inkzee

Hello all,

Today we have great news! Yesterday our company was selected as the winner of the VI Edition of the EOI School of Business nation wide Entrepreneur contest. We are very excited about it as it’s a great revalidation of our work. The prize is also a good amount of cash that will keep us running longer, something that is extremely valuable, especially during this financial meltdown.

We want to thank all members of EOI that made this contest possible and all the other entrepreneurs that competed with really cool ideas too. Keep them going!

More links to the same news (In Spanish):

Facultad de Informática (UPM)
Región Digital
Ibercampus
El Periódico de Extremadura
Campus Red

If you find new posts about it, please leave a comment with the link and we’ll update the post

Summer has been a slow month but we’ve been working on a new architecture for Inkzee. Right now, and even though we enabled new internal features, the current server where the alpha is hosted is too slow for the application and so we are migrating it to a bigger server.

Before we complete the migration, we are finishing some big changes to the way the application works. The new changes will make the application much faster and much more scalable. That way, if the new server isn’t enough, we’ll be able to add new machines to the application and scale horizontally.

The architectural changes will be finished by next week, so the migration will happen very soon and hopefully we’ll be able to send more invitations for the current alpha.

Thanks a lot for the comprehension and we hope everyone had a good summer!

The Inkzee team

Hello everybody,

Today we have great news! Inkzee has been selected as one of the 10 finalists for the Entrepreneur contest run by the EOI School of Business. It’s been an honor to have reached the final stage and we’ll try everything in our hand to take the first prize.

The next phase will be the 29th and 30th of September and we’ll have to do a presentation of Inkzee in front of a jury who will elect the winners.

Even though we haven’t won, the fact of being in the final is really great for us. It revalidates our business idea and most importantly, that our business plan is a solid one. Let’s hope we can at least achieve one of the top prizes.

Wish us good luck!!

Because for us, speed is one of our primary targets, we’ve just pushed a new update to our backend that enables memcache support for some parts of our code. It’s not all there yet, but the basics are there and response times will start getting better.

Right now, you’ll be able to experience a much better performance when reading posts and fetching a list of titles from a given feed. During the next days we hope the response time will get better and better.

We’ve also migrated our webservers today from Apache to Cherokee. Although Apache is excellent in many ways, we don’t need a fully loaded Apache, so we’ve chosen Cherokee which is working fine for us.

Thanks a lot for your patient!! And please, do sends us an email with any feedback you’ve got!

Have a nice weekend all!

We come back with news that are going to make many of our beta testers happy. We’ve pushed a series of upgrades (the last one today) that enable you to order your feed title pane by drag & dropping the titles around. This functionality was working last week but the changes weren’t being stored so they disappeared on refresh. Today’s update enables persistent order storing so that the order is saved and retrieve the next time you open Inkzee.

We’ve also added a new icon that will flag those blogs that are returning 404 http codes so that users are aware that something is wrong with that feed. We’ll be adding new features like folders and feed title and url edits in a few days.

As usual, if you want to keep updated, we recommend you to subscribe to this blog and to follow us on Twitter.

If you would like to be an alpha tester for Inkzee.com, please ask for your invitation at our home site: http://www.inkzee.com

After some dark hours, we’ve managed to unveil the alpha version of Inkzee. It took more than expected to stabilize the platform and we wanted our alpha users to have a not-so-bumpy experience with inkzee.

Currently we have the bare basics and we are working hard to bring new features every couple of days. All the feedback is greatly appreciated and we hope we can have an open version in a couple of months or so.

So, if you are interested in participating in the alpha program or you are one crazy early adopter please feel free to request an invite at http://www.inkzee.com and we’ll send you an invite as soon as possible. Right now we are sending invites in small batches but we’ll eventually send you your invite.

You can also read more periodic updates on our Twitter account: http://www.twitter.com/abarrera.

Thank you all for your patient!!

Hi all! Sorry for the recent server blackout. We proceeded with a reboot of the server and it crashed pretty badly. System is back to normal and the webserver and the databases are fully restored.

Hopefully the crash happened before we started handing alpha invites so no user has been affected, nevertheless we are setting up some measures to avoid problems like these in the future.

Thank you very much for your patient and sorry for any inconvenience!

Finally we’ve uploaded the new engine for Inkzee. It’s much faster and much more scalable (which is good if things get ugly). Right now we are doing some final tests but it’s live already.

Apart from that, we’ve managed to finally add the about us and contact sections on the main website. We’ve also enabled an invite request section on the main website so that interested users can request an invite to the private alpha program we are running.

We’ll start sending invites the moment we finish some interface details and all the tests are done. Hopefully that will be in a couple of days. Stay tuned!

Oh, and we’ve created a Twitter account where you can follow our day to day activity: http://twitter.com/inkzee

First of all hello from San Francisco! I’m currently staying a couple of days at SF pitching Inkzee, so I hope many of the people that are reading this blog will eventually become Inkzee users. Anyhow, yesterday night I saw the Robert Scoble had released his opml file with all his blog subscriptions. I though it would be a nice test for the Inkzee alpha to go and import that huge (698 subscriptions) amount of blogs.

As expected, the algorithm started chocking so I’ve been working on a new multithreaded version of the Inkzee engine. I finished it a couple of days ago but I’m still doing so tests before substituting the actual core. Some parts of the core have been rewritten in python for better speed and so no it’s time to test it to avoid any further problems. Hopefully the new version will be online at the end of the week. At the same time I’m working on some new features for the AI engine. Those will probably be online during the weekend.

Take care everybody!

A month ago I went to the first stop of the Adobe On Air European tour in Madrid. I have to say it was the best event I’ve been to EVER. I had a great time and they took care of us like I’ve never seen before. But, apart from the event which was great, I had the opportunity to talk to some of the speakers. Andre Charland was one of them and I had fun talking with him. What I didn’t expected was a mention to Inkzee on the OnAir Tour blog. From here I thank him very much for the link and the nice words he wrote about us. I hope we can meet again in another event.