Announcing the winners of the Best Profile Contest

/ CircleMe Team / Leave a comment

On the 12th of April we announced we were starting the best profile contest, a contest in which you could vote the most inspiring profiles on CircleMe. Well, on April the 30th, the contest came to an end and we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve got the top 10 winners who will get some great prizes.

The top user will get a new iPad, the second and third users will get an Apple TV and the rest of the top 10 users will get some fab CircleMe T-Shirts. Wondering who made it to the top 3 places? These are James Cook from the UK, Marlon Alvarado from Guatemala, and Nicolas Lecointre from France!

Below you can find the full top 10 list and the number of votes they received. As you can see, there was a ferocious fight between the top 2 users, with James taking the victory with a difference of only 51 votes!

  1. James, 819 votes
  2. Marlon, 768 votes
  3. Nicolas, 182 votes
  4. Marc, 76 votes
  5. Rodrigo, 57 votes
  6. Karla, 54 votes
  7. Bryan, 38 votes
  8. Allan, 32 votes
  9. Roberto, 28  votes
  10. Dick, 28 votes

From the CircleMe team, we would like to congratulate these top 10 users for their inspiring profiles and we’d like to let them know that we’ll be contacting you shortly to ask for the address where we should send the prizes.

Thanks everyone for participating! We hope you enjoyed the contest and that you are enjoying CircleMe!

The CircleMe Best Profile Contest

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Top 3 prizes in our Best Profile Contest

We’ve been talking for a long time on Facebook and Twitter about the new game we’ve got going on for our Circlers – The Profile Contest – in which you can vote for those profiles you consider the most inspiring due to their interesting likes, To Do’s, background photo, description…

However, we thought it would be nice to right down to all the details and make it easier for you to participate in “the most inspiring profile” contest too. So here we go! Starting with some simple instructions – we’ll give you the right answers that (we hope) will put light to help you better understand how to participate in our contest 🙂

  • For how long does the contest last?

The competition started on the 13th of April and will end on the 30thof this month at 23:59 BST! (UK time!)

  • Who is eligible to participate?

All CircleMe users can participate in the competition (except for the CircleMe Team, naturally). The only requirement is having a Circleme account.

  • Are there any prizes for the winners?

We have some amazing prizes! Including a new iPad for the 1st position, two AppleTVs for 2nd and 3rd spots and a cool CircleMe T-shirt for each user ranked 4th to 10th.

  • How does it work exactly?

So here’s the deal: You need to get as many votes as possible, so get your friends to vote for you by pressing the green “Vote for this profile” button at the top right part of your profile page. A new window-box will appear, asking them how they would like to vote.

  • How many votes can I get?

You can receive a maximum of two votes per day from one person, IF she/he uses both services available – Twitter and Facebook.

  • Can I vote for my own profile?

For sure you must love your profile, since you’re the one who created it, but hey: it would be rather unfair if you could, right? 😉 So nope, it is not possible to vote for your own profile.

  • How do I get to know my current ranking?

You can find your ranking of the contest in real time by accessing circleme.com/contest

We wish you the best of luck in the contest! Go grab those votes that will lead you to these awesome prizes! And don’t forget to vote for those inspiring profiles out there that you think deserve to be amongst the winners! 🙂

Finding friends via Yahoo! Contacts

/ CircleMe Team / 1 Comment

Hi Circlers!

This Monday we’ve got some cool news for those out there who use Yahoo! Mail. As you’ll know, until now you could only invite your friends via Facebook and Gmail. Some days ago we asked our users what their email provider was, and this was the result:

Results of the question about email services

So yes: we worked on it and we’re very happy to announce you can now invite your friends using your Yahoo! Mail account. For this, you need to go to http://circleme.com/users/import and you’ll see the button to invite your contacts on Yahoo! Mail:

Finding friends from Yahoo! Mail

And if you don’t have Yahoo and use Gmail or Facebook, don’t hesitate to get your friends in too! CircleMe is much more fun with friends!

What service would you like us to add next in order to be able to invite friends? Let us know commenting on this blog entry, on Facebook or Twitter!

Users meet-up in Milan

/ CircleMe Team / 1 Comment

Last Friday we organized the first meetup in Milan, Italy and we’ve got to say that it was amazing and it did beat all our expectations. We had some 100 users visiting us, which was amazing for us as we could get some very honest feedback directly from our users.

Our guests started to arrive at around 18:30 to the CircleMe office, with some drinks and nibbles waiting for them. We had some fun and chatted about CircleMe amongst other things. Since we had just released our new video, we projected it and it was our little “Cannes festival” 🙂 If you haven’t seen the video yet, check it out!

One of the things that caught the attention of our guests was the foosball table we have in our office. Obviously, we  had to organize a little foosball table tournament on the night!

However, that wasn’t the only competition of the night, as we organized some games and there was a new iPad as a prize!

Something we would have loved to share was a photo of the cake that the patisserie near our office prepared for us. Unfortunately, it was eaten before we had the chance to take a pic!

Many guests stayed until late and at past midnight, it was time for Circlerella our last guests to return home after a fun day where we learned a lot about our guests.

