sign up 5 or more of your friends onto Bluepulse, plan some crazy event and tell us all about it! A chance at a $250 Apple Gift Card AND a cool story to share - what more could you ask for? :)

How to plan a Bluepulse Scavenger Hunt:

Aim: To have fun and experience Bluepulse in action
Materials: 9 Bluepulsers with mobile phones and Bluepulse accounts
Method:

Thursday

Create a group on Bluepulse and invite Bluepulsers to join it

Friday afternoon

Receive a message from Ben in Bluepulse with information on our first meeting place

Friday evening:

Arrive at the meeting place via various modes of transport (Christopher biked [from the Caltrain station]!!! in hilly SF!!! I am in awe.)
Ben leaves with Pete and plans on messaging us on Bluepulse to tell us where to go next
We turn the tables on Ben & Pete and tell them where to meet us
Use the Urban Spoon on Veera's iPhone to decide on a dinner place
Use the compass on Luke's watch to figure out which direction to walk (I have no idea why we weren't using the iPhone GPS function)
Realize that the restaurant was three doors down from the bar we were originally at (we overshot without realizing)
Order dinner by messaging Christopher with our choice of dish so he has the entire list on his phone and can rattle it off to the waitress

Monday morning:

Do a post-mortem where Ben asks, "What was the most memorable thing that annoyed you?"
Understand problems that users have, such as:

Not being able to search for a private group
Lost group invitations
Confusion between group messages and status updates

But also acknowledging the good parts!

Having a threaded group conversation while out and about
Updating statuses to reflect where people are
Being able to go back and look at those messages later on (yay inside jokes!)

There you have it, the epic Friday night that Bluepulsers spent in the city. Now, it's your turn! Remember to share that cool story and begin your own adventure by signing up those 5 friends and getting a chance to win $250 to spend at Apple. More details on the contest here.

Best unboxing ever? [Must be hump-day]

2008-08-20T15:54:00.000-07:00

Yes, I know I've been suckered in to a viral ad campaign, but you have to give cred where due. Here's the unboxing of the Samsung Omnia i900:

[via Unpluggd]

The Atmosphere [Interns dishing dirt]

2008-08-14T17:05:00.000-07:00

Clarissa's at it again, telling it how it is as Bluepulse's first intern...

It's the 11am Monday meeting where everyone gathers for the weekly briefing. The first thing I notice is the jovial atmosphere - people joke before, during and after the meeting. Bluepulse IS dry wit. The next thing I realize is how international the team is - there are 6 Australians, 1 Peruvian (Rodrigo), 1 Indian (Veera), 1 Swedish (Tina), and I'm Singaporean (no, that is not in China).

Anyway, after we're done with the updates, Ben asks Lou to start writing a "Cool/Uncool/Normal" table on the whiteboard. Intriguing. It's a pretty good way of getting updates from people, whether on personal lives or on Bluepulse stuff. For the first week, things on the 'cool' side include me (yay), scavenger hunt (this I will elaborate on later), and one of the 'uncool' things was Diane's jury duty - she was most unfortunately spirited away by the Superior Court of California on my second day of work.

There are points during the day when the office is really really quiet. I was initially actually rather confused because I thought a startup should be really busy and bustling, but later I realized that everyone IMs in this office. GTalk is the order of the day. or MSN. or Adium. One of those. People still walk around and talk to one another, but this excerpt of a GTalk conversation between Bec and myself proves my point:

me: :p i have to say i find it vaguely amusing that we're sitting about 5m away from each other and IMing
Rebecca: hahah - now you know why it's always so quiet in the office
me: ohhhhhh O.o
Rebecca: and you'll also know why you'll suddenly hear 2 or 3 people around you all laugh at once :p
me: techy pple... sigh.

The truth of said prevalence of technology in Bluepulsers' lives is reinforced when we go off to SF on Friday for our scavenger hunt. More on that in the next post! Stay tuned:)

P.S. Special announcement: Pete's fish had a little fish! Okay, I just googled, it's called a fry. Please excuse my ignorance.
P.P.S. When asked what a baby fish was called, Luke suggested, "Fishy?"

