7 months ago by Aen

Vote For Us For Asia’s Top 50 Apps

I’ve nom­i­nated Lik­ables for Asia’s Top 50 Apps, orga­nized by E27. Good thing we’ve been accepted and are up on the vot­ing page. From the top 50, a panel of judges will select the Most Valu­able App and apps for Rookie, Solu­tion and Design of the year. Win­ning this would mean a lot more expo­sure for Lik­ables and could mean more resources for us to ded­i­cate more time and effort on Likables.

If you enjoyed using Lik­ables so far I hope you would take a minute and go to http://asiatop50apps.com/category/voting/ and vote for us. There are quite a num­ber of apps on the page. If you have trou­ble find­ing Lik­ables just do a Find on your browser (click Edit > Find or hit Com­mand + F on a Mac or Ctrl + F on Win­dows). This would mean a lot to us. Thank you.

Aen
Founder, Likables

8 months ago by Aen

Relike and Notification Settings

I’m a lit­tle guilty because I have not been work­ing as much as I wanted to for the past two weeks because of free­lance work but I’m glad that my team­mates have picked up the slack and two major fea­tures – Relike and Noti­fi­ca­tion Set­tings had shipped ahead of schedule.

Since we launched the beta three weeks ago and gave out more invites to our users, the num­ber of users and activ­ity had increased tremen­dously. It prob­a­bly didn’t feel like a beta for some of the newer invited users so the swarm of noti­fi­ca­tion emails from the increased activ­ity has put off some of them. We did not ship the beta with a way to turn off or man­age noti­fi­ca­tions and we are sorry about that. We’ve just released noti­fi­ca­tions set­tings so you can man­age them or sim­ply turn them off.

The juice of this update is Relike. Peo­ple have been want­ing this fea­ture. One of our users Nathan Rutzky had even con­tributed an idea for how relike could be imple­mented. Relik­ing on Lik­ables basi­cally works just like retweets on Twit­ter. Here’s how it looks like.

Just click the ‘Relike’ link above the com­ment textfield to re-post any lik­able you find to your fol­low­ers. Relik­ing a lik­able also makes it more pop­u­lar. The more relikes a lik­able has the more pop­u­lar it becomes. Like retweets, you may find lik­ables in your fol­low­ing feed that are not posted by some­one you fol­low but has been reliked by some­one you do. This helps you dis­cover new con­tent and peo­ple who you might be inter­ested with. When some­one relikes one of your lik­ables you will receive a noti­fi­ca­tion email. Of course you can man­age that in your noti­fi­ca­tion settings.

Please let us know what you think of the new fea­tures. We’d love your feedback!

8 months ago by Aen

Handmade Namecards For BarcampSG7

Tomorrow’s BarcampSG7 and I will be there with Vito, Chee Aun and Vishnu. I’ll be there in the morn­ing to put up my topic about new inno­va­tions in e-commerce and hope­fully I will get enough votes to present it later in the day. The event is from 9:30 AM to 6:00 PM so catch us there if you are inter­ested in my talk on e-commerce inno­va­tions or Likables.

We still have not printed our name­cards so I made some.

8 months ago by Aen

Catch Aen and Vito on 938LIVE this Friday

Vito and I will be on 938LIVE Raw & Ready tomor­row 9 Sep­tem­ber Sin­ga­pore time 7:00 PM – 8:00 PM. We will be dis­cussing with Sarah the DJ top­ics like new media, star­tups, Lik­ables and human connectedness.

Tune in to FM 93.8 between 7:00 PM and 8:00 PM to catch us. You can also call in to +65 6691 1938 between 7:15 PM and 7:25 PM, and between 7:45 PM 7:55 PM to ask ques­tions. The show will also be stream from xinmsn.com/938live after the 7 PM news.

8 months ago by Aen

Peter Kim Joins The Team

Isn’t that a nice rhyme? Today Peter Jihoon Kim or Peter Kim as most of us would know him has been ini­ti­ated into the crew and from today swear alle­giance to the Jolly Roger of the Heart.

Peter with Matz

Peter with Matz at Red Dot Ruby Conf

Peter runs Deci­siveBits and Somat­ic­Con­tact as an inde­pen­dent iOS and Ruby on Rails con­sul­tant. Before this he was Direc­tor of Cre­ative Engi­neer­ing for Viki and a soft­ware engi­neer for Game Ven­tures. He is well-versed in Agile, BDD and TDD method­olo­gies and con­tributes to open-source.

He will be work­ing with Vishnu and Jackie to pro­duce Lik­ables for iPhone and its back­end API. We are really excited to have Peter on our team and look for­ward to cre­at­ing great expe­ri­ences for our users together.

P/S: Like the rest of the team, Peter is work­ing part-time on Lik­ables. He and Aen are both still accept­ing con­sult­ing engagements.

8 months ago by Aen

Vote for us and help us win an Awwward

Awwwards

Lik­ables has been nom­i­nated by Awwwards, the pres­ti­gious awards for well-designed web­sites. If the­FWA is the best awards for Flash web­sites, then Awwwards is the equiv­a­lent for CSS websites.

It’s a long shot but we’ve put in lots of effort in the design of Lik­ables and hope that by win­ning an award like this, we would attract more beta users. So please help us by giv­ing us a 10 rat­ing at this page.

Many thanks.

9 months ago by Aen

Likables Beta Released

I know you have been wait­ing for this for a long time. I’m really pleased to announce that the Lik­ables beta has offi­cially launched today. It has been three months of hard work and many many emails, bug reports, feed­back, sug­ges­tions, praises and cri­tiques. I want to share with you the high­lights of the beta and briefly dis­cuss plans we have for the next six months.

What’s New?