As a fun note, one of our users managed to get a fun pic: It’s our CEO Giuseppe D’Antonio as Party Cleaning Manager. This pic might one day go viral… And you saw it first on our blog 😉 Oh boy!

We do hope you’ll join us in future meetups. Stay tuned on our Twitter account or Facebook page!

CircleMe’s Best Profile, Announcing our New Video and Last.fm integration

/ CircleMe Team / 1 Comment

You know what happens when we go quiet for some days. that’s right: It means there’s cool stuff to come! We’d hate to disappoint you, so we made our best to add some great new features to CircleMe and surprise you! Take a look at our fresh updates from CircleMe:

The Best Profile Contest

If you wander around on CircleMe it is rather difficult not to stumble on some amazing user profiles. We thought you might enjoy a nice reward for making your profile the “fairest of them all”, so we prepared some nice gadgets and cool CircleMe T-shirts as prizes for the 10 most inspiring profile, ranging from cool CircleMe T-shirts to an iPad (yes, we’d prefer the T-shirt too!). What you need to do is to play cool and share your profile with your friends so that they vote for you. Then lay back and wait for the votes to increase! 😉

Best Profile Ranking on Thursday just after the start of the contest

Our brand NEW CircleMe Video

As you all know, we’ve been working hard these couple of months to make CircleMe the best place to connect with the things you care about and to people who share your passions. Since we want everybody to be able to make the most out of CircleMe, we created a short video explaining the main features of CircleMe, both on the web and on the iPhone app. Turned out really well, don’t you think?

Add your musical likes from Last.fm

We all know how important music is in your lives, right? Here at CircleMe we also think that you’d love bringing all your likes to CircleMe in an easier way. So it was only fair to help you guys out by adding Last.fm to the list of services from which you can import your interests. Ramble on and rock our world!

Now that April’s secrets are revealed, we would love to hear what you think about our latest updates. Feel free to share them with our team! You can share them with us via Twitter, Facebook, as a comment on our blog or email!

The first ever CircleMe meetup!

/ CircleMe Team / 1 Comment

Hi Circlers,

Yesterday we hosted the first ever CircleMe meetup in London and we have to say that it was a great success and that we’re very excited to have met many of our users!

The event took place in Old Street, the “Silicon Roundabout” in London. We met in “Meter”, a new bar just outside the station.

We were meeting at 6PM, and soon enough, some users started to arrive and we started to talk about CircleMe and much more! Soon, there were many of us and we were having a great time.

We gave some cool CircleMe T-shirts to those users who joined us : – )

It was a great occasion for the CircleMe team to get some sincere feedback (we all know drinks foster sincerity 😉 ) and get to hear what works for our users, what doesn’t, and what they would like to see in CircleMe in the future. Certainly, we got a big list with feedback and suggestions to improve both the web version and the mobile app. We’re always on the hunt for new suggestions and feedback, so do not hesitate to share your feedback here or on Facebook or Twitter.

First CircleMe meetup in London. We’re terribly sorry we couldn’t get in the picture to those who left early/arrived late : – (

We continued to have a great time and some 5 hours later, we were still chatting and some even dancing and having a great time.

Some CircleMe users just could’t stop havin fun!

Funnily enough, our launch party coincided with the launch party of another cool service: lightbox. We got talking and sharing ideas : )

Sarp Centel from Lightbox and Giuseppe D’Antonio from CircleMe share some feedback

Overall, this first CircleMe meetup was a great success and we just can’t wait to organize new ones in the near future to get feedback from our users, and not only from the UK! For starters, you can count with a CircleMe users meetup in Milan, Italy, and more should come after that! Stay tuned on our Facebook page and Twitter!

Introducing the CircleMe iPhone app

/ CircleMe Team / Leave a comment

We’ve been talking about our new iPhone app on the blog, Twitter and Facebook pages. However, you might be wondering what it looks like, and more importantly, what’s so cool about it 😉 We’re writing this blog entry to introduce you to the CircleMe iPhone app!

The CircleMe app doesn’t only extend the CircleMe experience onto your mobile, but also allows for some pretty cool uses in real life. It also comes with a unique feature called ‘planting’ that we think will change the way you use CircleMe. If you haven’t downlaoded it yet, you can now by clicking below:

Ok, got your iPhones ready? Here we go!

CircleMe app on iOS

First Steps

As you open the CircleMe app, some screens will quickly explain how to use the CircleMe app. Then, you will be able to log in with your account or create a new one if you’re new to CircleMe (and if so, welcome!)

The Activity Feed

Right, ready to start circling? When you arrive at your activity page you will see the CircleMe activities, which is the equivalent of the Activities section on the web version. Here you will see activities related to the things you like, as well as those related to your friends.

CircleMe App – Activity feed

Navigation

If you want to go to any other section, you simply have to tap on the three horizontal lines on the top left corner and the Menu will appear:

CircleMe App – Menu

CircleMe Profiles

But you will be wondering how your beautiful CircleMe profile looks like on the iPhone, right? Well, we worked hard to make your profile as beautiful on iPhone as on the web version, and this is how it looks:

CircleMe App – Profile View

Yes, the images can be a bit small and become a bit tough to identify the likes that you (or others) added, which is the reason why we added the possibility to change the view so that it is easier to identify the likes.

