rrripple blog - private, meaningful sharing

We here at #teamrrripple know very well the determination and perseverance our CEO, Heather Hiles, displays on a daily basis.  As our team has travelled along the journey of The Fellowship of the Start-Up, headed to Mordor to destroy The One Ring….oh wait.  I’ll save that for another post.

In all seriousness, it brings me great pride to see the captain of our ship receive an acknowledgement from other amazing entrepreneurs.  Heather is probably to modest to promote herself in this forum, but I would like to congratulate her on being recognized as one of ‘The Next Women’ to watch in business.

We have some terrific news on the horizon that will change the future for rrripple and improve the usability of our application for all of our amazing customers.  We’ll be announcing our new developments in the next couple weeks so stay tuned.  Until then, please check out an article in The Next Women Business Magazine on Heather’s background as a proponent for education and workforce development reform by clicking here.

#teamrrripple

What an eye-opener being at Blackboard’s Bb World conference. It’s like Disneyland for people at all levels of education. It takes place in Las Vegas, which is adult Disneyland already.  So many concurrent sessions that even the good ones couldn’t fill the house.

I had the opportunity to meet with folks from the Board of Directors of Blackboard, as well as the CEO (great guy); university experts, K-12 movers and shakers like Dr. Rudy Crew and the list goes on and on!

Some of the highlights:

- Learning about the mobile analytics system at Stanford.  Amazing!

- Watching a university demo an iPad only class on Economics, relying on various software to provide real-time feedback mechanisms.

- Watching CEO’s and other leaders demo the latest Blackboard (Facebook-like) software.

- Witnessing the most confusing not-so-stealth  ‘stealth VIP party’ ever! It was hosted by Instructure, competitor to Blackboard. They attempted to have a party with Blackboard attendees and gave out t-shirts and presented an ‘interesting’ not ready for prime-time skit. (Capped by accidentally raffling off a lightsaver to a Blackboard employee. CEO Josh Oates was very embarrassed.)

- Hearing Dr. Rudy Crew’s amazingly honest assessment of how to tackle the achievement gap in K-12. Remember, if we close the achievement gap and the gender gap, we solve our workforce preparedness issues.

- Getting to know Pearson better. Great team of thought leaders.

- Hearing from no fewer the 10 schools using ePortfolios that we have the best-in-market product, by far.

So much more went on than I can’t possibly mention and I remain inspired by the palpable commitment to innovation in education represented by the 2,300 attendees at Blackboard.

If anyone else attended Bb World we’d love to hear about your experiences and what innovative ed tech companies you’re interested in.

Keep Learning,

HH (via Team rrripple)

I recently attended the ISTE conference in Philadelphia, PA with the goal of researching the eportfolio space in the K-12 sector.  I was surprised by the lack of representation by companies we here at rrripple consider to be players in the eportfolio space.  I was even more surprised by the size of the conference and the different products addressing pain points for students, teachers and administrators.
This conference had everything…interactive whiteboards of every shape and size, projectors, remote response devices, LMS’s, SIS’s, security firms, STEM robotics companies, web-based learning games, learning apps for tablets and of course physical and digital textbooks.  The exhibit hall was massive!  I’ve been calling it the CES of education.

There were three main things I took note of as I attended various workshops over the three-day conference:
1) Learning via Tablet PC’s and apps will become the primary device in and out of classrooms in the next 1-2 years.
2) Google apps for Edu have made a real impact with schools by providing free sites, email and docs and tying in collaboration throughout.
3) Now is the time for rrripple to really disrupt and innovate the ePortfolio space with our vision of highlighting users’ digital content on a platform that allows them to capture, curate, collaborate and privately/publicly publish to selective audiences. These four features will allow users to actually learn from their entire digital footprint that will include things like student information, collaborative projects and their social graph.

I look forward to sharing our vision with our users in the coming weeks.   We look forward to creating the best application possible to authentically impact people’s lives and help them achieve their goals.

As always, please don’t hesitate to give us feedback on how you’re using the product and suggestions for how we can improve it.

Best,

#teamrrripple

What’s new at rrripple? We’re glad you asked!