Mobile is different from Mobile

2008-08-04T09:00:00.000-07:00

Bluepulse has a UI that's pretty well optimized for mobile usage. Among the guidelines are (a) subject the user to as few links as absolutely necessary [to minimize navigating keystrokes], (b) make everything compact [to minimize scrolling], and (c) keep pages small [to accommodate devices with limited memory].

Bluepulse has a UI that's not very well optimized for mobile usage. Among the problems are (a) not enough links to take the user directly to where they want to go, (b) not making the links really big [to avoid the fat-finger problem], and (c) not taking advantage of large scrollable screens [to minimize pagination].

I'm talking about the differences between keypad-navigated devices (most everything today) and screentouch-navigated devices (e.g., iPhone), of course. And more generally, the diversity of devices that a mobile team that's fanatical about the user experience has to deal with.

Device-capabilities profiles will help ameliorate this. Rapid advances in the mobile browser experience will solve this.

But the larger point is that today, it's (unfortunately) still naive to think there is a "mobile user experience" expertise by years of experience, and even more so to think that the lessons end at a set of desktop-vs-mobile comparisons and contrasts.

We're moving fast and are breaking things along the way. Everyday the world presents itself anew. But we have our heads and hearts in the right places. We'll get better, we promise. Sorry, iPhone users, your fingers are not fat. Our buttons are too thin. We've got some growth hormones in the pipelines.

Bluepulse is fast!

2008-07-08T11:26:00.000-07:00

We've been nominated as on one of the FastCompany Fast50 favorite nominations, that's f'ing fantastic!

From FastCompany.com:

Every year Fast Company magazine highlights the most innovative companies worldwide that take business to new creative heights. FastCompany.com features additional companies, nominated by our readers, that also embody these ideals.

At Bluepulse's page you can read what makes us so fast and put in a notes/comments to show your support. Wink wink, nudge nudge ;)

Scoble tells Yang via Jobs that Bluepulse is Hot [Fake Chinese Whispers]

2008-06-20T10:21:00.000-07:00

One time favorite blog, The Secret Diaries of Steve Jobs, has taken to writing posts as Yahoo's embattled CEO, Jerry Yang. One such post from last night saw Jerry publishing a note he'd received from Robert Scoble where Robert gives him a number of pointers on dealing with his negative PR.

Along with helpful suggestions such as making as many Facebook friends as possible, he made this point about us:

"...along with Bluepulse which I think is the hottest social networking site right now..."

Read the full post here.

Diane's observations of 'Teens in Tech' are smokin!

2008-05-21T13:46:00.000-07:00

This week we have a post from Diane Zoi, our VP of Marketing here at Bluepulse...

Last week I went to the Teens in Tech Conference, held at the H-P headquarters in Palo Alto. Besides wondering how these kids got out of a day of school to attend a conference, there was a lot that caught my attention.

Here are a few highlights for me:

You can’t get through your teenage years without developing an online persona. In the same way that I couldn’t get through that era without trying my first cigarette (I didn’t inhale), teens today have to create and present who they want to be online. This is the first generation to experience this rite of passage. And it seems that the grown-ups in the room – the marketers, the product developers, the VCs, the parents – don’t truly understand what an important stepping stone this is for teens today. Whether you are the techy-kind-of introverted kid who works on your open source project in your spare time, or the busy-as-a-bee head cheerleader, or the ambitious-beyond-your-years teen who just so happened to already start a non-profit with a mission to alleviate world hunger, you are IM-ing, MySpace-ing, or Facebook-ing, or in most cases, using all three.

I believe that these sites and the fact that they facilitate communication enable this generation not only to keep in touch with more people on a regular basis now, they also make it much easier for high schoolers to stay in close touch with their BFFs once they leave home after high school. One panelist at the conference who is currently a college freshman says that she “definitely talks to her high school best friends online everyday”. If you compare this to 20 years ago - not that I know anybody who graduated from college in 1988 - when we would check in with our high school friends at Christmas break and over the summer, you can see a big shift in the social graph. Add in all of the moment to moment updating teens can effortlessly do on their mobiles, and it’s easy to see how all of these high school and college students may never lose touch with anybody.

This does beg the question what all of this virtual keeping in touch does for social skills. After the peppy discussion on all of the ways these teens stay in touch with one another online, one of them commented on Gen Y, “Yeah, I guess we lack social skills.”

