So, there are some big news for us! As of today, the technologies related to CircleMe and its related interest-based network have been acquired by Exa Futures (www.exafutures.com), a young company still based in the wonderful, fashionable, trendy (and even a bit sexy), Milano. 😉

Exa Futures website homepage

What does this mean for you, our users? Well, probably there will be implications, of course, and we hope you will like them. Exa Futures wants to continue to develop CircleMe so it continues to move towards becoming the world’s best interest-network available on the Internet. To do this though, the focus will need to be on making the company sustainable. Yes, that means we need to make money… but don’t start shaking out of fear! Indeed, the question is natural: how would you make a buck in this world of “free [everything]“?

First: we want to stay away from selling users’ data. Furthermore, we do not like advertising just for the sake of making few bucks with millions of invasive impressions here and there. But we do need to make a living (especially if you want us to keep CircleMe FREE).

Considering this, Exa Futures’ strategy will be to push on the packaging of our nifty technologies so that also other companies will be able to take advantage of AI systems that can “automagically” identify content and categorize it based on 1 or more of the million topics already mapped on our interest-graph.

We hope that Exa Futures will find many strong partners to work with, making good business while providing a great service to you, our Circlers, and in the meantime continuing to map all the Internet’s (good) content, on a single virtual graph.

We are excited about the future coming for us, and we hope you are too! Keep on Circling with us!

We love when CircleMe becomes the place where our users enjoy conversations about their interests. We thought we could also start this conversation with them ourselves when we first ‘meet’ them, to make signing up less tedious, and more interactive! And so, we created our ‘conversational’ sign-up process.

As Circlers know, we strive to make the most of the latest technologies and keep on improving CircleMe, and we’ve done it yet again: From today, when users join CircleMe, they’ll be greeted by a new sign-up process containing few questions that will help them understand how to best use CircleMe.

And it’s not just good for users… After a few days of testing this new sign-up process (FYI – we have A/B tests running constantly on the site and we determine ‘test-winners’ each week), we’ve seen great results when it comes to business metrics for those new Circlers using the new Sign-up process, multiplying our conversion rate by x2.5. Also, these new users are 63.4% more active than those who do not, a proof that it does a good job when it comes to educating users.

Second step of the easy peasy new sign-up process

If you haven’t joined, give it a try! And if you’re already a Circler, why not answering those questions by adding these interests to your profile? These things to add are: A movie they like, something they’d like To-Do such as a book or city to visit, a topic they often read news about, and concerts or events happening near you, which you can find here.

New recommendations section on the CircleMe for Android app

Dear Circlers, as we entered spring our best Android app to date has bloomed and we’re really excited to be telling you about it today:

Download the latest version of the CircleMe app to get a brand new recommendations section. You can use this section if, for instance, you’re at a library looking for a cool new book to read.
Readability of news has been improved, meaning you’ll have a better experience whilst catching up on the latest for your interests. In fact, we’ve even improved the posting and commenting areas so that chatting with other Circlers is easier than and more fun than ever.

Now it’s easier than ever to chat with other Circlers.

We have also added Push Notifications so that you don’t miss on any important news and conversations. And you can manage your preferences for these notifications from the ‘settings’ section.

Finally, we’ve added a series of kick-ass performance improvements, to make circling as fast and smooth as possible. We hope you enjoy this last version and please do keep your feedback coming at support at circleme dot com 🙂

Happy spring Circling!

With the launch of CircleMe second generation, we brought you the CircleMe Calendar, displaying nearby events related to your interests. Today we’re making it easier than ever not to miss a great event ever again with our Calendar reminders.

Once you add interests and your Calendar fills with interesting events, these reminders will start appearing on your Updates Feed as the events approach.

We hope you find this addition useful. Keep an eye out on the blog for more news on how we’re making it easier for you to make the most out of your interests!

In the meantime, why not check what events you’ve got on your Calendar?

Do you like writing about the things you’re passionate about? Are you a blogger? If you answer yes to any of these questions, read on!

We help thousands of CircleMe users sharing updates about their interests such as news and event reminders. Now you too can help other Circlers enjoy their interests thanks to the new Post Editor, which allows you to share interesting stories with other like-minded Circlers.

When you start writing a post, you’ll now be able to launch the ‘Post Editor’, which will allow you to edit your post including adding photos, bullet points and more:

If you’re feeling inspired, give it a try! Share something about one of your interest. For instance, you could tell us about your favourite hidden spots in your city or your crazy theories on a TV series you love.

You can find some of our handpicked articles written using the post editor here, including an article on opera for children and a review on a concert by music group Lamb, written my members of the CircleMe team.

Leave your mark on CircleMe today!

Makers, Developers, Dreamers… Make something amazing with the CircleMe API!

At CircleMe we’ve always strived to help users make the most of their interests and today we’re taking a big step forward opening the CircleMe API.

Opening our API we aim to create an ecosystem around the interests of thousands of Circlers. For instance, a news website could personalize the information it displays according to users’ interests, which will benefit CircleMe users as well as the website.

If you think you can make your project better using CircleMe’s API, we want to hear from you! You can find all the details about our API here and also contact us at partnerships [at] circleme [dot] com to express your interest or ask any questions you might have. This is an early release and partner’s feedback will help us shape its evolution.

CircleMe users should not worry: We use the standard OAuth2, which means interests are only available to sites which you eplicitly authorise. If you’re a Circler and have any questions about how we protect your data, please contact us at support [at] circleme [dot] com

To spice things up a bit for the Christmas season, we thought of launching a couple of fun competitions among our Circlers. The races start NOW!

The reason? Mostly for the fun of it, but also certainly to have our Circlers interact more with each other and to increase our community of users on CircleMe. Hence, we launch just now a couple of “races” among our users and we will rank in real-time (1) the most trusted users [TRUSTERS], and (2) the users who invite the highest number of their friends on CircleMe [INVITES] (all measurements will start from the beginning of this month, for fairness).

Then, for the best performers, we will get some little treats: nothing fancy, but we’ll do our best. We know you were getting used by our gifts sent over the mail during the holidays, so we had to do something this year too. We had Blackberry very kindly provide us with few phones Z10 and Z30 (they are quite cool and powerful) to give away and then we have some CircleMe t-shirts, stickers and gadgets. I know, nothing huge, but still a good treat for very limited effort, don’t you think?

So, competition is on! See immediately how you rank on the list, and what you need to do to get to the top of it:

• TRUSTERS Competition
• INVITES Competition

#bewhatyoulike and get up those ranks! 😉

Since you guys are having lots of fun with our trivia games, today we bring you five new trivia quizzes to complete.

Four of them are dedicated to some of the countries where most Circlers are from: USA, UK, France and Italy.

One extra quiz is dedicated to famous art masterpieces: http://www.circleme.com/trivia/art-masterpieces

We hope you have a blast and show the world you are the real expert of these passions. 🙂

Now: (1) do the trivia, (2) score well, and (3) challenge your friends!

Start the games now!  http://www.circleme.com/trivia

#bewhatyoulike