Present from JWE

Originally uploaded by Patrick de Laive.

Thanks Jan Willem

In the Dutch press there were some comments on the ‘enormous‘ (update: the journalist meant it in a good way and I didn’t notice his sarcasm ) amount of money we would have spend on the launch of Fleck. Some journalist thought we organized a party in a fancy club and paid all expenses for the attendees As we are a privately funded startup we try to keep the cost as low as possible (of course).

I’ve made a list with the total costs of the fleck launch trip in New York, so you can judge for yourself:

4 white suits (from the cheapest online shop in The Netherlands) € 201,46 (including shipping)

Suit customization € 81,35

Permanent markers € 12,-

4 white ties € 18,72

4 roundtrip tickets Amsterdam-New York (economy class Delta) € 1632,65

2 rooms, 4 nights at Stanford hotel € 1560,-

Hotel Wifi (4 accounts 3 days) € 78,- (Paid out of our own pockets).

Taxi costs € 238,-

Drinks, food (Burger King, American Burger, Cafe Muse, Soho Grand, Shime, 2nd 156 and A ave, Pastis, Starbucks, Gansefoort Hotel -oh no, the bachelorette party ladies from New Jersey paid that one-, Marriot Times Square -broadway lounge-, and the Lotus -thanks Thor!-) € 380,-

Hiring a PR firm (Well you could say that Heineken did our PR… so, about 200 dollars)

Sponsoring TechCrunch 8 Meetup (Next time Michael, we were short on budget)
The trip was € 4124,18 altogether. Is that outrageous for the launch of your company?

L1130660.jpg

Originally uploaded by Guido van Nispen.

We landed this morning at 9 o’clock in Amsterdam and at noon Guido van Nispen came by at Fleck HQ to make pictures of the Fleckees in the white suits.

Firefox users can view them through my eyes.

IE users, click here.

Just before the photo shoot, we released a new toolbar which fixes a lot of CSS bugs, is more stable and is just working All functionalities are the same. Try it!

We’re still at the office fighting our jet lag…..

Good news! The Fleck Extension just got approved for Firefox by Mozilla.

This means that you will be able to download Fleck from the official Firefox website. Lots of people visit that website so we expect some traffic from there.

As soon as it is up I will post that link here.

UPDATE: here is the link:

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3908/

One aspect that determines the adoption of any new technology is if it is fun to use…

…or maybe I’m just making that up as an excuse for my next request.

You see, Fleck is meant to be usefull. But at the office we also have a lot of fun with it. We add 100 bullets to a page or replace all the eyes in a photo with bullets pictures or block unwanted content with notes.

We Doodle.
Fleck Doodle.
Floodle?
Fledle???

Anyway…

…I’m sure that you can do better.

So I would like to invite all of you to try to screw up a webpage in any way possible with Fleck and share that annotated page with us.

I will add all of them to this post and at the end of the month we will select the most interesting page and give them a price.

How about an Apple Shuffle?
Cool enough?

Well, get Flecking then…

Yesterday was the official Fleck launch and we had a blast. The Techcrunch party was one of the most exciting and also funny evening of the year. We had so much fun with everybody writing stuff on our suits. I don’t remember ever having so much fun on an evening out as last night.

And then our servers couldn’t handle the incomming traffic from Techcrunch and gave up. I quickly disabled a few features that burdened the server too much and restarted. Since then the server has been humming along just fine.

So now we are reading all the blog entries on the web and talking with beta testers and just general people who visit the site and have an opinion. Is feels really good to be live and get actual feedback!

We are receiving a lot of traffic from Techcrunch but also from StumbleUpOn and Del.icio.us.