In the last couple months we have begun integrating our platform with software from Adobe, Aviary, and Blackboard. Soon, our partners and their customers will be able to utilize our comprehensive, secure, and fun sharing product from within their dashboards. We look forward to sharing our offering with their customers.

In addition to new platform integrations, our team has been networking above and beyond at events and conferences across the world. In the last couple months we have met with influential education and technology leaders and investors at events including: Eduacause in Southern California, The Web 2.0 Expo and the Womensphere Global Leadership Summit in New York City, and TECH cocktail in San Francisco.

This week our CEO Heather Hiles attended Astia’s Doing It Right Entrepreneurs’ Program where she met with several successful entrepreneurs including Eileen Gittins, founder of Blurb the online book publishing service which made $45m in revenue this past year. Eileen and Heather are now in discussion about creating a possible partnership.

Currently we are also involved in Vator.tv’s and Girls In Tech’s Amplify Business Competition. The competition is currently in the online voting phase and we appreciate all of the support that you can provide! Please VOTE for rrripple! We look forward to the opportunity to present on November 18^th, 2010, and to be their as successful angelivestor Esther Dyson, a colleague of ours and startup advisor, provides the keynote.

Further, we are thrilled to announce that we have been selected as one of Geeks Gone Global’s victorious startups to present at the Software City Conference on November 22^nd, 2010, in the UK. Heather will be jetting off to Liverpool to present soon and we are so excited to have this opportunity to share rrripple with the global audience! While in the UK, we plan to meet with large corporations focused on education and already have meetings set up with execs from Sony and Nokia.

Last but not least, we’d like to leave you with three thoughts:

1. Did you know that women entrepreneurs are on average more successful than men?
2. Congratulations to the SF Giants for winning the World Series! As a Bay Area based organization we are beyond thrilled and take pride in knowing that a bunch of misfits and outcasts can achieve so much!
3. Remember, Life Flows, Share it!

-The rrripple Team

I can admit it now…I was a bit skeptical of the utility of our Activity Stream.  I have such disdain for the Newsfeed way of life, getting glued to a non-stop output of random information and thoughts from random “friends” on Facebook.  I twitch just thinking about the time I’ve wasted.

Once our Activity Stream was live on our iPhone and iPad’s (and now live on web app!) I realized how totally helpful the AS is.  It’s great, do to the fact that the groups that are being summarized by the Activity Stream are all comprised of people I care about, that I created and belong to, that I want to know what is being shared within the groups, real time.

A teacher told me the same thing. She said: “I can assign homework to class, and as I’m running errands in the afternoon, I can find when all of my pupils have submitted their homework, and then I can sit down and review them all at once.”

So the Activity Stream summarizes (top-to-bottom flow) all of the relevant information, and all of the relevant activities of all of my relevant groups.  Especially while I’m on the run, I can check today’s activities, I’m always current.  Therefore, I get 100% of my relevant Signal (conent) and 0% noise.

Finally, mobile sharing that works for me, Yeah!

Guess what?  We now have a brand new homepage! As you might be noticing, our product identity is evolving as we are making progress with our product development.  Our new homepage reflects our more mature product.

What makes our product more mature than it ever was?

• We know more about our users—People are sharing privately with family, friends, buddies, interest groups and various communities. They’re also sharing publicly in our one public group —The World Cup.
• We have noticed that especially educators are loving to rrripple.  Elementary, middle and high school teachers, even university professors are using the site to securely share homework assignments, educational material (photos, videos, files); and to collaborate with students, parents and their peers. Hence, we have added more details on how educators can enhance the interaction with their students by using rrripple on our website.
• More Complete Product—In the weeks to come, you will notice some really cool features rolled out across our three clients: Web, iPhone and iPad. Some of these features include: new Activity Stream, new Media View, enhanced Slideshow, enhanced Permissions and Control over notifications and much more. So stay tuned!

We believe our new homepage better reflects the Who, What, Where and How of our product; please let us know what you think.

Thank you for building the rrripple community with us.

Truly,
Heather Hiles
CEO & Co-Founder
[email protected]

The countdown is over, the late nights of programming and design work have paid off, and our team is proud to announce the rrripple iPad application – ready for download from iTunes.

