Speeka in the blogosphere

July 30th, 2008

Our launch was pretty quiet (targeted at Croatian audience at the first), since we consider this stage to be very early beta, and the launch and the exposition to everyone is a great way to gather feedback. But, we didn’t spam the web with the announcements (much) :-)

So I was very pleasently surprised and very excited to find out that people out there (that means you! :) found out about us, blogged about it, offered their advice, help, and spread the world.

Juan Diego of wwwhatsnew.com found us on del.icio.us and wrote a short and positive review. As he said, we’re still very small and in a very early stage, but so was everyone at some point.

Mashupawards awarded us the mashup of the day award, and we were also featured by KillerStartups

While the reviews were very positive, some people raised real questions and pointed out our shortcomings. We also got a lot of feedback from our users, and we’re in the process of reworking some things that people found too confusing or that didn’t work.

The biggest problem that we can see is that people are confused on what exactly Speeka is used for. That’s because Speeka is a tool that can be used in different use-cases, and we haven’t really worked on how to present the various possibilities. We’re designing the page structure a bit to make this part of Speeka experience more interesting and less confusing to the first time visitors.

The other problem is that we’re still small, and to get many people we first have to have a big community already. I think the only good answer to that is that, if people find Speeka useful and we keep improving, more and more people will come and find us useful.

We’re also thinking about ways to allow Speeka integration into other pages and blogs, in form of embeddable JavaScript widgets, but also as a simple API ala Twitter.

Our goal is to be useful, to make your Speeka experience fun and interesting, and to keep possibilities open. So if you have any ideas on what we can do, how we can improve, what cool use case we can serve, please do tell!

As I said, during the summer break we’re overhauling some things based on the initial feedback, so stay tuned for future updates and news :-)

Speeka launched!

June 6th, 2008

We’ve launched!

This evening we’ve removed access restrictions, so everyone can now go to Speeka and try it out!

We don’t have a big bang for launch, no parties or celebrities, etc, but we do hope we have an interesting and useful service to offer. Check out the about and tour pages to find out more about what Speeka is, how it works and why it might be interesting for you.

See you on Speeka!

T -1 day and counting!

June 5th, 2008

Just one more day before the launch. The pressure is building up, there are always more things you can hack on and last minute fixes, but I’m confident that we’ll pull it off.

See you tomorrow on Speeka!

Launch day is near

June 4th, 2008

We’ve just made final (or so we think) preparations before showing Speeka to the outside world. First only a few friends will have a chance (and the responsibility :) to test it out, chime in with their thoughts, and play a bit with it. If all goes well, we will open up to everyone shortly afterwards.

In the meantime, for a glimpse of what Speeka is, take a look at our about Speeka page.

Hello World!

April 27th, 2008

Hello world!

On this blog we’ll write about everything related to Speeka, news, tricks, announcements, and have discussion with you, readers and Speeka users.

What is Speeka, anyways? It a cool new project of ours, aiming to help people communicate on the web. Yeah, can’t be more vague at this point, but you’ll see soon enough…