So that’s it, we’re live. A lot of work remains to be done though.
The site in its current form is pretty stable but we’ll be adding two important things in the next couple of days:
An aggregated list of popular sites to the front page, so you can drop by and see what’s hot right now.
A rich and secure widget with which you can tip without leaving the parent website.
Lots of other stuff can also be improved. Your feedback is very valuable and tells us what to focus on. Expect to see many of these things fixed in the following days.
We are thrilled to see that Chris Anderson’s next book “Free” is addressing the same topic we have been occupied with; we termed it Voluntary Economies. We believe abundance of information and connections are causing it to make sense to give stuff away and get paid in novel ways.
Financial testing is wrapping up and we think we may be able to go into soft launch before the end of the year. Those of you who have registered, can expect an early warning when we are ready.
Alper will be attending Software Social this Friday to close off the year with our startup friends.
This week the last bits of financial integration for Tipit.to were finished. This means that if everything goes according to plan, testing is the only thing that stands between us and launch.
Barcamp London
This weekend Reinier is headed to Google’s London Headquarters for Barcamp London to learn, to talk about Tipit and to give a presentation on Voluntary Economies. We at Tipit.to believe that tipping and other forms of voluntary transactions are going to be very important in the near future.
Launch planning
That said we think we should be able to launch within the next 2-3 weeks. Expect a definitive announcement and invitations to a launch event soon.
I spent today picking Rodger Buyvoets’s (Pixelindustries) brain on launch strategies, mechanisms and comparing notes about how you can best get out of the gates fast. A lot of comparable but also some new stuff which means lots and lots of more work for me keeping track of people, publications, writing press releases etc.
There is a fine line when an e-mail promoting a service is unsollicited and spammy and when it actually is something good that will add value to a website. We will err on the side of caution in these matters (We hate spammers just as much as you do.) but we may still be sending out some mails. Rest assured that if we do we will do it with integrity and back it up with our genuine conviction.
Launch update
There is only so much promotion that we can do proactively pre-launch. We can keep telling you about how good our site is but until we can back it up with something live, those are just words.
Reinier is now busy finalizing agreements with a payment provider and as soon as that has been done, we can launch. Right now we are looking at a timetable of a couple of weeks.
Reinier and I just got back from a short trip to London and Brighton to attend dConstruct and Barcamp Brighton. Reinier showed Tipit to some people at Barcamp and had a pretty positive response (more about that later).
We are still working hard on launching the site but a lot of it is out of our hands. Here is a small update:
Functionality wise we are mostly feature complete. The software is ready and demonstrable. Some functionality which we are planning for post-1.0 may make it into this version, but we currently have all the stuff we think is essential for a launch.
The thing that is holding us back right now is the agreements and details with the financial partners that will process our transactions and which laws we need to adhere to and which guarantees we can and will offer to our users. Getting this stuff right is essential for any business in the financial sector and it is not very easy.
We are working hard and making progress here so you will not have to wait much longer. Because a lot of this is not in our hands we cannot really give any indications on how long it will take, but we hope to launch soon.
Four Starters running on a new server is no coincidence. Tipit.to got a new server recently and it got plugged into a rack somewhere on Schiphol Rijk last week.
We are nearing launch and with the server firmly in place we can deploy a live version of the Tipit website pretty soon now. This way demoes will not be restricted to our Macbooks anymore.
Tipit is nearing completion and we finally have something to show. Tipit demoes have been sighted in the wild. If you want to see it yourself you can either persuade us to come to you or come to Delft and drop us a line, we’ll be glad to meet you.
This means that launch is nearing and that you can expect some preview screenshots here real soon. You can still register to reserve your name and receive a notification when we launch.