Our media curation service has been an ideal tool for chronicling and sharing media since our launch at TechCrunch50 last September, and our service was built by forward-thinking developers who had a touchscreen user interface in mind, anticipating products like the iPad. And now, we get to put our theories to the test, and look forward to your feedback.

rrripple’s timeline-based dashboard allows members to quickly and easily scroll through their media chronologically, and our sliding Friends and Groups tab give a sleek and simple dashboard for sharing media with controlled access levels.

Whether you’re going to be using your new iPad to log on and view photos or video from friends and family, or if you’ll be using it to give client presentations, our service ensures that you have access to all of your most important files in the cloud, ready to be viewed with just the touch of your fingertips.

We strive to provide our members with the best possible service, and look forward to hearing your feedback and stories about your experience with the rrripple iPad application!

For those of us in Silicon Valley, the race is on to get approval from Apple for its highly-anticipated iPad, which is set to hit the stores on April 3. For those of you lucky enough to have gotten your hands on one of these pre-sale touch screen tablets, you’ll have a number of exciting new apps hitting the press in the coming weeks, each specially designed for the iPad’s unique interface.

We at rrripple have been waiting. As we mentioned in a previous post, our entire user experience was designed to be touch screen ready – so that when devices like the iPad hit stores, we’d be able to provide our members with the best experience.

And while our Web application (and our iPhone app – if you haven’t already, you can download it here!) is designed with a touchscreen interface in mind, our development team has been toiling away to get the official iPad application ready for the big launch. And we’re excited to say, the app is ready, and we’ve submitted it for Apple’s stamp of approval.

We’ll have more updates for you as soon as we get our official approval – but in the meantime, here is a sneak peek of what our app will look like:

The feature set we have on rrripple fills a real need that not a lot of other services do: allowing you to share things truly on your own terms. While many other services only let you restrict your posts to all of your contacts, we know that not everyone you know needs to see every post you make. That’s why rrripple lets you choose, for each post, precisely with whom you’d like to share. Think of it as “sorta sharing.”

We’ve already blogged about rrripple’s commitment to private group sharing, but in case you were wondering just how easy it is to share something with a private group, a trusted bunch of friends… or both, it’s as easy as checking (or not checking) a box:

After clicking “post” at the top of any page, watch as lists of your contacts and groups slide smoothly into your view, on either side of the page. While your content uploads, use the panels to select precisely which groups should receive the content, and which of your contacts should as well. Anyone with a blue box next to their name will have access to the content, and anyone without will not.

Having a lot of rrripple contacts or groups doesn’t mean repetitive mouse strain injuries, either! Use rrripple’s “select all” or “select none” features, followed by just a few more clicks, to share a post with almost everyone… or almost no one.

You may have noticed, from the slick animations and consistent overall experience, that we’ve designed rrripple’s interface entirely in Flash. One of the best things about Flash is its use of vector graphics. As opposed to raster graphics, which are made of pixels (and, thus, get “pixelated” when stretched), vector graphics are made of lines and curves, which makes them infinitely resizable!

What this means to you, dear rrrippler, is that no matter how you stretch or scrunch your web browser’s window, rrripple is able to adapt, to bring you the best possible viewing experience. Whether you’re using rrripple on a desktop computer with a standard 4:3 monitor, laptop with a wide-screen, or have your computer connected to a large-screen HDTV, you’ll never get a rrripple interface that doesn’t perfectly fit your screen.

(Neat tip: In most web browsers, you can press the F11 key to make the browser interface — the toolbars, scrollbars, menus, etc. — disappear and experience as big a rrripple as possible, with no distractions! If F11 doesn’t work in your browser, see your browser’s menu options for the appropriate key.)

Our team at rrripple is always keen to interact with anyone who can provide us with valuable feedback and suggestions to make our product even better. In a similar quest (and to pay homage to our alma mater, since both co-founders at rrripple are UC Berkeley grads), Andres and Mandeep set out to the Venture Capital Investment Competition (VCIC) on a beautiful Friday morning. First up, while navigating through bouts of nostalgia and pride, Andres gave a ‘crash’ walking tour of UC Berkeley campus to Mandeep. The VCIC event was even more fun. It was very encouraging to witness the sheer enthusiasm of Haas Business School students on hearing about rrripple. Many of them had been beta users, and had been in correspondence with us reporting bugs and providing suggestions - it was great putting faces to those friendly emails. They asked very smart and insightful questions, and made some worthwhile suggestions. It was great engaging with the other entrepreneurs too, who made equally impactful presentations about their ventures.

