This Friday Wojtek took part in the social evening MiniBar - London organized by Christian from openbusiness.cc . It’s a cycle of meetings, during which people involved in start-ups, p2p, social networks etc. have great possibility to share their experience and ideas.
The meeting was held in Corbet Place Bar on Brick Lane. Around 200 people attended who guaranteed a metter-of-fact discussion, but also a lot of fun and great atmosphere as always. Apart from the people who make their first steps in Internet business, there was a lot of experienced people willing to help the beginners. Among the invited guests presenting their ideas were Margaret Gold (Vodafone Betavine.net), Nick Haltsted (tweetmeme.com), Antonio Roldao Lopes (graffywall.com) and others.
Just a quick update. We’ve been plenty busy lately, and that’s why it’s been so quiet around here for a while, but we promise we’ll be posting more on the blog as soon as things settle down a bit. Another update with a major overhaul of the Mapness homepage is on its way and the Mapness team has grown. Details will follow.
Meet us at TMT Ventures or Barcamp in Warsaw.
Meanwhile, Mike and Tom will be attending the TMT Ventures 2008 conference in Warsaw on 27.02.2008 and the biggest ever polish Barcamp (Ogólnopolski Barcamp) event on 26.02.2008, also in Warsaw. The guest speakers will be Reshma Sohoni (Seedcamp.com) and Hanna Viita (Mindbox.pl), and part of the Mapness team will also be present at an invite-only meeting with Reshma Sohoni before the Barcamp. Great!
If you’d like to meet Tom and/or Mike and have a chat during the Barcamp or the next day, at the TMT Ventures conference, drop us a line and they’ll be more than happy to meet you there.
A new version of Mapness has just been released! We’ve been working very hard for the last couple of weeks fixing bugs, tweaking, upgrading, speeding up and polishing Mapness. The newly released service makes creating your travel journals much easier and more intuitive.
Changes to Mapness include, among others :
full support for Internet Explorer 6+
more intuitive, easier process of creating of your travel journals
tips and visual cues helping you to get around
address search for creating your travel journals
lots of bugs and glitches fixed in response to feedback from our users
more..
If you haven’t already done so, go ahead and register at Mapness to see for yourself!
The new version of Mapness is full of fixes and upgrades developed in response to the feedback received from Mapness users.
If you think that a part of Mapness needs fixing, stumble upon a bug or a functionality that you think should work different please tell us about it on the Mapness forum, contact us by e-mail at feedback@mapness.net or fill in the Mapness team contact form. If your comment or suggestion requires our direct response we will contact you shortly.
All registered Mapness users can login at the Mapness forum using the same login and password as in Mapness.
“If you’re not embarrassed by your first release, then you launched too late”
So ashamed as we are, and well aware of all the little quirks, tiny bugs and mischievous UI controls still popping up here and there, we’ve launched the open beta version of Mapness. If you haven’t already registered for an account at Mapness, now would be a good time to do so :). We’d like to thank all of you who already registered and hope you’ll like Mapness. We will be launching a forum in the next couple of days to gather all the feedback and suggestions from you. As for now use e-mail to send us your first impressions and bug reports.
Now that the first beta is running live we will be focusing on fixing and tweaking Mapness for the next 2 or 3 weeks, and then developing it further, also based on the feedback from you, Mapness users. Our plan is to mainly focus on social features, which Mapness is a little bit short on as of now. We also have some surprises coming up so stay tuned for details. We have the technology. We can make it better than it was. Better…stronger…faster!
Feel free to test, play with and share Mapness with your friends.
We are looking for seed funding - Venture Capitals or Business Angels. Back in September, when we were starting the development of Mapness we’ve applied to Seedcamp but having no more than an unrefined idea and no prototype to show we didn’t make it. Since then we have self-funded Mapness - we’ve developed a beta version, defined our business goals and are nearing the completion of a full blown public release. Thus we are now seeking a seed investment to enhance our marketing and development teams and to kick start our service. If you are interested please contact us and we’ll supply all the details and a business plan.
