All roads lead to the CircleMe meet up in Rome

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After the great success of the meet ups in London and Milan, we decided to say ‘Hi’ to our users in Rome! We love these occasions as it gives us a chance to chat to lots of different Circlers, get some great feedback, and give out some T shirts of course 🙂

Casa Del Jazz

The venue for the meet up, the Casa Del Jazz, Rome

The venue we met at was the brilliant Casa Del Jazz, everyone started to meet up at 7pm and we got talking about the site, about the venue, about anything! One CircleMe user was so excited about the event that he arrived half an hour early! As well as this, 2 of our lovely users drove all the way from Pisa to attend, which is over a 3 hour drive!

CircleMe users at the Rome meet up

As you can see, everyone had a great time!

CircleMe Users

CircleMe users enjoying the Rome meet up

This was a great chance for users to meet some of the other members of CircleMe, and we certainly enjoyed chatting with everyone. Our CEO Giuseppe D’Antonio and office manager Elena Ciampella helped organize the event, so they had the pleasure of handing out T shirts! Along with the immensely popular CircleMe T shirts, we also had some fantastic goody bags to give out from JazzIt, whom we arranged the meet up with. Every CircleMe user who turned up got a magazine and a cool jazz CD, thanks guys! After the meet up we went on to get something to eat, eventually saying ‘Goodbye’ around 2am!

Elena hands out a T Shirt

Elena handing out T shirts : – )

We are all looking forward to the Paris meet up on the 18th! In the future we are looking to organise meet ups based around your likes, can you guess the theme of this one? Yup, it was jazz music! Would you like a CircleMe meet up near where you live? Well why not get in touch and let us know? As usual, you can let us know by commenting on this post, or by contacting us through our Twitter account or Facebook page!

Introducing the new activity page!

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By now you might already know the drill: When the CircleMe team goes silent, it means we’re working hard at improving CircleMe and launching new features, and now is one of those times! We’ve really excited to announce the launch of the new activity page!

For a while now we have wanted a way to show you all the great activity related to your likes as well as the activity of your trusted friends. Well, today we released the brand new activity page, and it has some great new features we really hope you’ll enjoy.

Brand new visual style

The new activity page makes it easier than ever for you to discover new likes and users on the site. Now we show you a cascade of interesting content, meaning that CircleMe looks better than ever. We also group activity stories together under each item, meaning that the site is easier to read than ever before, and you can now choose the category of the items for which you want to follow the activity.

The new activity page shows activity in the cascade-style

The new “Everyone’s” Feed

One of the most exciting new features of the new activity page is this very special feed of everything that is happening on CircleMe. Now by clicking on the “Everyone’s” option you will be able to see updates from every user. You will also be able to select the category of the latest activity you want to follow. Although we just launched this feature, we are already finding this a great way to discover new likes! 🙂

You can now check the latest activity on CircleMe by all users on all items! And filter by category : – )

You might have seen this cascade of likes on our homepage… now you can also access it when you are logged in, and like new things and instantly mark them as To Do’s.

You can now access the latest likes even when you’re logged in!

Social updates box

Another great new feature is this new box to the left of the activity page. We now show you some users you might want to trust, along with who your existing friends are trusting. This makes it really easy to find interesting new users on CircleMe.

Social Activity Box

We really hope this changes help you have a better CircleMe experience and, as per usual, if you have any feedback, suggestions or comments, do not hesitate to comment on this blog, contact us on Twitter or Facebook or send us an email to info@circleme.com 🙂

What a day! We were on Smashing Magazine and won the AppCircus London!

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Yesterday was a great day for CircleMe as we were featured on Smashing Magazine and won the Appcircus London edition, which qualifies us for the Mobile Premier Awards taking place in Barcelona during the Mobile World Congress 2013!

We are featured on Smashing Magazine

Yesterday afternoon we found out that we were featured by the popular (probably the most popular!) graphic design blog Smashingmagazine as an example of good design:

CircleMe on SmashingMagazine

We won the Appcircus London edition

Later on, our founder Erik Lumer was presenting our CircleMe app at the AppCircus, taking place in the Google Campus London. We were one of the lucky 10 Apps that were pre-selected and we were lucky enough to take the first place, which made us the best app in London according to AppCircus’ judges!

The judges were:

  • Simon Cross, Engineer, Facebook London.
  • Paul Sawers, Apps & Media Editor at The Next Web.
  • Daniel Appelquist, Head of Product Management for BlueVia.
  • Limvirak Chea, Director Business Development Europe & Middle East, InMobi.
  • Sid Thekkepat, Associate of m8 Capital.

AppCircus in Google Campus, image by https://twitter.com/#!/mtrends

Erik Lumer at Appcircus London, image by https://twitter.com/#!/ketan

Erik only had few minutes, but we recorded this (rather “shaky”) video in case you were curious to check it out!

