Gruvie wins Live Pitch event by Funding Universe!

So this past week, we had the opportunity to compete in Funding Universe's LivePitch event at the Novell campus. There were 5 companies that pitched to a panel of professionals and an audience of about 60 people or so. We were given 4 minutes to pitch, 3 minutes fro Q&A, and 2 final minutes for feedback. After all 5 of us had finished pitching, the audience and the panels of experts voted on their favorite - and Gruvie won! (yes that is me on the left, Carrie from ListPipe makes me look short)

We were the only social aggregator pitching; other companies included a bio-fuels company, a blogging content company, and i-phone app company, and a consultancy firm.

There were several great start-ups pitching at the event, so it was an honor to even be slected to pitch - winning was awesome! We got some great feedback and people seemed pretty excited about what we are donig. Funding Universe put on a great event and we want to give them some props for all they do. It is a great company and Brock Blake (CEO) has got some really exciting things going on.

For more info on the event, visit the Funding Universe Blog Post

Where did my email go?

Many of you have noticed that your Gmail and Yahoo messages are not coming into Gruvie right now, instead there is a message that says they will be back soon. We wanted to apologize about this little inconvenience and tell you what's up. For many people, Gmail and Yahoo have been working great, but for some people the messages are not always working properly. Making sure your email works properly is really important to us, so we want to make sure it is working perfectly (or as close to that as possible), and rather than risk confusion on the site by tweaking things, we have made the tough decision to pull the messages out completely until we can fix it right! We promise to have it back up as soon as possible - and maybe with a new feature or two....

In the meantime, you should notice your gmail and yahoo contacts are still in your address book. So, if you compose a message in Gruvie, you can send it out to these contacts. We don't expect to have any problems with this part of your account.

And here is a secret little bit o' juicy news for those of you that have read this entire post.... there is a new site going to be integrated into Gruvie soon! I can't tell you exactly what it is , but lets just say the birds will be singing at Gruvie.

www.facebook.com - manage your profile, email and more

www.facebook.com users can now use Gruvie to manage their profile and interact with their other social accounts.

Gruvie's mission is to enable every type of internet user to safely manage and share their unique life.

Gruvie was born out of our own desires for a better way to manage our lives online. There are so many great sites out there for social networking, blogging, sharing photos, and other stuff that trying to remember all our logins was hurting our brains. We have interests that vary from online gaming to sports to travel , and managing our different profiles was taking up most of our time, we needed a place where we could manage our own unique online identites. None of the "aggregators" out there did what we wanted, so we decided to make Gruvie work for us.

Gruvie is more than just a feed or an update pulling in information, it is a fully functioning network that allows us to publish content and communicate accross our different networks. Now we can be a part of as many sites as we want and they are easier to manage. Plus, it helps other sites by showing off our content to all our friends.

Give Gruvie a try today!

Improvements to email!

We are working fast and furious to improve the way Gruvie works, and we have some HUGE updates coming this next week. One of the most important things we are making better is speed, as Levi mentioned in his last post. We have been doing some testing and the improvement are amazing. The other big development we are excited about is in the Inbox.

Inbox Filtering
So we have always been excited about our Total Inbox on gruvie, but now it is getting even better. We started by bringing together social messages and email, so we didn't have to check 4 different inboxes, which is already pretty cool. While everything in one place is cool, there are times when we may just want to see our Facebook messages, or our Gmail messages, without having all those other messages mixed in. Enter The Inbox Filter. We have just built a filter navigation on the left of your inbox that will allow you to only view the inbox you want to view:

View just your email accounts, or just your social messages. Or you can choose just one particular account to view - Total Control for your Total Inbox. Check out the screenshots below:





A view of all my accounts - notice messages from Facebook, Gruvie, and Yahoo...



A view of just my Email accounts, notice messages from only Yahoo and Gmail....

We Love Speed!

We belong to the generation of instant gratification, we want it now! This incessant demand for speed is witnessed by the rapid progress in every electronic device we use. From cell phones to laptops, they all do more than they used to and they do it faster. I can't exactly say if our lives are that much busier today that they justify this lust for speed, but it doesn't much matter if this desire is justified or not, it is what it is. At Gruvie we also feel this need for speed. In fact our man Byron has been eat, drink, and sleep speed for the past few days. Gruvie is doing a lot more work than other social networks, it is bringing your stuff together from all over the web. One of the challenges we have faced in providing such a useful site is that it takes time to go out and get your stuff and bring it all back together. But we're making progress, we're almost there, and we can't wait to hear what you think about it.

Gruvie's gone batty!

We have been working really hard at Gruvie, so hard in fact that we all took the afternoon off the other day and went to the 2:10 showing of the new Batman movie. When we were done a couple of us had a rather interesting discussion about the film, but before I get into that I have to say I thought the movie was amazing! However, I'll be the first to admit that I'm not cut out to be a critic, I am too easily entertained, regardless of the quality of the acting, storyline, or special effects I usually walk away happy. But this movie was especially intriguing because the complexity of the storyline and the characters was riveting. I'll try not to go into too much detail for those of you who have not seen the film yet, but if you are the type that likes to go into a movie knowing nothing this is your warning, read no further.

For starters the acting was impressive, I was not fond of Maggie Gyllenhall who played Rachel, but otherwise the characters were flawless, and as for the Joker, he was superb. But the underlying themes and the way the story twisted our conceptual understanding of society and good and evil was thought provoking. The idea that good can win over evil was challenged over and over as Joker had his way with Gotham and turned the city against Batman and attempted to turn people against people. He was always very creative as he forced Batman and the citizens of Gotham to make decisions between two evils. This was demonstrated most powerfully when he wired two ferries full of people with explosives and delivered the detonator of each to the people on the opposite ferry. One was full of regular citizens and the other was full of prisoners, but each had the opportunity to detonate the other ship before midnight and whoever blew up the other first would survive. This scene was one of my favorite parts in the whole movie and I'm not going to ruin it for you, but hurry up and go see it because I want to talk to you about it!

I guess that is enough for now and I'll have to do a follow-up post later to discuss the film in more detail. If you have already seen it please tell me what you thought about it in the comments section.

Conference Table of Champions

I want to make sure we maintain a healthy balance between informative blog posts and pointless ones....

The big news of the week? Our new Ping Pong Table (oops, I mean conference table) is here. That's right baby, strap on your short shorts and pull up those tub socks because we got some pong to play!

Who needs some 8 ft mahogany "pretty boy" table collecting dust in some glass room when you can be negotiating a wicked spin shot into the corner, finalizing deal terms on the next tournament, or slipping in a drop shot when your competitors are least expecting it?

Don't worry, we still spend plenty o' hours staring at 1's and 0's, working to get Gruvie up and running for you, but occasionally even the most dedicated keyboard jockey needs to break out into a little "tennis for real men" - there's usually some tears, a little blood, and a lot of sweat (ok a lot of tears), but it's all worth it when you hit that elusive 21!

All are welcome to come join in the madness, but be warned, you may have to face the unbeaten, the unparalleled, the hard to believe . . . Betty the Bomber - Don't mess with her our you'll end up wrapped in her couch cover at the bottom of the river!

Gruvie out.