  • Per­haps the biggest improve­ment in this release is the friend finder. You can now login with your Face­book and Twit­ter accounts to find and fol­low your friends and fol­low­ers who are also on Lik­ables. Friends found will be dis­played with an icon indi­cat­ing their source – whether they came from Face­book or Twit­ter. You can fol­low your friends right from the friend finder.
  • The first fea­ture I men­tioned would prob­a­bly have given you a clue to the next biggest improve­ment. We have inte­grated Face­book and Twit­ter Login to make it easy for new users to quickly join Lik­ables and to take advan­tage of their exist­ing Face­book and Twit­ter rela­tion­ships or social graphs if you pre­fer a more geeky term. This also pow­ers the friend finder to make it easy for users to find and fol­low peo­ple they already know and fol­low elsewhere.
  • You can now import your likes from Face­book into Lik­ables. This should help those already doing lots of lik­ing on Face­book. This fea­ture is avail­able to both new sign ups and exist­ing users.
  • When you click on a lik­able, the URL in the address bar now changes so you can eas­ily book­mark and share the URL. You can not only close the lik­able by click­ing the “x” but­ton, you can now click out­side the lik­able or click back in your browser to close it.
  • You can now fil­ter the feed by fol­low­ing, pop­u­lar or every­one. Fol­low­ing is just like before. Pop­u­lar shows you the lik­ables which are viewed and com­mented on by many. Every­one is a pub­lic stream that shows you every­thing there is.
  • We cre­ated a browser book­marklet as a third option to share a lik­able. With the ♥ Like This! book­marklet you can now share from any web page in your browser. The book­marklet opens up a handy image picker for you to choose the image of the item you want to share and then you enter details of the item all while you are still at the page you were browsing.
  • Find any­thing you want because search now includes both lik­ables and users.
  • We’ve added a new bio field to user pro­files so you can tell the world how awe­some you are.
  • You can now invite up to 20 friends to Likables.

There are also lots of other bug fixes and invis­i­ble tweaks to improve the user expe­ri­ence and per­for­mance of the site. We are really proud of the beta and we want you to check it out: http://www.likabl.es/

The Future

We have been seri­ously explor­ing the prospect of work­ing on Lik­ables full-time. Our alpha has been really suc­cess­ful and we absolutely love our users who have con­tributed tremen­dously in help­ing us make Lik­ables an enjoy­able ser­vice. With the beta released, we plan to begin work­ing on fea­tures that will evolve Lik­ables into a community-curated mar­ket­place. Users (prob­a­bly all of you!) with a pen­chant for inter­est­ing goods will love this. Don’t be sur­prised if you can sud­denly buy some­thing you see and really like on Likables!

Thank you peo­ple, my team, our friends and most impor­tantly our alpha testers. Nasos, Puja, Navjot, Fred, Galen, Saya­nee, Brenda, Jess­lyn, Hanna, Rebecca and the com­mu­nity… you are all great. We will strive to make Lik­ables bet­ter so please con­tinue to sup­port us.

Aen, Founder and CEO.

9 months ago by Aen

Yesterday’s work-together session

We had a really great work-together ses­sion yes­ter­day. Vito, Jackie, Chee Aun and I were at the National Library in the morn­ing. While Chee Aun and Jackie worked on the sign up wiz­ard fea­ture of the web app, Vito and I were think­ing hard on our ele­va­tor pitch for our exec­u­tive summary.

Vito and Jackie had to leave by lunch so Chee Aun and I had lunch. When we got back to the library the place was really crowded. We headed for Hack­er­space but it was closed. After try­ing the Star­bucks at Raf­fles City we ended up in Sin­ga­pore Man­age­ment Uni­ver­sity. Jackie was back and we con­tin­ued work until almost 9:00 PM. Despite the hic­cups we got a lot done.

One step closer to the beta release!

10 months ago by Aen

Vito joins the crew

Jackie has been a great dri­ving force of our web­site and API but there is only so much a sin­gle per­son can do in the face of increas­ing demands on the back­end. The upcom­ing beta release will put to use pop­u­lar­ity algo­rithms, Face­book graph API, book­marklet inte­gra­tion and Metal for the iPhone API. Thus Jackie has been work­ing really hard to keep things mov­ing. Kudos to her and the rest of the team for sup­port­ing. The need for more power in the back­end became appar­ent in the recent weeks.

Vito works for iBuild­ings which does enter­prise PHP devel­op­ment, head­quar­tered in the UK. Ear­lier this year Found con­tracted Vito of iBuild­ings for man­ag­ing back­end work and we worked together for a few months. Frjin was preg­nant then and Vito already had his baby so he became sort of like my source for advice on father­hood. We got along and kept in con­tact. Soon after I announced I was leav­ing Found next month, Vito sent me an email and told me how he enjoyed work­ing with me in Found. I thought I might as well get him on the Lik­ables crew. And I’m really glad he agreed.

Vito grad­u­ated from the Uni­ver­sity of Sheffield with a Bachelor’s in Soft­ware Engi­neer­ing and the Impe­r­ial Col­lege Lon­don with an MBA. He’s a hard­core techie with prac­ti­cal busi­ness train­ing, some­thing that’s pretty rare in the tech indus­try. Pro­fes­sion­ally he has held posi­tions as a soft­ware engi­neer and CIO. He also just pub­lished a book titled “PHP Devel­op­ment in the Cloud”. Vito’s expe­ri­ence with code is a great asset for Lik­ables. But it is his soft­ware exper­tise mar­ried with busi­ness knowl­edge that will become an even greater asset as we grow and begin to develop on rev­enue strategies.

Vito’s imme­di­ate role would be to part­ner with Jackie to roll out the planned updates for the beta. Deadline’s tight but I know what they are made of. Go team!