Coming Soon: The All New Bloozler

Hello all! Since this is my first post, I'd like to introduce myself.

I am Kalpesh and the latest team member of Bloozler. Currently, I am completing my final year of engineering at IIT Bombay. I met Nikhil at the Mumbai Barcamp 2 where he launched the demo version of Bloozler. The initial presentation was interesting to say the least and when I came to know of Bloozler looking for team members, I hopped in right away! The main attraction for me was the promised relief from the information overload! (a consequence of subscribing to many feeds)

This post is to update you about the changes taking place behind the scenes.We are into a major revamp mode and you will be able to enjoy the all new Bloozler after the soft launch some time in the beginning of 2008.

Well, you could think of it as our New Year gift :)

As you might have guessed, things are moving pretty fast for us given that each one (well almost) has a regular job as well. This concept stands for our passion for internet technologies and the potential it has to radically improve our lives. And if we do achieve the actual implementation of our concept, who knows, we might be hooked on full time.

Last Sunday, Nikhil, Aurko, Hemant and me sat down for a brainstorming session with the major aim of relooking at the features to be shipped out in the next version and to decide the new look of the site. It was quite a stimulating session with all the ideas being bounced off each other.

It was amazing to see the theoretical concepts of "brainstorming" and "six thinking hats" in action. I shall post another article soon on the method we used for deciding the features to be included.

The features we discussed are pretty radical and addictive I must say. Without spilling the beans, let me divulge that you will be able to cut through the content noise of blogosphere and lay your hands on the best content being written on absolutely any topic you can conceive. We rely on the most sophisticated algorithms rooted in the human brain to bring the best content to surface. No artificial intelligence, no machine algorithms for us and our users. As the Indian press says, we are "a peer-reviewed blog and news content aggregator".

Well, that is it for now from our side. Stay tuned for more updates.

10th December,2007

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Listening to: Eddie Vedder -Guaranteed
via FoxyTunes

We've got press!!

Well not exactly - but in a way. It seems some reporter from IANS covered the barCampMumbai2 and his reports are all over the place! I discovered these when I ran a random search for 'bloozle' while testing the search engine 'Clusty'.

Here are the few lines which mention us ...

BarCamp Mumbai 2 was more focused on entrepreneurship than on the darling of previous BarCamps -- technology. Participation in technology-heavy sessions was low, he explained, as compared to those on entrepreneurship-related topics.

This was evident when discussions led by venture capitalists (VCs) like Mahesh Murthy of the IT companies-focussed Seed Fund and start-up founders like Nikhil Kulkarni of blog-oriented Bloozle attracted visibly larger numbers.
............

BarCamp claims to have a history of product launches and this event saw two. One was a new feature of randomly navigating through recommended Short Messaging Service (SMS) forwards available online on Rahul Gupta's vakow.com. The other is a peer-reviewed blog and news content aggregator called Bloozle.

So, even before we can ourselves claim it we have been made "peer-reviewed blog and news content aggregator" - that's actually quite exactly what we are. So, it definitely means that I was able to get the message across to the audience at the barCamp!

Bloozle Team Meeting

Ok. We are back - and the recruitment drive I mentioned in the previous post has gone well - we are a team of about 7-8 now. We have a 3 member technical sub group and at least one member dedicated to 'user communication' - the next post here could as well be by him.

We had a full day teem meeting today - the agenda was to get the whole team at a place - talk about our own inputs on the concept and about what we all have heard from the initial users (this part had mostly me talking). Lots of new ideas came in and lot of 'विचार मंथन' (brainstorming) happened.

We decided on a few 'NextSteps'.There are 3 major verticals of work as of now

• Incremental Work (plugging gaps in the current site)
• Concept Redesign (to project a more focussed message)
• communication (plan the marketing of the site on release – FAQ, Tuts etc).

It was decided to have a FULL team meeting again on 5/6 January to take stock of the progress. Meanwhile we have branched out into 2 groups – one will do the ‘Incremental work’ and other will do the ‘Concept redesign’ as well as ‘User communication’.

• Manpreet, Raza and Nikhil (me) work on ‘Incremental Work’ - plugging all the technical gaps (including UI gaps) for the current version of bloozler.
  
• Hemant, Aurko, Kalpesh and Nikhil (me) will work on study of competition, focus of the concept/homepage and redesign for the site. The group will also do initial work on ‘User communication’ – tutorials, FAQ, introductory emailers etc.
  

Hemant could not attend this meeting as he is in KL, Malaysia at the moment. Yet, his urge to be present for the meeting forced him to call me during the meeting and talk to everyone present.

Overall a good start ... lets see if we are able to close in critical things by 5/6th January when we meet next.