zintin blog

zintin.com has just been updated! Our placeholder site is gone, and we are now allowing everyone to sign up to be notified when our beta mobile social media product is out. (We won’t give your email address to anyone, and we won’t send you anything else.)

We have been working hard on zintin on the iPhone for a while now, and while the product has been moving along, our website and blog were not. Our blog should be a little more active starting now. We still won’t be releasing product details for a couple of weeks or so, but want to share our view of the mobile space from the inside so keep an eye out for upcoming blog posts. If you haven’t already, you may want to sign up for our blog RSS feed.

When building a new product a company needs to be careful to position the product correctly. A common concern is whether the product can stand up on its own, or whether it is only valuable enough to be a feature of something larger. As we continue to define what zintin is, we want to take this concern seriously. I decided a good way to start is by looking back at past examples. When I thought of previous new and unexpected networking technologies I thought immediately of the web (sorry to be cliche). The web lets people share documents between computers, and in it’s first incarnation, not much else. Well guess what, there were already word processors that let you generate such documents, the web must have sounded like a great feature for word processors.

What is missed by this simple view is that sharing is actually much more valuable than document generation. Document sharing on the web is not a feature of some larger product like MS Office, it is a first class product, one that has reshaped the world. At zintin, we are aiming at taking sharing to the next level. We want to connect our users to the people around them so they can share things with anyone they interact with. Of course this sounds like a great feature for lots of products, but we strongly believe that this kind of sharing is going to be valuable. We know we aren’t going to be as big as the web, but we are confident that zintin will be a first class product.

There is a lot going on in the mobile space right now. Android and the iPhone have started something, a market wave, which a lot of companies plan on riding to the top. Many have recognized that one of the first big mobile apps will be presence awareness, and as a result, there are a number of startups diving into that space.

What is presence awareness? The idea is that when you walk into a room, your phone will know who is around you. Several companies are excited by the idea of browsing the profiles of other users near you. This provides a new way to meet people and break the ice, there is also a way to apply the platform to dating. Almost every mobile presence company we have seen so far is taking this basic idea in a different direction. Of course, our application is also unique, and for various reasons we think our approach is the best. Stay tuned for the specifics.

We walked into a room with a giant orange Y on the wall. With nice chill music playing in the background we were greeted by a robot that shook our hands. Within a few minutes, all three of us were in conversations with some amazing people with great new ideas for making people’s lives easier. It was mind blowing.

Tonight was the reception dinner for the people attending Y-Combinator’s “Startup School”. Without going into detail, Y-Combinator is a company that starts startups. They accept a few companies each year for an incubator style program.  Startup School is an event on Stanford campus tomorrow, which will be a whirlwind tour of the challenges involved in starting a company.

We had a great time at the dinner tonight and are really pleased with the reaction we got to our idea from everyone we met. It was really rewarding to hear people eager to try out all of the things we are doing with mobile phones. There are a couple of interesting companies that we could possibly partner with and we are looking forward to meeting them and everyone else tomorrow morning at the Startup School.

On finishing note we’d like to say hi to all of the new friends we made tonight. See you guys tomorrow!

We are proud to announce the birth of the beautiful new (and imaginatively named) zintin blog! Our website and blog are a little bare right now, but we will be filling them out in the coming weeks and months.

We are currently developing our application for Android, which is an exciting new platform for mobile phones. We are having a great time building it, and can’t wait to get it into users’ hands!

For now we have just entered a prototype for our app into the Google’s Android Developer’s Challenge, which is meant to promote the development of “original […], appealing and indispenable” mobile apps. Zintin fits the bill on all counts.

We look forward to telling you more about the details of our app and our vision, so watch this space!