We are proud to share this news with all of our readers (and hopefully future users of our service).
We arranged an agreement with a Polish Himalaya expedition to publish their up to date achievements on our website.
The expedition itself is a pioneer one as its participants will dive in the Tilicho lake in Himalayas which is more than 5000m above sea level. Such an endeavor has never been accomplished before and that makes us even more proud of the fact that we were given the privilege to share news from this journey with other Globetrotters.
What you are about to see is a journey log entirely created with Mapness and it was done in just a few easy steps. Soon everyone will be able to publish journeys while we focus on keeping it as easy as breathing.
The news form the Himalayas may lack some details and have rather brief form but its due to atmospheric conditions that limit the communication with the expedition. We hope that soon the reports will be filled with lots of exciting details and multimedia from the trip.
So as we announced previously on 27.09.2007 we did a presentation of Mapness on 3camp in Gdansk, Poland – a barcamp like meeting of web folks from Gdansk. To be perfectly honest I was going to write this post just after the presentation, about a week ago, but we’re rushing to release Mapness beta and the last final batch of fixes and enhancements really got the whole team very busy. Anyway the meeting was great, I’ve met lots of interesting people and I got lots of positive feedback, quite a lot of advice from experienced entrepreneurs and some interesting business opportunities. For all that I’d like to thank the fine people who took interest in Mapness and cared to venture a chat with me after the presentation. I’ve really learned a lot. The slide show and the video shot during the presentation are polish only, as was the audience.
Next weekend Mike and me will be at Bootstrap meeting in Warsaw but no presentation from us this month, we’re just going to hang around hoping to meet some interesting people with bright ideas. If you’re going see you there!
On the 27th September we’re having our first public showdown at 3camp - first barcamp ever in Tricity (that’s where I (Tom) currently live). I’ll be giving a presentation about Mapness and bootstrapping in Poland.
I’ll shed some light on how it all started, how we came up with that particular idea, what other projects we’ve been discussing before committing to developing Mapness (and we’ve had a few) and how it all unraveled. Besides the brief presentation of Mapness itself I’m also going to cover more general topics about web startups.
I’m going to talk a bit about the technology behind Mapness, and the tools we’ve used to collaborate and I’ll try hard not to plunge headlong into an hour long discussion about usability and design issues (although I’d love to!). I guess that the ‘business’ issues will be far more interesting to the audience so I’ll cover as much as possible of what we’ve learned in that field.
It’s our first startup and we are by no means experienced entrepreneurs so I’ll focus on sharing our hands-on experience without going into overgeneralizations and Guy Kawasaki-style advice. We’ve applied for Seedcamp, Wojtek’s been to the TechCrunch/Seedcamp party, we’ve already established some fine deals to promote Mapness and I’ll share the important lessons we’ve learned from that with the 3camp audience.
Did I mention that there’s going to be a sneak preview of Mapness for all those attending? Well yes there is! Mapness will still be in private beta at the time of my presentation but stay tuned as we’ll be giving out invitations soon after that.
My presentation from 3camp will be available here on the blog afterwards.
It ain’t SXSW but there are some great people coming so I hope it’s going to be fun.
I had a pleasure to be at the TechCrunch party in London last Thursday along with Seedcamp investors, most of the Seedcamp attendees and a lots of other Internet people.
The place was amazing, Burritos and drinks were great. Everyone I met there had something interesting to say, I even got a few interesting tips for our project that I shared with the team.
Whole party was bursting with ideas and concepts for new startups. I’m very happy that so much is happening all the time. There is no way to get bored in the Internet with so many new startups coming in. Soon we’re all gonna be using some of those and wonder how could we have lived without them
This was a great experience for me and if I ever again hear about something similar I’ll definitely show up.
Thanks to everyone to whom I had an opotunity to speak to and I hope to see some of you on a next party
