School

HipCal History

July 15th, 2007  |  Published in HipCal, Plaxo, School

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!

In the past few weeks…

May 13th, 2007  |  Published in Photography, Plaxo, School, Tech

…a lot has happened!

  • Jump Sky HighWent 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.
  • Enemy Territory: Quake WarsPre-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!