Launch!

An amazing, exhausting, exhilarating week as we launched Fresh Sliced News on its way to creating personalized newspapers for anyone who uses a computer.  TechCrunch50 was an incredible experience and our twelve hours in the DemoPit (though our legs may shudder to recall them) were the best possible payoff for months designing, coding, and planning.  It was like running 100 three-to-five-minute focus groups with extremely bright people whose questions and suggestions will shape the course of our work henceforward.  Lots of positive response to the interface, lots of convincing to do about the desktop application approach, lots of requests for more preset feeds and easier feed discovery.  Much interest from people in the media industry, who responded positively to our experimentation with new ways of reading the news online.  We did demos for some of the most interesting and plugged-in people in tech and were absolutely thrilled to see an article about our launch of Fresh Sliced News in TechCrunch at the end of the week.  We’ve reflected on the fact that we never would have come so far so fast without TC50 — there’s a good argument that TC50 is as important as an accelerant to design and development as it is as a publicity platform and networking event.

We hit some regrettable bumps — some downloading problems and a fail with our e-mail signup system.  We’d had to build three versions of the application in the weeks leading up to TechCrunch50 — the public beta, a TC50 demo version, and a ‘canned version’ that operated completely offline in case of internet outage at TC50 (though luckily internet at TC50 never went down).  Consequently the website wasn’t tested and polished as much as it might have been.   Word of advice to our fellow startups: you can’t overestimate how much time you need for things besides core coding prior to launch.  Putting a freeze on code development two weeks before a conference or a launch event would be a very good idea.

Thanks to everyone who’s tried the application.  We know we have to make it faster, and we have some great ideas about how to do that as we move towards a version 1.0 with additional features and functionality.  We’re also waiting to see what Adobe announces about AIR 2.0 next month so we can judge how to leverage their improvements to make our own product better.  That’s it for now.  As always, please send any feature requests or bug reports or random thoughts to team(at)freshslicednews.com.  Thanks!