This include a new home page, where we try to expose the GetVega concept more clearly.
Please Do not hesitate to give us your opinion about this version.

By the way, about our betas users… if I will not speak on bug fixes on this post, it’s however a great opportunity to thank our users for their support! Guys, please keep notifying us about any small details we can fix or improve!

Now, about the new stuff on GetVega …

The One click grab
Grab anything in one single click.
Of course you can add extra content like images and texts, but new version is even more accurate than the previous one.

Activities
Very useful to discover lists close to your interests.
Feel interrested by a list ? Just click the follow button and you will be notified of any changes or updates.

Inbox
My favorite! Just grab stuff on any web page and decide later what you want to do.
Items are saved and stored in a temporary inbox waiting to join a brand new list.
Cool.

Dashboard
A synthetic view of your account and the opportunity to find new lists to follow.

Better UI
Mutiple operations, reorder lists items, filters, download …
We updated many features to make daily-usage more fun.

Follow Users & Lists
You can be notified each time a friend creates or completes a list.
This allow you to comment and give advices when it really does matter.

Video tutorial
Last but not least, a brand new video about list creation!
If you are new to GetVega, it’s definitely a good opportunity to learn how it works!
Play video [english]
Play Video [french]

And of course, many bug fixs I don’t have the courage to list here (you won’t have the courage to read it anyway…)

See you soon on GetVega!

The CEO

The event website : http://disrupt.techcrunch.com/

Our Wizard is cooking magic algorithms in his cave for the next GetVega release. Well, to be honest… it’s not a cave but a cool open space with a bright light. Aurélien is a kind of modern wizard, which means that he doesn’t deal with crappy things and dead creatures (I’m 99% sure of that, but sometimes he works by night…).  He builds a new kind of high level semantic artificial intelligence. If you don’t understand what it means, then you can call him Wizard.

The web designer is working on his side and also deliver blog posts. He honestly has nothing original to say this week (this does not mean he is doing nothing, I personnaly think he is doing great!), but he swore on his grand mother’s grave to write one blog post per week. By the way, I’m the web designer. Do you think it’s a shame ? I do!

So, next time I guess Mathieu will speak about his trip to New York

GREAT NEWS!
You can get invites for our private BETA at getvega.com!

And because we like fun stuff, we will offer an iPad 3!
Yes you correctly read the number. When it will be available, the best GetVega “evangelist” will win the next cool Apple tablet!

Some of you would rather prefer to win an iPad2 right now… but we had this idea, and we thought “Why not, it’s cool“.

I already have an iPad2, and I think many of our BETA users already have one… So one happy guy will receive an iPad3.

Hurry up we won’t give more than 200 invites …

• Please go to getvega.com,
• Register for the beta,
• Spread the word and wait for your invitation!

Wanna be a GetVega BETA user ?

Being selected within the five startups by TechCrunch was already a great satisfaction. Ten seconds later we realized we only had few days to prepare eveything! … and we were quite shaky of pitching such a high profile Jury.

Few days laters we were at the ESCP, the 5th of may 2011

Keynotes were just fantastics with very interresting speeches from:

• Axel Dauchez, CEO Deezer
• Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet, Priceminister CEO
• Oleg Tschelzoff, Fotolia CEO
• Gilles Babinet, etc…

Main organization was just perfect and smooth, keynotes being conducted by Roxanne Varza who did well the whole afternoon. Very professionnal, not to mention the myQaa screen with dynamic contents frome the audience and web.

Finally it’s time for the startup contest.
First goes eLive, then Cloudnet, GetVega, Tumbup and Jimmy Fairly.

I can’t speak for Mathieu who performed the GetVega’s picth, but it was quite fun!
No slide mistakes (thanks to our wizard, Aurélien), no bad surprises at all…
I think Mathieu did well answering questions and it was quite positive.

GetVega won, having Tumbup as the runner-up.

Even more than winning the price, it was a real pleasure to meet the other startups right after the show. They all have beautiful features, I’m sure many will succeed within no time.

Considering that many thought they had won at first (some misunderstanding in the jury’s verdict), Tumbup also gave us a nice fairplay handshake! We wishes them the best success for their smart solution.

So, we had great time and we won… what next?
Well, we definitely need BETA users and our launchrock page is up.
Be sure to check our next post, we also have a suprise…

Did you saw us at Techcrunch Recipes 2011 startup contest?

PS : We won 2 entrance tickets for the Techcrunch Disrupt New York City!  That’s cool, thanks to Techcrunch, the ESCP and the partners of this wonderful event.

If you are on the private list, you will receive an invitation in the next days. Check your mailbox. For those who are unlucky and not on this list, ask us on Facebook / Twitter we might get some more people in the shuttle .

I am not sure if I have the right to tell you this, but we will offer a very cool gift for the person who will be the best GetVega evangelist…

For those who spoke with us last months, we delayed a little this launch because we want to increase speed and usability of the product. Now, it’s done. The product is amazingly fast!

That’s the the beginning of long road for GetVega! Yes, “beginning”, because weeks after weeks we will unleash new features!