There were some amazing apps presenting. These were the 10 apps selected by the judges:

Free first aid app bringing life-saving skills into your hands, featuring animated content, interactive quizzes, and videos. Check out their  video.

CircleMe is the social network that connects you to the things you love and to people around the world who share your interests. Demo video

Pilot Uni PPL is the app that makes you a real pilot. Pilot Uni interactively walks you through all essential scenarios needed to fly a  small aircraft.Demo Video

The app assesses your vision through a series of simple tests tailored by professional opticians and makes recommendations based on your results. More info here

Explore the Curzon Cinema for memories, from snogging in the back row, to the bomb that exploded outside the front entrance in 1941, to celebrate their centenary this year. Videohere

Shhmooze helps you make smart connections so you can have fantastic face-to-face meetings. Video here

Social media mobile apps for engaging the public with police. 500 officers & staff use the app for quick real time updates, compare police activities with monthly crime etc- more info here

A Midsummer Night’s Dream follows the plot of the original play closely but with a short rhyming text. Fully interactive, illustrations, lots of puzzles and riddles, bilingual English/Spanish, voice recording and much more…

Learn the words: Animals is developed under the educational concept of ‘learning by doing’ with the purpose to encouraging a creative play. More here

Read. Write. Share. Movellas is a social community platform for young readers and writers. Movellas works on  iOS and Android, with 1000s of free stories to be discovered. Watch the video here

So overall, it was a great day which motivates us to keep on working hard on CircleMe! Hopefully more blog entries like this coming soon 🙂

Announcing CircleMe User Meet-ups in Rome and Paris!

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If you follow this blog, you’ll know that some months ago, we organized two great CircleMe users’ meetups. The first one took place near our offices in London, whereas the second took place in our HQ in Milan. As these were great fun and we really enjoyed meeting our users, we’ve decided to organize two more CircleMe users’ meetups in two beautiful cities: Rome and Paris!

First CircleMe meetup in London

Rome

You can read all about the Rome meet-up here!

When we organised the meet-up in Milan, we realised that many of our users in Rome would have loved to attend, but it was too far 😦 So, we decided to organize a meet-up for them too! The meet-up in Rome will take place on the 9th of July. Are you interestested? Please email elena@cascaad.com to get the address of the place where we’ll be meeting!

Paris

After the UK and Italy, France will be the third destination for our CircleMe meet-up! And having one of our biggest communities in France, we’re sure it will be a great success! This meet-up will take place in Paris on the 18th of July, 6:00 pm at:

19, avenue Victoria 75001 Paris
métro Châtelet (sortie Théâtre du Châtelet)

Why do we organise these meet-ups?

When we work on improving CircleMe, we don’t think about numbers: We work hard to create something great for people like you. For this reason, getting to know our real users is very important to us: We want to learn how you think we could improve CircleMe, but also get to know who our users are, which means that we might end up talking about anything like music, sports, politics… or anything you are passionate about! Obviously, there is no fee to attend the meet-up or anything like that! In fact, the earlier you join us, the more likely we’ll treat you to a drink 😉

If you are near Rome and Paris during those dates, please join us! It will be real fun!!

The CircleMe team is hiring!

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That’s right! The CircleMe team is looking for no less than 3 talented individuals to join the CircleMe team as we work hard to make CircleMe more awesome! Would you like to be part of this growing team? Don’t hesitate to apply!

The open positions:

Web Front-End Engineer

Unsurprisingly, CircleMe is not built magically but it requires a lot of talent, passion and hard work! We are looking for a talented web front-end engineer to evolve our CircleMe web application. If it sounds like the right challenge for you, get ready to enjoy “la bella Start-up vita” in CircleMe’s headquarters in Milano, Italy. We work 100% in English, so no need to worry about speaking Italian! (Besides “Café”, “Birra”, “Bistecca” and so on 😉

Find more about this position here

This position is based in Milan, Italy

Summer Marketing Intern

What could be better than interning for a cool and growing Social Network that connects people to the things they care about? Join the CircleMe team in our cool offices in London’s TechHub, in Google Campus, where you’ll gain working experience in Social Media, email marketing and more!

Find more about this position here

This position is based in London, UK

Junior Content Manager

People love collecting and discovering new likes on CircleMe, but hey! It takes a lot of time and dedication to make sure the content on our site is up to the standard our users deserve when they collect and discover. If you’re passionate about content and would love to help us enchant our users with great content, this sounds like the right position for you!

Find more about this position here

This position is based in Milan, Italy

And do not forget that you can always find all our job opportunities here

Visit the CircleMe team tomorrow in Brescia and Luxembourg!

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Dear Circlers!

Tomorrow, 19th of June, will be a busy day for the CircleMe team as we’ll be attending two different events in different parts of Europe 🙂

Our CEO Giuseppe D’Antonio will be speaking about CircleMe and the creation of a social brand at the Pane, Web e Salame event. This event will take place in Brescia at 15:20 CET time.

