It’s Moving Time!
There comes a time when hard decisions have to be made, and for us, that day has come. Sadly, but with good reason, we are giving up our swanky downtown studio. Yes, we will miss the awesome First Friday Tweetups and get-togethers, but alas, the time has come to make a smart decision and recognize that as wonderful and lovely as our studio is, we’re just not using it enough to warrant keeping it. All of us at Blellow are freelancers and we love working from home!
Our lease is up, so it just makes sense for us to move out, continue working green & saving some green, while we reallocate the expense and time to continuing to improve Blellow. This is a cut that just makes sense from every angle.
So, join us in saying goodbye to what has been our home away from home (read our client showroom and party house). We will miss you studio, but you are a sacrifice we are willing to make for our fellow Blellowers.
P.S. For those of you living in the San Antonio area, we will be hosting a studio sale event this Saturday, May 30th to sell furniture and office supplies. Interested? Come by from 10 -3 and check it out! Also, if you know of anyone in SA who is looking for a great location in Southtown for their business, let us know - we’ll be glad to introduce you to our wonderful landlady!
Blellow Sponsoring Freelance Camp Houston
This Saturday, April 11th, 2009, Blellow is one of the sponsors of Freelance Camp Houston at the Houston Technology Center at 410 Pierce St. Show up and support Freelancers and network with others in your field.
Texas’ second annual Freelance Camp is to be held April 11th, 2009 from 10 am to 4 pm at the Houston Technology Center in Houston, Texas! The event is designed to explore and promote the synergy that independent contractors can bring to business today. The day will center around bringing together freelancers, remote contractors, entrepreneurs, and anyone else interested to network, share ideas, and explore opportunities. Thanks to the support of Bridgette Penel, Debra Robinson, and Travis Skweres from Werkadoo, Marc Nathan of the HTC, Shane Pearlman, Luis Sandoval, Jr., Brad Parler, and a lot of other folks, this event is going to be a huge success!
Freelance Camp is a place to discuss and explore the different approaches to running a successful freelance business / small service company. The Houston camp is FREE to attend thanks to some very cool sponsors. So come ready to learn, and if you’re up for it, sign up to give a talk the day of the camp!
Register for Freelance Camp Houston at Eventbrite (link)
News and Updates from Blellow
Watch the video above to get a rundown of news, events, and updates to the Blellow.com site, including the recent Blellow/Twitter meetup with Rackspace and Robert Scoble, changes to the site including kudos and Twitter integration, and future plans.
Click here to view the video.
Blellow Needs Your Help!
Blellow is a community about helping each other with problems that might be difficult to solve on our own, and communicating with your colleagues and peers.
A week into our beta, we’ve read many good reviews of our site and the buzz is slowly growing, but in line with our “help others” philosophy we are now asking for your help!
Blellow started as a bootstrapped company, with president Mandi Leman privately funding the entire site by herself. This is practically unheard of in today’s venture capitolist dominated internet.
We’ve poured every cent into the site to make sure your experience is fun, productive, and useful. Unfortunately this hasn’t left much room in our budget for advertising, so we’re pleading to our users to help us spread the word about Blellow.com!
With South by Southwest Interactive coming up this week we’re bound to get some traffic to the site and attention pointed towards us, but we want to double — if not triple — the user base!
Increasing our users also increases our community, and increases the chances of getting better solutions to the problems and questions that you ask of other Blellow members.
This is where you come in: talk about Blellow, Tweet about Blellow, write blog posts about Blellow, record a YouTube or Seesmic video, talk about us on FriendFeed, Facebook, or MySpace. Whatever your social network of choice is,
If you’re a graphic designer, invite other graphic designer friends. If you’re a programmer, invite other coders. If you work for a design firm, invite your coworkers, create a private group just for your company to brainstorm and talk about ideas.
Of course we’re not asking you to spam you friends, but imagine if all of the other people in your field were available on the site, how much more worthwhile would the site be?
Blellow Bug Fixes and New Features
Another day, another round of bug squashing and adding new features for our wonderful beta members!
Changes as of 3/10/2009:
- Find People and Member Directory - Long delayed and highly requested, we’ve finally added a method of finding your friends and colleagues on Blellow. On the left sidebar you can now search for members by Name, Email address, or Member name.
- Invite your friends! We are trying to spread the word about Blellow and all it’s great features, and now you can help! Click on the link in the left sidebar and enter your friends email addresses, separated by commas, to invite them into the Blellow beta.
- Jobs - Company Link now properly links to the website
- Projects - Now shows the project creator with a link to their profile on Blellow
- Links - All links in status updates and replies now open in a new window, and appear in a slightly smaller sized font so it doesn’t detract from the rest of the message
There are some other bugs and additions on the production server that should be pushed up by tomorrow. We’re getting closer and closer to the open beta and SxSW so we’re trying to take care of as many problems and add as many features as possible. Please let us know if you find any bugs by submitting them using the orange feedback button on the left side!