These teenagers want it NOW. The California (PST) kids don’t want to wait to see the new episode of Gossip Girl when it’s just aired in New York (EST). They want to download it and watch it the second it’s available online so they can start IM’ing with their friends about it. Did someone say, “illegal”? They’d be more than happy to get their fix legally, and even cough up a few bucks for it (they really said so!) IF the content and speed could compete with the pirated content experience. But today there’s no comparison according to the crowd at the conference. When it comes to video and TV content, they laugh at what is available online via the above board sites. Not one of the college-age conference panelists owns a TV. I take that back – one Stanford student has an old TV from his parents house in his dorm room because “it’s kind of like having an antique.”

Definitely not like it was in 1988, when viewers couldn’t find out who shot J.R. until it aired on national television. At least that’s what I’ve heard it was like in 1988 ;)

Christopher on the FierceWireless Hot Seat

2008-05-14T13:41:00.000-07:00

Christopher recently spent some time with ~~Mike Dolan~~ Sue Marek [Edit: Mike did the write-up] of Fierce Wireless discussing his move from a Director of Engineering at Google to CTO of Bluepulse, his past successes in building companies and the focus areas for Bluepulse going forward:

On the Hot Seat with Bluepulse's Christopher Nguyen

Job Openings At Bluepulse

2008-05-08T17:42:00.000-07:00

We have a stack of openings for people to come and join the Bluepulse team. Right now we're looking for people in the following areas:

Software Engineer, Mobile, Front-End User Experience & Development
Software Engineer, Mobile, Back-End Architecture & Development
Production Engineer, At-Scale, Software Engineering
Production Engineer, At-Scale, System Administrator
Product Manager, Mobile User Experience

You can always see the latest openings on the Jobs page (You'll find this page inside the 'About Us' section of the website). If you're interested, send your resume to iwanttowork@bluepulse.com.

How Much Is A Mobile User Worth?

2008-05-01T09:49:00.000-07:00

Christopher has started Pentagoniac, a personal blog about his thoughts and experiences as CTO here at bluepulse. As with Ben's blog, I'll be grabbing the 'best of' and post them here on the bluepulse blog as well, starting with How Much Is A Mobile User Worth?

Last week I tried taking the train to work for the third time or so, training myself on the new routine. I took the 8:27 from San Antonio station on this beautiful sunny California morning. It would be 30 minutes to the San Mateo station, and another 5-minute leisurely walk to the office on Third. Plenty of time for an important 9:30 meeting.

Or so I thought.

8:56 My train went right past San Mateo. Having experienced commute train service elsewhere, it took me 5 seconds to realize I was on an express train. It took considerably longer to decide what to do. That 9:30 meeting could not be missed! Could I get off at some appropriate station beyond and catch a southbound back to San Mateo? Would I still make my 9:30 meeting?

8:59 My train pulled into the Millbrae station. I could see a southbound pulling in from the other direction, perhaps just about 30 seconds ahead of ours. I rushed to the door, willing it to open. The southbound was still on the platform. Following signs, I ran up the stairs, through the overhead walkway, back down on the opposite platform, just in time to watch the southbound depart right on time, at 9:02. Missed it by a hair.

9:03 Do I call someone from the office to come out and pick me up? My sister, who lives nearby? Maybe I should just call a taxi. Just then I caught sight of a taxi line. "How long to reach San Mateo from here?" I asked. "Just 10 minutes," said the driver. "How much?" "About $20. We'll go by the meter."

Ouch.

9:15 About 10 minutes, 1 very enjoyable chat, and 2 handshakes with a self-described Persian-solar-engineer-on-a-temporary-cab-driving gig later, I was in front of our office building. I would make my 9:30 meeting.

This whole episode reminded me of something. Certainly the Googles and eBays and Alibabas of the world have made discovering and connecting supply to demand so much more efficient, and in the process have cut distributor margins to the bone. I would never pay $40+tax+travel for that Rustic Pewter Kwikset door handle that I can reliably get on eBay for $7 net, delivered. But the premium given to locality and immediacy have not diminished---not for a long time to those of us still living in space and time. We're still willing to pay $1 for a quarter to feed that parking meter at 3rd-and-B, a 100% premium for that last-minute ticket to see Hannah Montana Live at the HP Pavillion. If anything, the value ratio between the here-and-now over the there-and-later is probably expanding.

