First, a little update. We’re working on revising our last set of designs and hooking them into our programming, so Leftos looks nice and pretty for all you people. It’s been a long and tedious process but design is such an important aspect of this project that we want to make sure we put our best foot forward. We’re about finished with all the profile pages and their related elements. After this we’ll be moving on to the Homepage/Leftos feed, the Login page, and the “Create your account” page. Then–we’re done and we can ready this thing for launch. Relatively speaking we’re close, and it looks like our official Alpha Launch will come sometime in April (we’ll announce the actual launch date soon).

In our last post we asked for your help spreading the word about Leftos and getting people you know to sign up for our Alpha. We received a good response and our sign up’s continue to increase daily, so we wanted to thank everyone who helped spread the word. Keep it up, we appreciate your continued support.

TechNow09

So then there’s the matter of this little event that we are presenting at called TechNow09. Well, that little event isn’t so little anymore. The TechNow09 team has been hard at work pulling in sponsors, presenting companies, panel members, and other elements that will contribute to the festivities. Here’s an update of what’s going on:

5 Presenting companies: Leftos, uwemp, bablur, ShopFiber, and hab.la

Discussion Panel: Larry Freed-CEO of Foresee Results, Chuck Newman- CEO of ReCellular, Jeff Bocan- Managing Director at Beringea, and John Kelley- Manager of Sales and Operations for Google Adwords.

(ya, i know…we got a guy from Google, pretty cool, eh?) Whats even cooler is that Google is supporting the event as well. Here’s the other companies behind the event…

Sponsors: Yelp, The Royal Oak DDA (downtown development authority), Safford & Baker pllc, Ann Arbor SPARK, Beringea, Korotkin Insurance Group, Title Source inc., Airfoil Public Relations, and Telemus Capital Partners.

Things are really coming together and it promises to be a really great night. If you haven’t bought your ticket yet, make sure you do at the TechNow09 website. All the proceeds will be donated to the Multiple Sclerosis Society and we would love to have your support at the event.

That’s all for now, more to come in the next week or so…stay tuned.

We’re still in the design phase, perfecting the look of our site before we connect it to our programming. We’ve had a few minor setbacks that have pushed back our launch date a bit, but nothing serious. (More to come on our launch date in the future, stay tuned).

For right now though, we actually want to ask you for a favor. As we near closer to this launch date it becomes increasingly more important that we have a large number of people signed up. Thus far, we’ve done fairly well with the number of sign-ups but with your help we think we can increase this dramatically. So what exactly are we asking you to do?

It’s simple–reach out to your networks, friends, family, co-workers, etc.. and ask them to sign up for our alpha launch at Leftos.com.

Remember, we’re only asking for their name and email address, and this information will ONLY be used to notify them of our launch and invite them to try our website. Also, each person only needs to sign up once.

Most likely if your reading this blog post, your either in one of our personal networks or your someone who is interested in our idea. Either way, were hoping that you’ll take a few minutes out of your day to help spread the word and show your support for us and for Leftos.

Thanks everyone and we’ll be back soon with more information about Leftos and our launch date.

First, Our Progress:

We’re now in week 6 of development. During this phase, we’ve focused most of our efforts on 2 particular areas: Programming, and Design. Back in September we set out to hire a programmer to build our website. About a month later we found the right candidate for the job and made the hire. For the past 6 weeks, he’s been busy programming all the features that you’ll see when we launch. Generally, it’s a rule-of-thumb that these projects always take longer than expected; but surprisingly, we’ve hit every milestone on time, and are set to finish development as planned (knock on wood).  We’re really happy with the programming thus far, and are excited to have you all test out these features in Leftos Alpha.

Our other major area of focus has been design. We decided for a number of different reasons that it would be best to do the site design in-house. We had the capability, so we figured– hey, might as well save some money and make it look exactly how we wanted. Lets just say that’s easier said than done. Our first draft went well. We got through all 15 pages in 4 or 5 days, and were really pleased with the results. But one lesson you learn is that perfection is a graphic designer’s best friend…and their worst enemy.  Redesign, after redesign, after redesign. We kept making minor changes, and as we added or changed a feature, the design had to be changed as well. Last Friday, December 23rd, after 3 months of almost daily work, we finally put the kibosh on site design. Though it was kinda painful at times, we’re really happy with the outcome. It’s clean, simple, and unique, and we’re excited for you all to see it too launch.

Speaking of Launch

There was one big question that we didn’t answer in our last blog post:”When will the site launch?”. That’s a really big question, so big that we don’t even have an exact answer. Right now it’s more important that we build a great product–a functional, helpful, and intuitive website, than to rush Leftos out onto the market prematurely. Therefore, we haven’t set an exact date for launch. We do however, have a rough idea of when we think it will be ready, which will be around the second week in February. Pure coincidence (I swear), but another (Leftos-related) holiday just so happens to fall around that same time. Just don’t forget that rule-of-thumb though, that these projects always take longer than expected. So don’t mark your calendars just yet–instead just keep an eye on this here blog. We’ll keep you up-to-speed on the launch date as it nears.