Our launch is just a few weeks ahead… That’s quite scary but we are so excited to finally share Vega with all of you. Anyway until then, we are happy to announce that we raised some funds to help us reinforce our team. So if you want to join us and be part of that big jump into the wild, be sure to read these 2 job offers (in France so in french):

• Offre d’emploi en CDI : Architecte Web
• Offre d’emploi en CDI : Développeur Front End

And the few of you that can’t apply, you can still help us by spreading the word: we’re hiring!

“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” – Steve Jobs, 1998

Today is a great day. Yeah! Really. I agree with Steve Jobs. Yes I tell you it’s quite weird. (Hoho, I will have some ennemies including Vega’s CEO, hello boss! ).

Hello Steve !

After I joined Vega in August we decided to start some Focus Groups. Or something like that. Indeed we did not have a very-strict-full-process for the Focus Group.
We just defined main point to test, and let people test the software. And speak. A lot!

But come back on the Steve’s quote (I use his first name, he is so close of his client remember it ! I have no smart-phone yet but I plan to buy one this year) !

I remember one of the first questions during the first Focus Group. We asked them to describe “how they see a tool which helps them do a list, organize their data, build comparators, etc. ?”. A lot of answers where not very defined (regarding other answers) especially regarding the high quality of feedback our dear testers provide us.
Curation tools and assimilates are not popular yet. They are planned to emerge only this year [Robert Scoble's article and RIP Delicious]. That’s why it was not really a surprise to have no real nor focused feedback. Nevertheless, every single comment from our users was highly valuable.

So how did we do in Vega to obtain interesting feedback during Focus Group:

• provide food, and beers (and softs ). Even we are a French company, a lot of French like to test food. So bring international food to your focus group members. They will associate the food discovery with the focus group. And with beer and other soda, the event doesn’t look like a work time!

• choose people from the right category. At the first focus group, the product was really buggy, so it was more appropriate to invite computer science engineers. They know that software can be bugged or not ergonomic at the beginning. At the second focus group we invited people less geek (= heavy users of Powerpoint & Excel).

• decide on which point we want feedback but this is only a guideline during the test.
• let’s go for the test : one user, one computer, one vega member is the best combination. More user/computer by vega member is too much.
• after the test : throw some questions (and answer to marketing/business questions). Usually the discussion starts and you just have to listen to your focus group. And learn. A lot!
• during the night, your focus group users go to bed, but you have to work. Write your report to your teammates (Yes, 3 o’clock is quite late to go to bed).

Fun & About the title: sorry for you, dear readers (and maybe friends), Steve wasn’t really in our office during Focus Group.

@Steve : tell us if you want to come to our Focus Group, we may arrange us. And please bring me an Iphone also (but I prefer one without antenna trouble – I’m left handed).

More photos from the ceremony on http://www.facebook.com/getvega

First Digital Startup Trophey (le Trophée Startup Numérique) organized by Telecom SudParis. There were more than 80 french startups in this competition and there was some truly interesting projects.
We are very grateful to Telecom SudParis for organizing such an attractive – and unique – competition. Part of the price included a free incubation in their Parisian center, as well as coaching from their best advisors.
☛ For more information: Website, Twitter

Ecole Centrale de Paris - Incubator

Second Vega will also be incubated at the Ecole Centrale de Paris (where Yvan and I have done our studies). We are very proud to be part of this prestigious school and are excited to beneficiate from their coaching.
☛ For more information: Website

Vega, Pick the Web

And <insider news>, I can tell you that the product is growing fast… ! Thanks to the best early testers of the planet, Vega has become sexy, responsive and awesomely useful.
☛ Stay tuned for early invites on our Facebook page, or by entering your email at http://www.getvega.com!

This week Foursquare rolled out his 2.0 version, an event that got a lot of media coverage. Some very interesting features in there including a small button that let you add the “venue” you are viewing in your Foursquare to-do list. Does it remind you something? Yep, Facebook announced their own “Like” button, some months ago at their F8 conference.

And that time again that’s a hit! How do they do that? For such a small button??

Well that’s actually more than a button… A lot of buttons have polluted invaded the web for a long time now.  AddThis, Dig this, Buzz this, Tweet this, Plouf this… They have their golden place at every single blog post on the web. So how the Like button and the Foursquare button are different? Data.

Social buttons

They allow you to save data, not “URLs”. Data is meaningful. Http slash slash blabla urls are not. When you click the “Like” button on a movie page (for instance “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I”), the page is telling Facebook to save a Movie whose name is Harry Potter, written by JK Rowling and directed by David Yates.

So yeah Facebook gets richer because they have much more data to play with. But you are the first to benefit from this. First you can retrieve much more easily your favorite movies because you can go to your profile and get your likes well organized (and not a messy bunch of links). But the main benefit is yet to come on Facebook or Foursquare: Recommandation. For instance Facebook knows that you may like other David Yates movies, since you liked Harry Potter… A little bit like what Amazon does for books, Foursquare will do it for places. And Facebook for… everything else.

Yes we can  still argue that they are weaving their web of proprietary data, not leveraging any open standard like RDFa… But well, when you are big you can impose your own conventions… What is bothering me more is that this approach remains very “Top Down”. As a user I don’t want to wait for that blog or that website to add the little button in order to save a simple movie. There might be another way no

Too soon

Too much

Too much “platform”

No integration

A technology incubator

They have other plans

PS: Well now there is a movement for saving Google Wave…