Rounding off the event with a nice lunch, on the way back Andres stopped to savor the ever-famous Blue Bottle coffee, finally reminiscing over his amazing hinter years.

Wedding planning can be a major challenge – something I can attest to personally. Modern brides are juggling their careers, social lives, wedding planning duties and domestic responsibilities – often with family and friends spread far around the country or around the globe.

Sharing ideas, photos, videos, and articles with the Mother of the Bride, the Maid of Honor, bridesmaids, and – of course – wedding coordinators, is a must for most ladies, but finding a platform to manage the media and files that go into coordinating the Big Day is difficult. Wedding sites, like TheKnot.com or MyWedding.com offer public sites that allow brides to share stories, details, photo galleries and reservation information with the wedding guests – but aren’t an ideal way to share photos of her top dress choices with a small group of people. Likewise, social networking services offer the same disadvantage – what bride wants all of her wedding guests to see her dress before she walks down the aisle?

Enter rrripple. From sharing with her closest confidantes to posting wedding details – time, date, location, room blocks and important party information with all of her guests – rrripple allows brides (and grooms) to be the power of a multimedia sharing tool in a controlled setting.

Want to share images of potential cakes and floral arrangements, documents with proposed menus and appetizers, or even discuss secret surprises with your wedding coordinator? rrripple lets you do that. Want to share details for bridesmaids’ dresses, shoes and accessories with just your ladies? Set up a bridal party group and sharing is as easy as dragging and dropping photos and files into your designated group. Best of all – your Maid of Honor can create her own group (using rrripple) to plan your surprise bridal shower and bachelorette party with your mother and bridesmaids – and you won’t spoil the surprise.

And for wedding guests – the benefits are just as useful. By building a wedding group on rrripple, the bride and groom are making “virtual introductions” in advance of their special day, and making it easy for their guests to:

• Coordinate airport transportation with other out of town guests arriving at the same time
• Share their stories about the bride and groom, or post photos they have of the couple
• Post their own wedding photos after the event in a private setting where all guests (who may not know each other or be connected on social networking platforms) can enjoy or comment on them, without having them open to the public
• Keep in touch after the event, or post contact information such as phone number or email addresses with requests from the group (e.g., “Did anyone happen to pick up a white iPhone from Table 5? If found, please email [email protected]”)

Perhaps you’ve already started your Knot wedding page, or have created your own, customized Web site to share details with guests. But for planning important details, private communications and media sharing, check out rrripple!

Behind the Scenes

You may have noticed, rrripple has been hard at work making some important, member-facing changes – we’re eliminating bugs, making the site slicker and faster, and adding features that make ours the best private sharing experience on the Web.

But we’re also busy making some behind the scenes changes, as well. Perhaps the best way to ensure that you’re running the best service on the Web is to make sure that you have the best people backing it – and that’s why rrripple’s executive team has been hard at work finding the “best in the business” to join our diverse team of talented individuals, each of whom bring a new element to the rrripple experience.

This week, we’re proud to announce two such additions – who will be enhancing our technical and business development teams! Please join us in giving them a warm welcome!

Judah Frangipane, Senior Flex Developer

Judah Frangipane, a senior Flex developer, will be providing our dev team with strategic guidance and hands-on development for our applcation. Judah brings to the team more than seven years’ experience in Flex and Flash development. You can learn more about Judah and read his personal blog at http://judahfrangipane.com.

Please join our team in giving Judah a warm welcome to the rrripple community!

There’s one word resonating across the blogosphere today: iPad. What was described by TechCrunch as a “big iPhone” may undoubtedly do for laptops what the iPhone did for, well, phones. And, as with the iPhone 3G, with the product launch came a flurry of apps, optimized iPhone versions, games and gadgets.

