rrripple blog - private, meaningful sharing

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!

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

Tonight, at the Plug and Play center in Sunnyvale, we had the pleasure of sharing our presentation and a bit of our Flex application to a great group of smart, fun and entrepreneurial folks — SilvaFUG.  We enjoyed the opportunity to share our vision of group sharing on LifeFlow™ and appreciated all the feedback, ideas and possibilities that resulted from this group tonight.   Thanks to all who participated, especially Keith Sutton and the panelists.