ImThere Blog

The team has returned from California, the turkey leftovers have been placed into the refrigerator to be forgotten about for months, and we’ve installed hand warmers to keep us typing away for the frigid months to come. A lot has happened since the last blog entry and the time has finally come to talk all about it!

As previously blogged about, we had the honor of presenting at Under The Radar at the Microsoft Silicon Valley campus. We had 6 minutes to explain ImThere to a room full of investors, people in the mobile industry, and press. After our presentation, a panel of 3 “judges” (spanning the aforementioned groups of people) grilled us with questions for 10 minutes.

Despite the numerous days of stress leading up to the presentation, it went as well as we could have hoped. The panelists were of course critical (that’s their job!), but all of the attendees we talked to expressed a lot of interest in ImThere. We had a bunch of opportunities to do this all-important networking, which we’re confident will lead to big things over the coming months.

Being at Under The Radar was the best thing that could happen to a company like ours. Needless to say, our trip out west was very valuable—especially when combined with the other great meetings we had outside of the conference. It was a bunch of fun too. Having the whole team together is always great, and meeting up with Wes for the first time was awesome. Hopefully we’ll all be together on a more permanent basis soon!

Now, let’s talk about the major functionality that we’ve been hyping up for the past couple of months. It was in fact launched, along with some other new nifty things, at the conference. However, we’ve left the biggest chunk of it unexposed while an extra coat of polish has been applied. If you’re especially crafty, you may have already noticed some of it. Either way, this coming Tuesday, the 27th, all will be unveiled here on this very blog and in… other places. Confused? Excited? Uncertain? Perfect!

See you Tuesday!

Update: Okay, okay, it’s a bit after Tuesday now. We’re still polishing, but it’ll all be in your hands any moment now!

We’ve rolled out one final update to ImThere in advance of the major changes that we’re launching at the Under The Radar conference on November 15th. This update consists of nearly 50 new features, enhancements, and bug fixes. Here’s an overview:

The Friends tab sidebar now displays all friends’ status messages in one place. Venues and artists are now sorted by how many friends have added them as a favorite. Hovering over or clicking the favorite count displays those friends.



You can now invite your webmail contacts to ImThere

• Hotness now better handles local events and updates drastically faster
• Invitation and friend request emails and mobile messages have been cleaned up
• Notifications are now displayed and linked on the sidebar Inbox tab properly
• Favorite lists now scroll without ever getting cut off
• Tags were removed from event listings to give more room for the associated venue, artist, time, and date
• Invitations now better handle custom addresses
• WYSIWYG editor output is now rendered properly on content and user pages
• URLs are now auto-linked in descriptions on content pages
• Time-zone support improved for clarity
• Communication center message previews have been truncated to make scanning through messages easier; other UI improvements were made as well
• Numerous fixes and improvements throughout the site, especially with the friend and mobile systems

Overall, you should find ImThere to be very solid. We’ve reached the point where the base of the site is very stable, and now we get to build awesome things on top of it and make larger-scale changes. As mentioned, you’ll start seeing exactly that happen very soon!

If you have any thoughts on improving ImThere, please let us know on Lighthouse!

ImThere is really picking up as of late, thanks in part to some great press we’ve received. TechCrunch, one of the most influential blogs in the internet startup world, wrote a great piece about us. Getting on TechCrunch is a huge honor and will help investors, potential partners, and the early adopter crowd find out about us. Rex Dixon’s Technically Speaking wrote about us too, and so did CMS Wire.

All of this goes a long way in helping ImThere get on the radar.

We are, however, still not quite on it. That’s why we’re presenting at Under The Radar | Mobility on November 15th. We will have 6 minutes (plus a Q&A session) to tell an esteemed group of investors, leaders in the industry, and press why ImThere is going to solve the problems of the world—or something like that. The conference takes place at the Microsoft campus in Silicon Valley, but the whole team will be out in that area for the entire week. If you’re in the area, get in touch and we’ll meet up! If you’re not, keep an eye on this event for live coverage of the conference.

Oh, and that super-secret system I’ve been teasing you about? It’s launching at the conference!

P.S. Sorry if you’ve noticed any instability with the site as of late. Our provide has been experiencing some network outages, which they believe are now resolved.