Luckily, at rrripple, we don’t have to “jump on the bandwagon.” Our service has been designed around a touchscreen UI experience from our inception, and we’re thrilled to be able to stake our claim as the first Tablet-Ready, or, now, iPad-Ready media sharing application on the Web. Our private media and file sharing service that helps members capture their “lifeflows” will work spectacularly on the iPad, giving users a simple, intuitive touchscreen experience.

rrripple’s already simple timeline feature will be ideal for scanning through your digital lifeflow, chronologically searching through all of the media that you encounter and share on a day to day basis: your photos, videos, links and documents.

We knew this day was coming, and we can’t wait to be a part of the revolution. Welcome, iPad, from rrripple. We’ve been waiting for you.

rrripple has been making waves in the press for our innovative, private content sharing service – and now we have a chance to make an even bigger splash as a contestant in the Vator Splash competition, hosted by Vator.tv.

If selected as a top 10 finalist, this competition will give our start-up the chance to give a three-minute pitch in front of 300 business professionals that can help keep our momentum going and take us to the next level of success – but we need your vote to win!

Between now and January 27, please cast your vote for rrripple in the Vator Splash competition.

Don’t have a Vator account? It takes just a minute to register with Vator to cast your vote, and you can choose to follow rrripple and be kept up to date on all of our company announcements.

You can also help us spread the word about rrripple by Tweeting or posting to your social media profiles mentioning @rrripple and using hashtag #vatorsplash!

We’re excited to be a part of the Vator.tv Splash Competition.  We’ve created a special video (with beautiful San Francisco scenes!) — you can watch it below.  This short video helps to illustrate the easy and controlled way in which you can share memories of your trips with only those people that matter to you.  Thanks for your vote!

rrripple Final SF - Vator.tv Splash Competition from Andres Alejandro Davidovits on Vimeo.

Follow rrripple (RippleSend, Inc) on Vator.tv

Happy New Year from the rrripple team!

As 2009 comes to a close, our team has been taking a look back at all of the challenges and triumphs we faced this year – including the launch of our exciting new Web application and our iPhone app – which has made sharing of files and digital media safe and secure, the bumps in the road as we’ve continued to improve on our Beta product, and the tremendously positive feedback we’ve received from the press and from our earliest members.

As you make your New Year’s resolutions, we’ve been hard at work setting our own company goals for 2010. Among them, our three main goals for the coming year include:

1. Continuing to grow our user base by providing the best, most delightful user experience to privately share your life’s media with your real world groups of friends and family.
2. Extending our visual architecture to third parties (and continuing to integrate with them) to allow others to benefit from our core user interface for all their file-sharing needs
3. Introducing highly-demanded features: public groups (yep, they’re coming soon), profile pages, and premium services, as well as a Facebook application and additional mobile apps for Palm, Android, and others.

Helping You Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions

While we work on improving our product for your use, we’ve also been thinking about how rrripple can help you meet your resolutions.

Our secure, private sharing capabilities make it simple for you to share your photos, videos, and files with those people who matter most to you – and not the anonymous masses on the Web – regardless of your contacts’ level of computer literacy. What does that mean for you? You can finally share those wedding photos from last Fall’s event with your wedding guests, or keep up with your resolution to send your parents more photos of their grandchildren – without sending large emails or using complicated sharing tools.

rrripple’s ability to store and share business files in the cloud will make it possible for you to get your professional documents – from Powerpoint sales presentations to spreadsheets and briefings – organized and online, where they can be accessed anywhere, from any computer – without risking the security of those documents.

rrripple’s iPhone app will help you privately post and share all of those photos that you’ve been meaning to sync to your computer, but haven’t had time to – perfect for protecting the hundreds or thousands of mobile photos you’ve been snapping in 2009 that are one drop of a phone from disappearing!

This Week

You may have noticed some changes to the rrripple interface, and some improvements in our performance (read: lots of bugs have been fixed). To wrap up the New Year, the team has released the latest iteration of rrripple, which comes complete with a completely revamped new Post user interface:

• Separated media tabs
• Multiple sharing capabilities let you select as many different groups and as many individual friends you wish to share with
• Facebook importing allows you to import/open your FB photos directly inside rrripple to share with your friends
• Video uploading!
• Thumbnail previews allow you to add tags, titles and descriptions to one or all of your uploaded media.

