We couldn’t come to Les Blogs/Le Web 3 empty handed so today we present a new and important new feature. If you use Fleck now you will be able to blog straight from the Fleck interface to your blog.

In theory at least! You do need a WordPress blog and you need to know your username and password. We will add support for Blogger, Typepad and other platforms too as soon as possible.

This is how it works: Fleck any page on the web and then click the “Blog” button. There you will have to supply the address of your blog and your password and username. You will then be able to write a blog post and your Flecked page URL will be inserted automatically in your blog.

Fleck remembers your data for you and you can enter the address of several blogs. You can select the blog you want to post too from a drop down menu.

Give it a try and let us know how it works for you!

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?

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.

Michael Arrington warned us about what kind of traffic an article on Techcrunch can cause. I thought we were prepared but apparently we still underestimated it. The database server had some difficulties handling all the queries and gave a ‘Too Many Connections’ error for a while. I just fixed this so all seems to be fine now.

Michael Arrington
Originally uploaded by Boris

This is a photo of Michael Arrington about to push the one button on my Blackberry that opened up the Fleck.com service to the world.

More photos in the morning.

Only a few hours left and we will launch Fleck.com to the public. We will be at the Techcrunch party wearing white suits and People will be able to write their emailaddress on our suits in exchange for a free PRO account.

Hopefully Michael Arrington will be available to push one button on my Blackberry which will switch a 0 to a 1 in a database somewhere which will change everything. From that moment on you will be able to browse the whole site.

The Estimated Launch Time (ELT?) will be between 7pm and 8pm New York (EST?) time.