What's New for DEMOfall09

Finally. After a summer filled with long hours, two complete user interface overhauls, plenty of backend headaches, and a lot of soul-searching about how best to explain what we are and what we do - we're ready.

This post comes to you from sunny San Diego as we prepare for DEMOfall09. We couldn't be more excited to meet some of the best new companies in the world and see what they're doing. But we'd be lying if we said the most exciting part of all this is having a product that works and telling everyone we can find about it.

While this is certainly not anywhere near the end of our development, it does mark a big milestone for the company and gives us a great base from which to figure out where we fit in the market, how we can best serve our customers, and where we need to focus our efforts going forward. Whether people love us or hate us, we know that all of the feedback we'll get over the next couple days is invaluable. Whether you're going to the conference or not, we'd love to hear what you think. Send us an email, tweet us, or leave a comment here.

Here's a few of the notable changes we've made:

1) New user interface.
We stripped it, toned it down, and stripped it again. Pinyadda is about providing quality web content to our users, not about giving them a visual feast every time they log in, and this new look give the content you want without any distractions.

2)New homepage.
The new homepage features a module that allows anyone to get a glimpse at the content that's being shared on Pinyadda without logging in. This is the first step in a number of changes we'll be rolling out that opens up the content experience to everyone.

3)Real-time indexing.
We were close before, but now we're there. Content is coming in hot, and we like it that way.

Yesterday was the first chance we all had to really play with the finished product as end users, and I have to say the experience was great (Finished, of course, is a relative term...). Lots of great content, easy navigation, and conversations flowing. We're a little partial, but it's truly amazing to see how far the site has come over the last couple of months. Anyone who saw the original prototype can attest to that.

We flew out yesterday, went for a swim in the Pacific, and grabbed a room at the nicest HoJo we've ever seen to get our internet on and grill each other on the pitch. Today we're headed to the Longboard Bar & Grill to watch the Patriots game (at least one of us will have a close eye on the race at Louden, too) and then it's back to the laptops for all the last minute tweaking and de-bugging we can handle. We'll be posting at the end of each day of the conference to talk about our favorite presenters and give general updates.

A big thanks to all of our team members, advisers, friends, parents, and users. We couldn't have come this far without you. You can follow the conference on twitter using the hastag #demo09. If you're going to be in attendance, you can find us at booth 65.