There are things for which we will still pay a significant premium, and we will pay because we need it here, and we need it now. This violates no efficient-market hypotheses. My train commute averages to about $2 per ride. And that urgent short hop from Millbrae to San Mateo cost a good $22.

So the next time someone asks you how much a mobile web user is worth compared to a desktop web user, you can tell them confidently, "Empirical evidence suggests that it's 11X."

080424 Update: someone forwarded me a news clipping containing this timely article from Sid Yadav at rev2.org that I have to place in the this-guy-gets-it bin.

April Celebrations

2008-04-16T14:57:00.000-07:00

We had a few people celebrating birthdays in April, so we decided to have a get together for everyone together.

At noon we headed down to San Mateo's Central Park where we started off with a nice relaxing Tai Chi lesson. With our chi flowing freely, we sat down to a picnic lunch and chat, including a discussion around the finer points of two-up.

Nicely relaxed and full, what better to do than play football (soccer). It was energetic, it was hilarious and ever so slightly competitive.

See the rest of the soccer action. All that and back to work 2 1/2 hours later. Yet another example of how fun it is working at bluepulse :)

Thanks to Bec and Joseph for organizing and happy birthday Christopher, Diane, Jeremy and me!

Stanford Students are REALLY Smart [Stating the obvious]

2008-04-08T20:35:00.000-07:00

A bunch of us just finished an excellent evening with about 40 Stanford Electrical Engineering students (thanks to Stanford IEEE for organizing!). The topic for the night was how to build a successful startup and was kicked off with Ben doing a talk on Bluepulse's background, and a few of the lessons learnt along the way.

One of them was the importance of an elevator pitch and how important it is to be able to succinctly state the problem and how your idea resolves that problem. With that in mind we broke out into groups and brainstormed problems/solutions to improve cell phones.

With that done, each group presented their elevator pitch back to everyone. I have to tell you, not only were we blown away with how creative their ideas were, but also by how well they were able to stand up in front of an audience and articulate their answers. Like a bunch of seasoned pro's!

The winning group was for a way to get highly localized information about you surroundings using your phone/camera - Mostly explained around a story involving being lost in Texas and getting the worlds best burrito.

For their pitch they each got a much sought after bluepulse t and an oversized novelty check for a million bucks.

All in all a great evening, and luckily not our last. The next one will be with Alpha Kappa Psi at 9pm on April 20 (If you're interested in coming, ask AKP nicely and I'm sure they won't mind).

[Edit: More photos of the night are here]

Press Release

2008-04-01T12:42:00.000-07:00

BLUEPULSE TOPS 150 MILLION MESSAGES PER MONTH; UNVEILS NEW FEATURES AND FUNCTIONALITY TO ENHANCE MOBILE SOCIAL MESSAGING EXPERIENCE

Leading Mobile Social Messenger Taps Google Veteran Christopher Nguyen as
Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering

SAN MATEO, Calif. – April 1, 2008 – Bluepulse, the award-winning social messaging platform, today unveiled a host of new features and functionality, including easy friend importing from popular Web mail services, daily summary notifications of bluepulse activity and a set of new emoticons that give users a fun way to express themselves through bluepulse messages. The new enhancements come on the heels of substantial growth for bluepulse; the company now delivers more than 150 million messages per month to users in more than 190 countries around the globe.

Bluepulse also announced today that Christopher Nguyen has joined the company as chief technology officer (CTO) and vice president of engineering. As CTO and vice president of engineering, Nguyen will play a key leadership role in continuing to develop and execute on bluepulse’s technology strategy and vision. Nguyen will report directly to Ben Keighran, founder and chief executive officer of bluepulse.

“Bluepulse is the starting point on your phone, a way to capture your experiences as they happen and broadcast them to your friends, right from your phone,” said Keighran. “As we continue to grow the business, our technological roadmap is one of our top priorities. Attracting top talent like Christopher is key to our strategy. He comes to us with an established track record in technology leadership, which includes experience at industry-leading companies such as Google, ACTGent Software and Xerox. Over the past year we’ve brought on new employees from Amazon, Yahoo! and Google; I’m very happy to see that bluepulse is proving to be an attractive ‘next step’ for Silicon Valley veterans.”

