In the third quarter of 2007, we embarked on a mission to connect people. We came up with an idea that allowed people to exchange digital contact information through a USB keychain device called Connector. Because of this innovative way of exchanging information through an NFC and RFID connection, we gained a lot of traction and founded our company in 2008.

Over the past year, our company has learned where we truly excel and have our strength. Development of our cloud service and mobile applications have given us more traction and adoption because software moves freely, is distributed easily and supersedes financial and adoptive barriers.

Our company however, is mainly known for Connector. The ease of a one touch connection seems to be appealing to a lot of people. We get emails on a daily basis of people asking to buy, lease, rent, sponsor, sell or gift these nifty little devices. We have seen other companies producing connective hardware and successfully selling it. It seemed to be a great market opportunity.

And as nice as specialized hardware can look and behave, its got an expiry date. Something which is not the case with software. If you think about it, most people in the world already have a Connector in their pockets. It’s called a mobile phone. And the market we aim to target consists of these people.

A few weeks ago, we announced our roadmap to platform independence on mobile phones. And a clear mission: E is not just aiming to replace the traditional paper business card. Replacing the paper business card will only make sense if we can leverage the it to the next level. And that’s exactly what we are planning to do over the next couple of months. Our software allows us to provide you with real-time functionality that will enhance the experience of connecting with new, real-life contacts.

Therefore, today we announce that E will not be manufacturing, selling or delivering Connectors itself, under the E brand. We will allow developers and third party manufacturing partners to build on top of our API. Our sophisticated API allows others to push contact information into the E cloud from all kinds of hardware and software out there. Because that is where our strength lies. In creating the best possible software experience.

Feel free to contact us for more information.

We just launched a new version of the webservice, which I’m sure you’ll like, though the visual changes are minimal. Here’s the breakdown of everything we changed (and fixed!) and added to our service.

Mobile Public Cards

Your Public Card, http://eee.am/username, is now fully optimized for your mobile browser. Place direct calls, emails or open address information directly in Google Maps. Connect with someone remotely, and get a clear overview and direct access to the social media profiles. They especially look great on iPhone and Android devices (hint: turn your phone to landscape mode!).

Added support for Custom Domains

This feature is still in beta, so we encourage you to test it. Custom Domains allow you to automatically redirect your URL to your Public Card, a feature that was requested by many. Please try it out and support us with your feedback. You can access Custom Domain settings in Settings/Public Card.

Added support for Gravatar

Don’t feel like uploading a profile/card picture? Just use your Gravatar. It’s located under Settings/Pictures.

Redirect to Trail when previously logged in

Small, but significant in your user experience. If you’re logged in to E and visit the website, it’ll take you to the Trail directly instead of the homepage.

Smaller updates

• Updated image selector on Cards

• Deleting your public card bug fixed

• Delete your background pictures

• Address info on your Public Card now has a better structure

• Image uploader now fully supported by Internet Explorer

• Disable/delete account bug fixed

We’re very happy to announce that from today, E offers support for over 50 online services. We added a few last week, and with the ones included today, we support a total of 52 services. The ones integrated today:

Hulu
Watch your favorite videos right from your browser, anytime, for free. With full episodes of TV shows both current and classic, full-length movies, web originals, and clips of just about everything, Hulu is the place to watch and enjoy premium videos from the biggest names in entertainment.

Google Profiles
What do people see when they find you online? You can control how you appear in Google by creating a personal profile… …and people will see it on their results page when they do web searches for your name.

Google Reader
Google Reader lets you subscribe to your favorite websites so new content comes to you when it’s posted. Reader keeps track of which things you’ve read so that when you only see unread items when you come back. If there’s a dark blue border around an item, Reader is marking that item as read.

Google Talk
See real-time availability and status of friends online, send instant text messages, easily go from text to voice chat, chat right from your desktop or from Gmail.

Identi.ca
A micro-blogging service based on the Free Software Laconica tool.

Qik
Qik enables you to share your moments live with your friends, family and the world—right from your mobile phone!

Readernaut
Share your reading experience by writing notes, tracking progress, and meeting fellow readers.

TipSpot
TipSpot is an event calendar for your computer and mobile – it gives you a personal overview of all the action around town. tipSpot is smart and takes into account what you and your friends are into. You see where your friends will be going and which events they recommend.

