Critical UX insight today! And pirates!

Where have we been since the last blog post? Not working on Trippything the whole time. Not even close.

Elliot headed to the US and Europe for a holiday and to network (catch up with people, not cable them together... though cable ties might not be out of the question...). For a while I got busy salvaging what I could of my investments from the pending econolypse. When I realised most of it was unsalvagable no matter what I did, I decided I better get some cash coming in, so did some work for clients of Doing Words and Pollenizer.

Critical UX insight (and pirate eraser!)

Since we got back to work on Trippything a few weeks ago, Elliot's been busy getting the back-end code base into a whole new, improved shape, which will allow him to spend less time building stuff from scratch which has already allowed us to make faster progress on the unique elements of Trippything platform.

With all this new progress on the backend, Elliot has even been able to start work on the front-end of Trippything. There's still nothing tangible to show you, dear reader, but there will be soon enough, and in the meantime, in Elliot's bedroom and mine there are small piles of front-end pencil mockups growing. On Elliot's laptop (and also on the backup) there are the beginnings of a real interface that he and I can click on and get some simple interaction out of.

In the last week or two Elliot's been struggling with a bunch of stuff related to the complexity of displaying a helpful view of your travel itinerary. For most of this journey we've assumed that we'd need to present your itinerary in a calendar view. It might not seem like a big deal but doing a great job of a calendar user interface is big and complex. Outlook, iCal, gCalendar — these things were built by large, well-funded, multi-skilled teams. Elliot and I are two multi-skilled people.

Today we had a Team Trippything Moment and realised that we're actually not designing a calendar user interface at all, we're designing a list! It sounds trivial but it's actually very significant - it simplifies our user experience design problem immensely.

These are the kinds of discoveries you make when you use a pencil with a pirate eraser on the end.

Yesterday was a big day!

Such a big day in fact, that I wasn't able to get around to writing about it until today. That's OK, it's not like you were waiting with baited breath, right?

Yesterday 12 June 2008 was such a big day because we hit two important milestones in the development of our business and our product.

First big milestone: we demonstrated a key chunk of the technology underpinning the product to an important external audience. We parsed an important guy's emails and showed him what meaningful data we'd extracted. Live demos always get me quaking with fear beforehand and leave me exhausted afterwards because so often the gremlins come out to play at live demo time.
I'd always prefer to do these things with canned screendumps, but not everyone will settle for that. It also helps our confidence and our reputation enormously if we demo live and everything goes to plan. We did, and it did. Yay!
Big thanks to Elliot for teh devshiz, without which I'd just be some guy with a slide deck.
Second big milestone: somebody said they'd be prepared to invest in our business. It's a long way from verbal offer to term sheets, and a lot can go astray on the journey from here, but what an amazing feeling it is any time somebody tells you they'd consider investing in your startup.
Doesn't matter (for the time being) about how much money or in exhange for what, exactly. Just knowing that the vision we have for a new business can be shared beyond the two of us and it broadly makes sense to someone other than us is just awesome. This is the third time I've been involved in raising money for a new business, and it's every bit as exciting as the first time.

That's all from the news desk here at Trippything. I'll bring you more news as it comes to hand.

Pic by Nrbelex

Planning inaugural 'ParsingOut' devcrunch

During work dinner Originally uploaded by Lachlan Hardy

Over at Elliot's today (picture 'Flight of the Conchords', he's the band and I'm Maury) and he had an excellent idea: invite a mob of developer mates over one night soon, set out some documentation on a wiki, lay on a lot of pizza and beer, bump up the volume, and see how many parsers we can write before the sun comes up.

I thought we might call it "ParsingOut" and if it proves popular, then this would be ParsingOutOne since we're likely to do it more often than once a year.

Elliot's place is at 50 Mill Hill Road, Bondi Junction. Likely timing is from midday Saturday, 5 July '08.

Want to be in on it? Drop me an email at my_first_name at trippything dot com and we'll let you know when we have it confirmed.

Cheers! [burp!]

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Trippything "Parse Harvest April 08" a roaring success!

A confirmation email. We love them.

Here at Trippything (when I say "here" I mean a virtual space incorporating Elliot's house, my house, and some server space) we need confirmation emails from travel service providers (airlines, hotels, car rentals, trains, B&Bs, etc.) We can't get enough of them. Send them through to trips[curlysymbol]trippything.com any time you book something new. We'll respect your travelling privacy, of course, but we'll gratefully use your confirmation email and any PDF attachments it might have to write, test and tweak our growing library of parsers

.We soooo can't get enough confirmation emails that we recently put out an email to a bunch of friends around the world, asking them to send in as many old and new confirmation emails as they could dredge up from their email archives. We offered some prizes - iTunes Store gift vouchers and an iPod Nano - for the people who sent us the most, and most-useful, confirmation emails.

Elliot had the canny idea of purchasing the Nano duty-free to save some of the personal savings we're using to power Trippything at the moment, so I took the opportunity to snag one duty-free in Singapore on my way home from Ila and Maury's wedding in Bangalore last week.

I can't quite announce the grand Nano prize winner and the minor gift voucher winners just yet because Elliot's too busy coding to send me their names and contact details, but whoever you are, here's your lovely shiny Nano. It's softly calling your name... I just can't quite make it out... Oh wait, it's calling Elliot's name. Huh...

MailChimp.com - A_B testing in an email marketing service? neato!

MailChimp.com - A_B testing in an email marketing service? neato! Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy

I'm signing up for a free trial of mailchimp.com, not because I need email marketing now, but trippything may need it in 6mths and choosing the right platform is important - it's so dang hard to migrate to another platform later on. Here's something interesting: A/B testing built right into the platform so you can quicky segment a email DB and test two different versions of an email. It lets you define what constitutes "more successful" and will even automatically send out the 'winning' email to the rest of the DB once your test has been completed. slick!