New Features and Functionality

With its post-beta release in October of 2007, bluepulse reinvented mobile messaging by giving mobile users a way to broadcast their lives to their friends with text, photos and videos. The innovative bluepulse platform enables users to keep in touch with and build out their trusted network of friends from the device they always have with them. At CTIA Wireless 2008, bluepulse is introducing new product features, including:

Easy Friend Importing: This feature lets bluepulse users quickly and easily import contact lists from their Gmail, Yahoo! mail, AOL and Hotmail accounts, enabling them to immediately get and stay connected with their existing contacts via bluepulse. Imported friends receive an invitation to sign up for bluepulse as well as summary notifications of what their friends have been doing on bluepulse.
Summary Notifications: New summary notifications provide bluepulse users with a daily email or SMS recap of their friends’ bluepulse activity. This means that in one mobile or PC-based update, users can see what has been happening on bluepulse since they last logged in. This summary includes any friend requests or messages they have received, who their friends have become friends with and any new pictures and videos their network has uploaded.
Picture Expressions (emoticons) – New home-grown emoticons from bluepulse let users express themselves with more than words. Users can select “pixs” under the “Say” tab on bluepulse.

About Christopher Nguyen

Dr. Nguyen comes to bluepulse with more than 13 years of industry experience. Most recently he served as the engineering director at Google, responsible for operations of Google's Apps (GMail, Calendar, etc.) in both consumer and enterprise segments, serving hundreds of millions of users globally. Prior, he was founder and chief executive officer of ACTGent Software, where he delivered five generations of multi-million dollar real-time trading system acquired by SHB Bank in 2005. He was also founder and chief technology officer of Agenda-Asia, a 400-strong pan-Asia digital presence agency acquired by WPP in 2008. Nguyen has helped create more than $1 billion in shareholder value in the past decade. Earlier, he was a professor at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, and has also held technical positions at Xerox, Hewlett Packard and Intel.
"I'm excited to join Ben Keighran and the bluepulse team," said Nguyen. "Bluepulse is a clear leader in the mobile space and I look forward to applying my experience to building the best product and strongest team for next-generation mobile messaging. We're enabling and shaping the fast-growing mobile market."

Nguyen holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley and an MS and PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University.

About bluepulse

Bluepulse is a privately held mobile social media company based in San Mateo, California that is busy building one of the world’s largest communities on the Mobile Web. The bluepulse platform enables and encourages users to broadcast their lives to their friends from their mobile phone with quick text, picture and video updates. In December 2006, bluepulse launched its game-changing social networking application (in beta) that works on most Internet-enabled phones around the world – approximately one billion handsets. In October 2007, bluepulse made the platform mobile-web based. What started out as founder Ben Keighran’s hobby has evolved into a global social messenger for mobile users. Bluepulse is one of the fastest growing mobile communities in the world, with users in more than 190 countries. Bluepulse has an advertising-based revenue model.

Half of iPhone Owners Get Social in Jan.

2008-03-18T09:58:00.000-07:00

Some new market stats have come from the folks at M:Metrics this morning - the unsurprising news that iPhone internet usage is “off the charts” compared to the average mobile user.

If it’s fair to say that what current iPhone usage is indicative of the mainstream usage we’ll be seeing in months and years to come (which I think it is), it’s great to see that a whopping 49.7% of iPhone users accessed a social networking site in Jan.

For those of you on an iPhone, setting up one-click access to what your friends are doing is really straight forward – Go to bluepulse.com and log in (make sure you have auto-login enabled in your settings), go to the msgs page and add it as a webclip.

From M:Metrics, via Moconews.

bluepulse on AlwaysOn OnMedia 100 Winners, right on!

2008-01-23T17:09:00.000-08:00

It’s just been announced that we’ve made it onto the OnMedia 100 winners list!

Bluepulse was selected by the AlwaysOn editorial team and other industry experts based on five criteria: innovation, market potential, stakeholder value and media buzz.

The top 100 are being officially announced at OnMedia NYC and a cocktail party in Mountain View tomorrow night, so make sure you come and say hi if you see anyone donning a stylish bluepulse t-shirt!

You can read more about bluepulse and the other OnMedia 100 Top Companies and congrats to our next door neighbors, Admob who also made the list!