Orgoo And Some Such Things

Techcrunch was giving away invites to Orgoo. I lined up early and took it. What the site does is aggregate my mails, IM and SMS and other forms of communication (Video Chat. New!!) into one single app. I wonder why they do it and even if they have a good reason for spending their coding prowess on this integration why did they leave out my Facebook and Twitter accounts? Why not integrate all the shabang now that you've started it anyway.
A new platform that has caught my fancy is Xobni. Check it out if you haven't. I don't think new account registrations are accepted though. It acts as a neat plugin app that pulls up all the media in your mail and makes an interesting 'social' network around it. It's an Outlook pluin for now. Many tech pundits are claiming that the next big social network in hidden in our mailbox. At some level I tend to agree.
As far as ProjectOffguard is concerned measures have been taken to streamline the work flow etc. A feeler mail has been sent out to a certain early stage fund as well. Let's see what comes of that. Have a very hectic work day tomorrow so I'll sign out now. Have a great time.

Some Part Is Alive

There isn't much to make any noise about but ProjectOffguard, the precursor site that talks about what we do, who we are, and also accepts registrations has a web presence. The current homepage says 'Coming Soon' and that is really soon. The last couple of months have been slightly productive but mostly introspective (geek speak for lazing around). The excitement around our idea hasn't ebbed away or died, we're (all 3 of us) are trying hard to keep pace with out work lives and Project Offguard. Ideas regarding the Business Plan etc have been bandied around and a few more people have been given a glimpse of what's in the offing. The response has been the same excitement and wide eyed appreciation and that is heartening.
Coming back to this blog, the idea of the blog, as stated earlier, is to document the progress of Offguard and share our learnings with the community. We were toying with migrating this blog from Blogger to our own platform, however that's been put on hold for now. There are bigger things to be tackled. We'd really love comments and suggestions from you regarding the idea (for you to read when ProjectOffguard.com goes live). To help matters a poll will be a regular feature on the blog very soon. If you've noticed I've been going 'We' since this post, that's because I'd like you to welcome the latest contributors to this blog, Arnab Saha and Vibhu Sharma. That's all for now, the next post comes up tomorrow.

The Game Is Changing

ProjectOffguard will have a web presence very soon. There is a lot of excitement within the team and for a few close associates. We had not ventured to make something game changing, the idea was to simply fill in the void, I'm glad we are chugging along very close to achieving that and as we see some games will change because of us.
In an interesting twist to the tale, Yahoo is thinking of accepting semantic standards and plug a lot of RDF. It's great news for anyone looking to pimp an application that keeps to these standards. But there has been a mixed response to Twine from the techno-blogger community. Twine, which is the poster boy for the nascent Semantic Web 3.0, is still ironing out the creases from it's much awaited content sharing-storing-discovering product.
Back to us. We are developing a CMS for our platform...from scratch. Why don't we just plug and play with anything of the existing CMS available? You'll see when we launch, we aren't reinventing the wheel, just constructing something that will suit us best.
The content that is to be plugged into the system is also being sourced/worked on. A lot of ideas, many revolutionary, are being thrown around. Let's see what sticks.

Moving On

The last couple of days have been very hectic (yeah, Sundays too have it in them). I've also been struggling to come up with a name for the startup. Naming an Internet company is difficult because even the weirdest names have been taken by junta. And then stuff like this happens. Anyway, things are looking great with the project now. I'm figuring out a way to get a work-entrepreneurship balance, if all else fails I'll just quit my job and do a bit of freelance work at the side to keep the money flowing in.
I've cross posted this at a new Blogging-Networking platform, it's still in Alpha and is called Profy. You'll find goo dope here. It seems to be a smart enough tool which goes along the natural evolution curve that a blog would go (approach social networks). Is 'Project Offguard' also one of those? Nope. 'Project Offguard' actually has a lot of home grown content and it's more than just simple WYSIWYG text blogging but more on that later.