TripIt
Organize trip details into one master online itinerary — even if arrangements are booked at multiple travel sites. Automatically include maps, directions and weather in their master itinerary. Have the option to book restaurants, theatre tickets, activities and more right from within the online itinerary. Safely access travel plans online, share them, check-in for flights, or print an itinerary

Twones
Twones is a music service and a new way to store, organize, find & share music played all over the web (i.e. YouTube, Myspace, Last.fm, Hypemachine, Favtape, Blogs and many more) or on your computer (i.e. iTunes) to one single point of access. Twones ties all music and music services together and lets you share your taste with others in the most direct way.

Ustream
Ustream.TV is the live interactive video broadcast platform that enables anyone with a camera and an Internet connection to quickly and easily broadcast to a global audience of unlimited size. In less than two minutes, anyone can become a broadcaster by creating their own channel on Ustream or by broadcasting through their own site, empowering them to engage with their audience and further build their brand.

Virb
Virb is a community and a place for you to contribute the stuff that interests you. Virb is your social network, your photography portfolio and your band’s website. Virb is the collection of all that you share online, from what you find to what you create.

Yahoo! Messenger
Yahoo! Messenger is a free product that makes it easy and fun to communicate with friends and family around the world. Enjoy real-time text chats with friends, make free PC-to-PC voice calls, send SMS messages from your PC, plus share photos and files instantly.

Update your cards now!

Lots happening here at My Name is E. We decided to push out support for some of our favourite online services and networks today. So I’m happy to announce that we’ve added support for the following services:

• deviantART
• FriendFeed
• MobyPicture
• Picasa
• SlideShare
• Soundcloud
• Wakoopa

We’re working out some OAuth quirks which may require a smaller update later this week, to give some additional ‘auto-friending’ support to the integrated services. Stay tuned for that.

In the meantime, enjoy the update and go update your cards! I already updated mine.

Over the past couple of weeks the team has been altering and rewriting part of E’s architecture. Now, to avoid too much lightsabery geektalk, you probably won’t notice any of the changes we’ve made to the service. But I’ll walk you through it anyway. Platform scalability is extremely important for growing companies like us, and we really like to think of ourselves as a platform, not a specific product. The changes we’ve made allow E to scale more rapidly, and make sure that future API connections get handled more effectively (think iPhone app, mass Connector release, developer API keys). The update was pushed out today, so if you are experiencing any problems or noteworthy changes in user experience, please let us know on Get Satisfaction!

After these backend changes we’ll make sure you’ll actually get an update where you’ll notice stuff has changed/added.

Time for a short update on the development front. iPhone app is coming along nicely, those of you who are waiting: You might have read that Apple sent an email to all developers about 3.0 compatibility. We’re at that point right now. There have been many questions about how the device connectivity will work: iPhone to iPhone card exchanging will support the ‘flick’ gesture, but the app will support connecting with other phones as well through the m/i.mynameise.com method.

A small and funny detail: E recognises your gender now. You have to specify your gender in E/Settings/Account though, before the Trail messages correspond to you being a boy or a girl. No longer will your connections think you’ve undergone drastic surgical procedures.

We’ve had some troubles with the Hyves OAuth connection, but have managed to solve this fast and properly. If you’ve encountered problems, try to share another card and the automatic friending should take place regardless.

The aftermath of the Next ‘09 conference has led to many cool new things coming up. In the meantime, check out the keynote presentation on Empressr, Slideshare or Vimeo.

Last but not least, our Widgets have been a real popular feature since our last update, so we’re making sure they’ll work on all platforms. We’re working hard to get everything ready for you. If you want to support E, please point to your public profile on your social networks, Twitter bios, etc. Oh, and join our Facebook group!

Thanks to iFranz.tv

We’re very happy that we got selected out of 200 startup submissions to present on main stage at The Next Web 2009 conference in Amsterdam.

900 internet professionals from over 25 countries come to Amsterdam for The Next Web Conference. The most influential entrepreneurs, VCs, thought leaders, corporations, developers, industry bloggers and journalist are all present at the conference.

We have a lot of things to announce, on all fronts, and we’re extremely stoked to show you our hard work. We’ll be rocking on stage, and if you are attending, don’t hesitate to come up for a chat.

Enjoy these bits of the new E UI in the regular web browser!

Read the rest of this entry »

Come look for us at CES in Las Vegas 2009. Hanging around the Sands Expo and Convention Center, you will probably catch us at the Innovations Showcase.