Different ways to use Symbaloo (Part 1)

July 29th, 2010 • updates

Symbaloo is most commonly used as a personal startpage.  By setting it as your homepage on your browser, you can start with your online favorites everyday. Over time we have seen it progress and used in many other ways.  Each week we will be posting a different way that Symbaloo can be used. Come back weekly to get more details.

Online portfolio

This week we are introducing the option of Symbaloo as an online portfolio. This is great for freelance writers and bloggers or even designers who use a portfolio to present their work. You can have all of your work published on one webmix and just send your potential clients the link. Below is an example from Daniela Bolzmann.

It’s an easy and creative way for Daniela to share her online social media portfolio. Daniela compiled links to her blog, online social profiles, and social media groups all in one webmix. This enables her to send just one link to potential clients.

Email us if you would like more information on how to set this up.

Social Media Day Orange County

July 8th, 2010 • updates
Tags: benny luo, daniela bolzmann, event, kimmie chann, kyle bodovitz, mashable, orange county, smdayoc, social media day, symbaloo, tech

Team Symbaloo US participated in the World’s first official “Social Media Day,” an international event proclaimed by Mashable and hosted by the Orange County Register on June 30th, 2010.

Kimmie Chann, Daniela Bolzmann, Kyle Bodovitz and Benny Luo were on hand to demo a custom webmix entitled “Social Media Day OC” which aggregated all the Twitter feeds of all the speakers, vendors, taco trucks and attendees.

The event featured a panel of local social media guest speakers and taco trucks galore. Over 450 people were in attendance and Symbaloo was the only interactive demo on site. The event was successful in it’s mission to bring together local social media enthusiasts to celebrate the change and impact that social media has had on everyone’s lives both professionally and personally. We were very happy to be invited to this event and look forward to participating again next year.

Update Symbaloo 2.0: what’s happening?

March 7th, 2010 • 4 comments updates
Tags: symbaloo, tests, update

We had the feeling that we have been quiet for too long and would therefore like to update everyone on the status of the new release of Symbaloo. As we have said earlier on our blog, we had to postpone the launch because of some serious performance (speed and stability) issues that we experienced during the migration. Speed is key to enjoy your Symbaloo experience and we are therefore not willing to compromise on this. Nevertheless, this was obviously a great disappointment to many Symbaloo users and we do everything to make sure that you can rely on us as you are used to.

The basics are set and tested

In order to reduce the load of hundreds of thousands Symbaloo users trying to retrieve their personal data simultaneously, we have made changes to the technical architecture. All of these changes have been implemented and last week our development team in Delft have done some extensive performance testing in co-operation with two specialized companies in this field, CompuTest and TRUE. The performance testing results are positive and everything performed well which is obviously great news.

What’s up next?

The upcoming weeks we’ll be running user acceptance tests with Symbaloo users. We’d like to involve users to hear what you think and whether we meet the required standards. As soon as everything is set and works fine, we will invite a first user group on the new version and expand it slowly. Even though we start inviting users, bear in mind that the new version will never be ready because we will improve it constantly with new features and take the unlogical parts out.

What do I have to do?

For now we just ask for your patience. Please keep on following our blog for updates, you will be notified whenever you can start using the new version.

Preparing for the private invite beta launch

October 12th, 2009 • 2 comments updates
Tags: beta, invite, symbaloo

Today, our technical team and Q42 have released the first testing version of the new and improved Symbaloo! All major functionalities have been implemented succesfully and  the content  database has been uploaded. This is not only an important moment for our development teams but also for the marketing and content teams as we can finally experience all aspects of the new version integrally. And the site feels great! It runs very, very smooth and is great fun to play around with. Adding and sharing content has become easier then ever before.

In the upcoming period our development people will implement a list of additional, smaller requirements ranging from usability to visual improvements. I’m sure we’ll constantly see new things that we want to improve upon. There’s also a lot of work to do in preparing FAQ’s, help lists etc. The new version contains a help functionality and we’re also developing a new forum to serve users and business partners better then ever before.

So, there’s still plenty of work to do but we achieved another important step. In the coming weeks we’ll start a private invite in the US and The Netherlands to learn what others think of the new release. Stay tuned !

Quick update

October 1st, 2009 • updates
Tags: development, symbaloo, webmix

Time flies when you’re having fun, so they say. And to be honest some things are great indeed, others are just work. Klaas is spending a lot of time with legal people to ensure that everything we do is well validated. Meanwhile the US Team (based in Orange County CA) is doing a great job on content and setting up business partnerships. In order to boost progress we’ve sent Sander, our Dutch Business Development Manager, over to CA. Sander enjoys working with the US team a lot and is very impressed how quickly things are going. His main focus for the upcoming period is the development of hundreds of webmixes. A webmix is a page filled with tiles around a certain topic made by an expert. We already have some great ones about things like music, sports, health etc, etc…

Here’s an example:

Meet Symbaloo France!

September 1st, 2009 • updates
Tags: ambassadors, france, symbaloo, team

As some people know, we are proud to have people around the globe that are supporting us. We have ambassadors in over 12 countries who help to translate and find local content. Today, we’d like you to meet our French evangelist Valentin.  Valentin is a student who lives close to Paris and spends loads of time and effort on finding the best content and setting up partnerships with major publishers like newspapers. Valentin discovered Symbaloo through StumbleUpon about one and a half year ago, sent us an email and joined our team within two hours.