A bit earlier, our Marketing Manager Javier Galán will be speaking about CircleMe at the ICT Spring Europe in Luxembourg at 13:30 CET time.

So if you are near Brescia or Luxembourg and are attending any of these events, do not hesitate to let us know and pop by to say hi and let us grab you a coffee! You can find Giuseppe at @giudantonio and Javier at @javiergalan

We will update our blog with future speaking events, but do not hesitate to also find us on Facebook or Twitter for the latest news and updates!

Updated iPhone app

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Dear Circler,

As you’ll expect, the CircleMe team has been working hard to bring you yet another new improvement: We just released the latest version of our iPhone app! What are the changes that the new iPhone app brings?

  •  Notification Box: You can now track all the activities related to your account directly from the top bar. If you receive a notification, a number will appear showing the number of notifications you have on CircleMe. Once you tap on the “m”, these notifications will be shown

    CircleMe notifications

  • Direct Person-to-Person Suggestions: That’s right, you can now send suggestions to other CircleMe users as well to friends who are not on CircleMe yet!
  • Delete Items from Profile: You no longer need to visit the web version of CircleMe to be able to remove unwanted items from your profile

    Deleting Items from the CircleMe app

  • Social Tagging of Items: You can now add tags to your favorite likes to help other users discover related items
  • Provide Feedback on the App: Love it? Hate it? Do not hesitate to get in touch with us and let us know how you think we could make CircleMe better for you!
  • Reach Score:Wondering what categories you are most influential in? You can find out by going to your profile and clicking on the “reach” score

    Reach Score on iPhone

  • Various Bug Fixes and Improvements: Many tiny improvements that as a whole, certainly deserve to be mentioned 😉

We hope you enjoy this update and that it makes your CircleMe experience much better! And do not hesitate to let us know if you would like to see specific improvements or new features. You can comment on this blog entry or find us on Twitter or Facebook… CircleOn!

What is Planting?

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So what is Planting?

With the launch of our iPhone app in March, we introduced a cool new feature on our site, “Planting”. Some of the community members wanted to find out more about “Planting” so we decided to write a blog entry and explain more about it.

On CircleMe you can collect all the things you like and discover new ones.  So, we thought that it would be very cool if you could add one of your Likes not just on your profile, but also somewhere in the world. For instance, you might discover the best ice cream ever and want to add it as a Like, but not only on your profile: What about placing the like somewhere in the world? What about placing it where that awesome ice-cream parlor is? And so we decided to create “Plants”: The possibility to place things you like somewhere on the map.

What’s the benefit?

First, you get to collect all those things you liked or found interesting somewhere in the world: Imagine you discovered that amazing ice cream whilst visiting a new city… you wouldn’t like to forget where it is, right? 😉

But also, if you are placing interesting likes, others will be able to discover those (that is, unless you want to mark them as private) which means you can also discover other cool “plants” shared by other CircleMe users related to the things you are passionate about.

But… I don’t have an iPhone! No problem: Planting is also available on the web version of CircleMe where you can not only explore Plants, but add your own ones.

Right, so how do I plant?

We’ve created a quick video tutorial on how to plant that you can find below:

We hope it’s useful for you! Are there any other features you would like a video tutorial for? Please let us know by commenting on this blog entry or our Facebook or Twitter pages. And even better! On our CircleMe page on… CirceMe!

James Cook, The Winner of the Best Profile Contest

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Last month we announced the winners of the Best Profile Contest. James Cook was the winner with few more votes that fellow Circler Marlon Alvarado. Since James lives in London, where CircleMe has an office, he visited us to grab a drink and, well… take home his shiny new iPad : – )

James Cook receives his new iPad

It was a pleasure to get to meet James and we had some fun talking about CircleMe and other things such as the unusual amazing weather in London during those days.

James, run with your iPad before Javier from CircleMe does! ; – )

If you didn’t get to participate in this contest, stay tuned because we might organise more fun contests in the future 🙂 In the meantime, Circle On!

You can now invite your Twitter friends on CircleMe!

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Back in March we asked you on our Facebook page how you preferred to invite your friends to join you on new sites like CircleMe. Well, Twitter was the second most popular result just behind invites via Facebook and ahead of invites via email.

Result of CircleMe Poll on how to invite friends

Well, that’s right! Although just days ago we released the option to find and invite  your Yahoo! Mail contacts on CircleMe, we’ve worked hard on it and from today, you can also invite your Twitter friends to join CircleMe!

Finding Twitter friends on CircleMe

To find this new option, you simply have to go to the “Find people” page. Once you click on Find friends for Twitter, you’ll see a screen where you can select the contacts you want to send the invite to.

Selecting Twitter friends on CircleMe

Once you select the friends you want to add, then you simply have to click on Add. Then you’ll be requested access from Twitter for our Twitter app to send the invites… and voilà! You’ve sent the invites to your friends!

We hope you find this useful! And if there is a service that you think we should add to CircleMe to find and invite new friends, do not hesitate to let us know!