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While giving an interview recently I realized that some of the important dates in HipCal history were getting a little fuzzy. Here’s an official time line;

Fall semester, 2004 - I make the first version of MyPIMP in my EIW class at RPI. ~30 fraternity brothers and friends were using it.

Winter break, 2004 - Pete & I were talking on AIM and decided that we wanted to make a website. We chose MyPIMP since it had already been started.

Spring semester, 2005 - Pete, Chris, Tawheed, Glenn, and I start planning features, prototyping, and working on the PHP framework.

Summer, 2005 - Pete, Glenn, and I stay at AXP in Troy and work on the site daily. Chris and Tawheed work from the east coast while not at their real jobs.

September 4th, 2005 - Launch! MyPIMP goes live and we start spreading the word around campus. Most new users are our friends and classmates.

Fall semester, 2005 - We continue adding features including an interface upgrade, Groups, iCal support, and DST support.

November 17th, 2005 - We change the name of the site to HipCal, enabling more users to feel comfortable using the site. We did not take church calendar users into consideration before this point!

Winter break, 2005 - HipCal is having some serious server issues. We weren’t really sure what to do since none of us had run a website before…

January 19th, 2006 - We get an email from Rikk Carey over at Plaxo asking if we’d like to chat. We give him a call and are soon booked on a flight out there to meet the team.

February 5-7th, 2006 - We fly out to Mountain View to meet everyone at Plaxo. Product visions are shared and both sides seem very excited about moving forward.

Late February, 2006 - Legal documents are passed back and forth while we try to figure out what each of us would be doing at Plaxo.

April 10th, 2006 - Mark Jen visits us in Troy while on the east coast for a blogging conference. We get our office set up as a Plaxo satellite office so we can start working.

Late April, 2006 - Pete and I are doing tons of press interviews (under embargo) while getting slammed with homework. It’s fun.

May 1st, 2006 - News of the acquisition finally goes public! Here’s some more press.

May 16th, 2006 - A small Plaxo + HipCal party is thrown at the Plaxo offices while we’re out there on a 4 day visit.

May 20th, 2006 - Glenn, Pete, and Tawheed graduate from RPI.

June 5th, 2006 - We begin our road trip across the country.

June 10th, 2006 - We arrive at our new place in Los Altos.

June 12th, 2006 - First day of work at Plaxo!

— Year of work —

June 24th, 2007 - The new Plaxo 3.0 is released.

The next few items added to this list will be very exciting. I wish I could add them now, but you’ll just have to wait!

Last night we released Plaxo 3.0, the product us HipCal guys have been working on at Plaxo for the past year. It feels great to have finally shipped a product and is nice to see all the positive press coverage. There’s nothing more motivating than positive feedback!

Plaxo 3.0’s front end is written primarily in JavaScript, a technology which very few others are using to create applications of this size. All of us have learned more than we ever thought we’d know about this little scripting language! Although JavaScript is fun to use, I’m really enjoying the switch back to PHP which we’re using for some of our future products.

My main contributions to Plaxo 3.0 were the calendar views, new WAP, and Pulse. Features like countdowns and a more interactive upcoming view were ideas we had for HipCal, and it’s great to see them make an appearance in 3.0. It’s also nice to see the new WAP, which I originally started as a small side project, make it to a shippable state within a few weeks, bringing us all one step closer to the “poor man PDA” (now we just need SMS alerts!). Pulse is just plain cool, and I’m very excited to watch it grow over the next few months.

Anyway, back to work!

While ‘driving’ by the Plaxo office using the new Street View in Google Maps I noticed that my car is visible in the parking lot (it’s the red wagon behind the lamp post in the center). Pretty cool! I don’t have any privacy concerns about this feature like some other people do. Assuming the images are kept up to date it’ll be very helpful when getting directions in confusing areas. It’s also fun to look at all the funny images people have found.

…a lot has happened!

• Went to Jump Sky High with a bunch of people from Plaxo. It’s basically 3 huge trampoline rooms and a foam pit that you get to play around on for $9/hr. We found it odd that you can only do flips on the trampolines and off the walls, but not into the foam pit. It only took a little practice before I could do decent back flips as well as flips off the trampoline walls. Maybe this summer I’ll learn to do them off any wall…
• Finished school this past Thursday and it feels great! In a few days I’m flying home for graduation which is on Sunday. Still waiting for the final grades to roll in.
• Started using Amazon S3 along with JungleDisk and am enjoying it so far. Had Explorer lock up a few times when accessing the mounted drive in Windows but other than that it has been stable. Even though I have 2 300gb drives in mirrored raid in my desktop it feels good to have a remote backup of certain things. Losing data really sucks.
• Got a new 50-200mm lens for my camera and have been able to take some cool macro shots. Since 50mm still feels zoomed in I’m sure I’ll be switching to the 18-55mm lens that came with the camera for larger shots.
• Finally signed up for Twitter and am enjoying Twitterific on my mac. Hopefully I can remember to update it reasonably often (I’m terrible with AIM away messages).
• Been working on the new WAP for Plaxo (now at m.plaxo.com!) and using it almost daily. If my phone had a button to jump to a specific WAP site I’m sure I’d use it even more.
• Pre-ordered Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and am remaining optimistic about its release date and ability to deliver good gameplay. I hope I’m not let down!

For the past few weeks I’ve spent my spare time working working on a new version of Plaxo’s mobile access (WAP). It uses PHP, Smarty, and the new Plaxo 3.0 APIs so I’ve had to do very little work myself. The hardest part by far has been getting the layout to look good on all sorts of phones.

Some of the cool features:

• Data is always in sync with Outlook, Mac, Gmail, etc using thanks to 3.0’s sync setup.
• Main page shows my weather and calendar events for today and tomorrow — usually that’s all I want to see!
• Add and edit tasks and notes. The only reason for me to use a paper todo list or grocery list was that I could take it with me. Now I can just keep my tasks/notes in Outlook and access them from anywhere.
  (Outlook tasks and notes aren’t implemented in the most user-friendly way, so I often just use the mobile access through my browser. We’re hoping to get these features added to 3.0 soon!)

If you want to check it out just hit up http://labs.plaxo.com/mobile/ from your phone (should also work from your browser if you don’t have a data plan or want to play with it first.
Feedback welcome in our Google Group.