From the Leftos Team, Happy Holidays Everyone.

Leftos.com is a user generated site designed to break down the communication barriers that have always existed between men and women. Leftos is a resource, similar to Wikipedia, where you can learn all about male and female interaction from the perspective of both sexes. Its reinforced by certain social networking features, which allow users to connect and share advice on a personal level. It allows people to say what they’ve always wanted, find out about something they never could, or get an answer to a question they never felt comfortable asking. Leftos is also anonymous, so users can participate openly without the fear of embarrassment or judgement. Whether your single, dating, in a relationship, married, or divorced, you can benefit from Leftos. Men have always complained “I’ll never understand women” and women complain “I’ll never understand men”. At the root of nearly every conflict between a male and female lies one consistency: a lack of communication. Leftos.com aims to change all that, by giving men and women an insight into the minds of the opposite sex.    

The concept was conceived based on the premise that there are no experts on this type of information, only people with opinions. So if we could somehow aggregate all those opinions from a large group of people, we could establish consistencies–or the best opinions. The benefits to a system like this would be widespread. Advice, lessons learned, insights, stories, philosophies, and most importantly, the opinions of both men and women, regardless of age.

Collectively, people like you and me are the single greatest resource for this type of information and we have yet to find a way to bring it all together in one place. With the massive reach of the internet and some carefully designed features, we feel that Leftos is that place.

Next

In our next post, we’ll be giving you a more complete picture of our website including a look at our features. So check back soon.

If you have any thoughts, as usual, we would love to hear them. You can post them down in the comments section.

]]> http://leftos.com/blog/leftos-is/feed 0 http://leftos.com/blog/what-does-leftos-mean-time-to-find-out http://leftos.com/blog/what-does-leftos-mean-time-to-find-out#comments Fri, 05 Dec 2008 18:53:01 +0000 zach http://blog.leftos.com/wordpress/?p=214 First off, thanks to everyone who has shown some interest in our business, our blog, and helping out in general. We had a great response to our last blog post and especially want to thank all of you who posted comments. We had fun reading your guesses and remarks, a couple of which were actually very close to being correct. So I won’t beat around the bush any longer–you came to the blog today to find out what it means. So here it is, Leftos stands for:

So that’s what it means, now what is it? Check back in a few days for our next blog post, where we’ll be answering that question.

Progress: Its the end of week 4 and we’ve finished building our feed (ahead of schedule!). Next week we’ll begin work on building out the user profiles and a few other social networking features we have planned.

Oh yea, and before I go, one more thing. A lot of you have already signed up for Leftos Alpha, which we want to thank you for. We do wanna clarify one thing however. We put up a simple sign up page at Leftos.com. This sign up is the same as the one here on our blog, therefore if you’ve already signed up on the blog, you don’t have to do it again there.

• Build a group of users to participate in Leftos Alpha.
  
• Explain Leftos, with more information in each post.
• Update our readers on our progress.

Just to clarify though, our website is not this blog. Think of this as sort’ve the prelude of what’s to come– a sneak peak. Make sure you keep checking back here, because we’ll be posting all the time. You can make this easier by signing up for our RSS FEED.

We’re well aware that we didn’t disclose a whole lot of information thus far, but there’s plenty of things you can deduct from our first blog post and About Page. How about another list to simplify. Here’s what you know so far:

• Our site is called Leftos.com.
• It’s a web 2.0 website, comprised of all User Generated Content.
• It incorporates Social Networking features, allowing users to communicate w/ eachother.
• We are addressing a real world problem.
• We feel Leftos can solve that problem and truly help people.

Still frustrated/upset/anxious/perturbed?….well stay tuned. We’ll be posting our logo soon, sometime in the next few posts. Our logo, albeit simple, should give you a nice hint as to what Leftos is.

We’ve kept this thing pretty quiet throughout our planning process, but now we’ve got some news for you. We’re making progress, and as we get closer to our first private release, we want to get you involved. We’re trying to assemble a group of people to participate in this first version of our website, Leftos Alpha. (Learn more about Leftos Alpha). We want you to be a part of it, so if your interested in helping us out and supporting what we’re doing, this is the way to do it. Its easy–all you have to do is enter your name and email address in the black box to the right…we’ll take care of the rest.

We’re going to use this blog as a way to document our progress, talk about the latest news with our company, and also to answer all your questions about what the website actually is. So if you’re interested, keep checking back here to see if we’ve dropped anything new about the idea. We’ll be doing it piece by piece, with each post getting closer to the complete picture.

If your one of those curious types, check out our About Page to get some more information on our company, what leftos is, this blog, and how you can help.