BlooSee on open waters
This blog has been pretty silent for the last weeks/months (oops!) but this didn’t mean the activity had slowed down — on the contrary!
The main news is that this last week we’ve opened our gates and now anyone can register at BlooSee, which is of course something we’ve been after for a long time!
While Mark Puig, our CTO, was orchestrating the process from our Barcelona offices, I (Pedro Valdeolmillos, CEO) was again in the San Francisco Bay Area pitching the project to potential investors and everyone interested in this particular venture. The trip had also the purpose of strenghtening the Bay Area team, together with Manuel Maqueda (our VP of Community and Strategy, who is our permanent presence there) and other key players that shall soon come on board. The result is we have now offices in Barcelona, Spain, and Palo Alto, United States.
So, far from being idle, we’ve been taking BlooSee out to open waters. Go tell everyone about it!
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Getting ready and getting excited
Although the idea had crossed my mind on and off for a while, I started to really think about BlooSee back in the summer of 2007. Yes, that long ago. Of course it didn’t have a name at the time. It was the “nautical web project”, and it seemed like a cool idea basically because I couldn’t find anything like that on the web. So I set off to design the web application that as a cruising sailor I would like to find online. Which basically meant starting to write some sort of “mega wish list”. Which led to writing more and better structured documentation.
Flash forward to now, and I realize how much easy it seemed at the time. Everything has taken (much) longer than expected, from deciding on what technology to use, who’d make up the development team, defining the data structures, planning functionalities (current and future ones), starting to research the paths to get funded, etc. Essentially, because each decision has led to a reflexion of the kind: will this still hold when we add this or that feature? Does it make sense for all the user types? Will this new option scale with the system? Is this too complicated? Too easy? Well — you get the idea.
In the meanwhile, other systems have appeared, but I strongly believe ours takes into account a broader range of possibilities, caters for a broader range of users, is much clearer in terms of user interface, information taxonomy, and so on. I believe the extra time will pay off in the end. Buy hey, it’s users who will tell.
And speaking of users. What the title of this post means is that we’re finally getting ready to open the system to external users. The development version is already hosted on the private virtual server, and at the end of the week bloosee.com will be active with all the content. We’re ironing out the last wrinkles, so that in a few days real users (this means, yes, other than the people from our team) will create accounts and start interacting with the system and each other. Of course this ready is not prime time ready, but I’m really excited since the feedback from those users will be very important to us. And by the way, they’re all experienced sailors (ranging from racing sailors, to cruisers, people who make their living on the sea, wind and kite surfers, etc.), that come from three or four different nationalities.
I do know there are still many miles in front of us. BlooSee miles, that is. But for the moment this is very exciting!
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What it looks like
Since the system is private for the moment, I thought I’d share some screen captures to show what it looks like. You can click on each image to see a larger version.
But first let me show you some of the preliminary designs we developed:
First designs - Explore section
First designs - Groups
Although we had some okay-looking designs, before coding the actual XHTML we decided to go back to what’s essential, Continue reading »
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First status report
This project was but an idea on (virtual) paper about a year ago, but we’re currently getting ready to launch the first beta version with actual users.
I thought it would be clarifying to shortly mention where we are, what we’ve accomplished so far and what are our expectations for the near future. Continue reading »
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