We’ve also fixed a number of bugs in our system, and made some adjustments to improve performance look and feel on our site.

Wishing You The Best in 2010

While we’ve been hard at work providing you with the best product possible, we realize that we owe a great debt of gratitude to our first adopters, who have entrusted us with their private media, provided invaluable feedback and suggestions for rrripple, and, without whom, we wouldn’t be the network we are today!

On behalf of the rrripple team, we wish you a happy, healthy 2010!

May it be a great one.

We want to wish everyone a very healthy and happy New Year, as we leave behind 2009 (and all its challenges) and step into a hopeful and brighter 2010.  We have a lot to be grateful for at rrripple and a lot to look forward to in 2010.  Here are some of those things:

Most important, our thanks goes to our team, their families and our devoted early adopters (you).  As a grassroots company with over 15 members sprinkled all over the world (Armenia, India, France, England, USA, etc), we have all shared in the highs of entrepreneurial good times as well as the lows of the equity market dive that started in late September of 2008.  With a shortage of cash, we relied on each other more than ever to push rrripple ahead, bit by bit (have fun with the pun), towards our Beta release earlier this year at the TechCrunch50 Conference in San Francisco.  And we did it!  Through an incredible effort by many, rrripple has been slowing adding new users each day, receiving feedback to better shape its product offering and gaining overwhelmingly positive press coverage around the globe (yesterday we found a Polish magazine writing about us).

Our goal for 2009 was to release our Beta and begin the iterative development process with our early adopter market.  We’ve done that, and now we’re looking forward to a really exciting 2010, where the rrripple visual architecture now gets to expand into new areas.  There are three main goals we have for rrripple in 2010:

1. Grow our user base by providing the most delightful user experience to privately share your life’s media with the groups and friends in your life;
2. Extend our visual architecture to 3rd parties (as well as integrate with them) to allow others to benefit from our visual core UI
3. Introduce highly-demanded features: public groups (yep, they’re coming soon), Profile pages (wait ’till you see how we’re going to do this) and Premium services for a certain percentage of our Premium Users.  We’ll also be releasing our Facebook application and additional mobile-compliant apps for Palm, Android and others (TBD).

And so, with a hopeful eye towards 2010, we wish you all the best year of your lives.  May you share in joy, health, peace — and may your sharing be private and secure. 

The rrripple Team

A great number of file sharing sites and applications compete for your attention today, with more creative (and lighter) versions of these being favored by users across different domains.  A quick Google search on the term ‘file sharing’ predictably showcase the traditional peer-to-peer services (like Limewire) and the more integrated apps — which do both backups of your hard drive and sharing (e.g. Box.net).  However, there is yet another model of file sharing — temporary transmission of one (or a few) files.

Temporary transmission of files (whether they be a large PowerPoint, PDF, Word, Excel, etc) has its own niche, and there are some great companies positioned in this realm (e.g. drop.io).  Their strength is in their robust back-end systems, allowing quick upload, processing, previewing and ultimately, downloads of multimedia.

So what’s the bridge between peer-to-peer systems on one hand, and the more robust back-end infrastructure plays?  Perhaps the bridge between both will be a visual user interface that can couple next-generation touch-based user interaction (think capacitive touch screens) with these existing back-end heavy products, to create a more engaging, easy to use and delightful user experience to share files with one another.

Users need the basic features, after all, for  file sharing.  But users are also now heavily nurtured in social media, so visual interfaces must also adapt to these social requirements.  Thoughtful, delightful visual experiences are no longer the realm of just your Apple products (as one clear example) but required more and more across the web — rippling their way across the file sharing space, too.

Us folks at rrripple seldom rest when it comes to ensuring you get to share what you want, exactly with whom you want.  That’s why we’re excited to share a bit of an upcoming feature enhancement that we are certain will help our users share photos, videos, links, notes and files with any number of their individual groups or individual friends, all on one enhanced user interface.  We call this new user interface update our “Super Post” — and you should see it very soon.  In the meantime, thank you for all the great feedback you provide us on a daily basis.  We’re listening, and making small changes on a weekly basis.