CircleMe App – Profile View 2

Taking CircleMe into the real life : – )

Now, imagine what this would allow you to do… You know those times when you’ve been in a bookshop… and in front of sooo many things to chose, you just couldn’t remember what was that book you wanted to buy? Well, now with the CircleMe app, you can just bring up your phone, check your To Do’s, and voila!

Using the CircleMe app in the bookstore

You can obviously use this for many other things such as films, songs, etc. Or on a lazy Sunday where you’re wondering what you could do, you could check the many things you wanted to do when you didn’t have time but that you then added as To Do’s on CircleMe.

CircleMe App – To Do’s

Neat, isn’t it? But there is something we think is even cooler than that: What if you wanted to mark items on a map? Yes, we call it “Planting”.

Planting

Why on earth would you want that? Well, you might like pancakes, but what if you had some great pancakes in a cafeteria and you wanted to tell the world about it? You could also leave a comment with the plant such as  “Here you’ll find the best pancakes in London!”. You can think of many ways you could use these “plants”, for instance, you could plant your favorite romantic song on a very romantic spot for your partner to find 😉

iPhone App – Planting

Also, wouldn’t it be cool if you could discover new items as you walk around town? If you like pancakes, wouldn’t it be great if you could be alerted if someone had marked a pancake on the map? Yes, this too is possible with the CircleMe app and the planting feature.

CircleMe App – Explore

Exploring

But there is more to the CircleMe app: you can find new likes in the explore section, whereas on the web version, you will find the trending, most popular and featured likes.

CircleMe App – Explore

Inviting and finding friends on CircleMe

You will also be able to invite your friends from within the app, by clicking on the ‘Who to Trust’ section.

CircleMe App – Who to Trust

Account Settings and Privacy

Finally, you will be able to modify your account settings as well as your privacy settings from the ‘Account’ section.

CircleMe App – Account settings

We hope you enjoy the CircleMe app and if you have any feedback or questions, as per usual, do not hesitate to let us know! You can comment on this blog or find us on Facebook or Twitter

Media coverage round-up of the CircleMe launch and iPhone app!

/ CircleMe Team / 7 Comments

Dear Circlers,

As you will know, just a week ago, CircleMe went from closed to open beta and we released an iPhone app! We are happy to say that we’ve got great reviews from the press, and what is most important for us: good reviews from our users.

Why did we launch publicly? 6 months after starting our private beta, we reached a point where we thought that CircleMe was a great product and ready to be enjoyed by all users (as opposed to the closed beta users!). Therefore, we opened the gates to new users!

However, this does not mean that we will stop innovating and launching cool stuff 🙂 We’ll continue working hard (or even harder!) and make CircleMe more fun, social and innovative.

We’ve compiled some of the articles written about us that you can find below 🙂

Direct URLs to the articles:

TechCrunch by Mike Butcher @mikebutcher

TheNextWeb by Nancy Messieh @nfm

Wired.it by Silvio Gulizia @silviogulizia

Journaldugeek.com by Christelle D. @melhancholy

Genbeta by Guillermo Julian @gjulianm

TechTudo by Thiago Barros @tbarros89

isole24ore by Luca Tremolada @lucatremolada

Betakit by Darrel Etherington @drizzled

Fredzone by Fred @fredzone

Antyweb by Kamil Mizera @kamilmizera

Geekissimo by Andrea Guida @naqern

Bnext by Anon.

Fanpage by Claudio Gagliardini @cla_gagliardini

CircleMe needs your vote!

/ CircleMe Team / Leave a comment

Hi CircleMe’rs,

That’s right, we need your vote! We found out that were amongst the top 150 companies to be nominated for Top European Start-up at the London Web Summit (People’s Choice).

We’re in the top 9 so far and voting ends on Wednesday the 14th, so we can do it 🙂 If you want to support it, you can vote for us here: http://www.websummit.net/nominee/vote/ (it only takes one click and no registration is required!)

On behalf of the CircleMe team, many thanks!

Making what works… well, better: Announcing the Activity Page & Endless Scroll!

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They say if something works, why break it? Well, we disagree and think that if something works, why not break it and make it even better? We launched the Activity Board some weeks ago and we got some great positive feedback. The Activity board allows you to easily keep track of the activity related to your interests as well as the activity of your friends.

However, that is not our only new feature this week: we also implemented a endless scroll so that it is easier to navigate likes!

The new Activity Page

Yes! We decided to take that great (but perhaps hidden) feature and create a page for it on it’s own. So what is new in the Activity Page?

Out with the old…

In with the new!

The new Activity Page will allow you to easily read updates about the things you care about. And in case there are 2 or more activities for an item, you can easily click on the icon of the second person to see the activity!

Endless scroll

However, that is not all! We’ve also changed the different pages to show all your likes and to dos and now once you reach the bottom of the page more items will be loaded!

Endless Scroll

We hope you enjoy these new features and do not hesitate to leave your feedback! As usual, you can comment on this entry, on our Facebook fan page or on Twitter.