just.me

just.me named finalist at SXSW startup accelerator

admin — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 23:17:40 +0000

We are pleased to tell you that just.me has been named as a finalist at this years SXSW interactive festival in Austin. The Startup Accelerator competition takes place on the 12th and 13th March at the Austin Hilton Downtown, Forth Floor – Salons A, B & D. The Schedule is here.

The competition itself is fairly constrained. Each company gets a 2 minute presentation. These are slides only. Those who qualify from the first round get a 5 minute presentation the following day – also slide based. As such we are not launching our apps at SXSW. That will happen shortly afterwards. We will be giving a sneak preview though.

Seed and A round funding

admin — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 08:12:58 +0000

CrunchFund founder Michael Arrington has just blogged about his investment in just.me. This follows an earlier TechCrunch post disclosing our A Round financing that was followed up on Vator.tv and VentureBeat.

So I can confirm that the company has indeed partnered with Khosla Ventures in bringing the just.me software to market. They join True Ventures who re-invested and our other seed investors. The total new money was just over $2m, adding to the $550k seed we raised earlier in 2011.

Now isn’t the time to talk about what just.me is, we can do that as it evolves once it is available later in the year. But one thing we can say is that it isn’t trying to kill or replace any other service.

just.me is a new architecture built on top of the mobile, and particularly the smartphone, ecosystem. It doesn’t take the web as its starting point, it takes the highly personal and ever-present mobile Internet as its starting point. As such it is focused on defining a new consumer software experience, not replacing an existing one. It is also focused on the freedom that comes from placing social tools on a device the consumer fully controls, and not building a big cloud service that owns or acts on the consumers data. We don’t know all of the questions this gives rise to yet, never mind all of the answers. But we are really excited about building on this new ecosystem and learning with users as we go.

I can also say at this time that we have recruited a great team. More on this in a later post.

just.me – semi-finalist for Le Web

admin — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 19:27:03 +0000

just.me has been selected as a semi-finalist for the Le Web startup competition in Paris on December 7th and 8th 2011. As part of the process of elimination from 32 semi-finalists to 16 finalists we had to submit a video to Youtube, and permit community voting on the videos. We were a little constrained in our video because we are still in stealth mode. Nonetheless, it being Halloween, we came up with something… Here it is. Here is the link to vote for us

Commonwealth Club panel – what will be hot in 2011?

admin — Fri, 27 May 2011 19:26:41 +0000

13th Annual Top Ten Trends at the Churchill Club, held on May 25th 2011. Trend No. 6 received 80% assent from the audience and 100% assent from the panelists:

Trend 6. Social, Really. The rise of social networks is well documented, but they’re not really social networks. They’re a mix of friends, strangers, organizations, hucksters—it’s more like walking through a rowdy crowd in Times Square at night with a group of friends. There is a growing need for social networks that reflect the fundamental nature of human relationships: known identities, mutual trust, controlled levels of intimacy, and boundaries of shared information. The trend is the rise of true social networks, designed to maintain real, respectful relationships online.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/5760456067