Transcript: BlueDot, Share your favorite sites with your friends

This transcript is from a PodTech.net podcast at:
http://www.podtech.net/home/technology/1382/bluedot-share-your-favorite-sites-with-your-friends

Guest: Kabir Shahani - BlueDot
Guest: Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
Host: Editor

Editor
Who are you guys?

Kabir Shahani - BlueDot
Sir, my name is Kabir Shahani; I'm the dot connector of BlueDot.

Editor
Yeah.

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
My name is Mohit Srivastava. I'm the co-founder.

Editor
Oh, of BlueDot and we are here in Seattle. So, visiting all the cool start ups. You guys are the coolest of the cool because you are on the top of TechCrunch, right?

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
Yeah, it's a good day for us today.

Editor
So, what is BlueDot? What do you guys do?

Kabir Shahani - BlueDot
Yeah, BlueDot is a way for you to stay in touch with your friends and with your affiliations in a really easy way, in a really meaningful way. It's a way to stay in touch around real pieces of content.

Editor
And so what is similar to the part that I've seen BlueDot? What is similar to BlueDot?

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
So, the promise of BlueDot is, as you're browsing the web, there's all this social sections in the web that let friends connect and like del.icio.us is one of them but they're more of a book marking site and then there's MySpace which is more of a social site and we're really a place so as you're browsing the web, you see something interesting like a piece of news or you see an event you want to go to on a weekend. Well, the BlueDot system wants you to press the 'Dot This' button in your browser, you're now commencing, hey going to check out this hike this weekend or listen to this album, last night it was really good and share it with your community of friends. So, at any given point during the day I can go to my BlueDot page and see the things that my friends are up to. I can see the news they are reading, I can see maybe -- like right here I can look and looks like my friend Deb is looking at Bridal Veils so I can add a comment and ask her, so she's looking at a Bridal Veils Falls which is hiking.

So, I actually just happen to use that example, but she really is looking to is hike. It sounds great, I really need to go on a hike soon and just add a comment and so we're sort of engaged in a dialogue around the content that she is creating and finding on the web. So, we just found it as a really good way for friends to (ph) stay in touch and to see each what each other are up to. One of the innovations that we have as a company is a full permissions model so we kind of realize that I don't really want to share everything I'm looking at with the entire world and I may not want to share it with everybody on my buddy list either. So, it let's you create custom groups of friends, so you can share a particular piece of content which are smaller than groups of people. So, I've a group for just my co-workers, I have a group for just my family, so if there's something related to work I can share it with only work and nobody else can see it.

Editor
Why was the company started? What was the idea you had--?

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
We've talked about that.

Kabir Shahani - BlueDot
Yeah, Kabir described it really well. Like I have a sister and we're very close. Like, we were on the phone all the time, we IM each other all the time and we also email each other but I still felt I didn't really know as much about her as I wanted to, I wasn't really as close as I wanted to and she reads a lot of books, she reads a lot of news articles and we thought, lets build a company around the way for close people to stay in touch much better. And I've discovered through BlueDot, all the news articles she is reading in the New York Times, all the books she is reading and we really have become closer.

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
Yeah, one of the examples that I like to give is, one of my good friends from college who I've known for 10 years, he was actually my roommate in college, he's is an active BlueDot user and about a few months ago I started seeing all these dots (Inaudible) on the World Cup and as I looked at his profile, I see 13 dots on the World Cup and I didn't even know he liked soccer. So, it was somebody that I lived with and I knew really well but I had no idea they had this particular interest that I may even have myself.

Editor
Where did you guys come out with idea of BlueDot?

Kabir Shahani - BlueDot
Oh, finding names and finding ideas for how to communicate (Inaudible).

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
Well there're at least two reasons and before the third one sense, but the first reason was, if you look at the earth from space, it looks like a small BlueDot, we're obviously about making the world feel like a smaller place and then the second reason is we wanted BlueDot to be really, really simple and we thought what's something really simple that comes to mind and a 'dot' was the simplest possible UI we could think of, so we probably saw the double meaning there of having a dot as a really simple way to create content with one click of the mouse.

Editor
What's your traffic like? What is the growth of the company like (Inaudible) ten people working behind me here -- you're not just a couple of kids in a school (Inaudible) trying to come up with an idea.

Kabir Shahani - BlueDot
Yeah, last month we had about 120,000 people coming to site and we have a percentage of those people who are registered users that are actually creating content. The way that we've designed the system is you have to be registered in order to create content in the system but you don't have to be registered to view content. So, that's one of really interesting (Inaudible) about our partnership strategy is, not only can you browse entire sites and see dots that are public, meaning if I publish a dot that I say anybody can see then you can come to my BlueDot page and see it without being a registered user. But we've also kind of innovated an authoring where now with our partnership program, we're letting users create content without being registered on our system. So, all you have to do is if you are on somebody's blog that has a 'Dot This' button or you're on a partner's website that has a 'Dot This' button, you press 'Dot This', you can actually create a dot the way you can a user and turn a node, add some tags, give it a subject; or we order like the subject for you and all you have to do is give us your email address and the friends that you want to share it with and you've created a dot already. And later, we message you to come back and register for the account if you want to.

Editor
Interesting, how do I get a BlueDot thing on my blog?

Kabir Shahani - BlueDot
Just go to -- I can send you the link right now; all I have to do is go to my account and here it says 'Add Dot This' to your website and you can choose from 16 by 16 icon, there's a white button that we have or a blue button. So, we'll get you set up before you to take off today.

Editor
Now, here it sounds like you are little bit similar to Digg, can you compare it to that?

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
Yeah, I think what's interesting about Digg is, they're really -- the value of Digg is to come and get articles from the entire Internet community. We're really not about the entire Internet community though we have a view of everybody's dots; we are really more about your friends. So, the prime thing when I log into BlueDot, and I think I talked to you about this last time which is when I called the Prime WaterFront Real Estate, is your friends and so here I see the most recent dot from each of my friends. This isn't the main focus of BlueDot as what your friends are seeing on the web, not what the entire world is seeing. So, yeah, with our partnership strategy the way that we're describing it to our partners is, you know with the Digg 'This Button', it's more about getting onto the front page of Digg and getting that big burst of traffic and getting really become popular. We're not about having that one off popularity place; we are more about being a multiplier. So, if you think about for every visitor of your blog, or every visitor of your website, if they have 10 friends or 20 friends or 30 friends and they choose to press a Dot This button, that's increasing your exposure by 10x or 20x or 30x because it makes that visible to that visitors in entire social network.

Editor
Interesting, and how are you guys going to make money out of this?

Kabir Shahani - BlueDot
That's the big question.

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
Oh yeah oh yeah, well we -- as you've noticed from our site already, we already have hooked up some advertising. So we pull ads based on what your friends have been dotting or what you've been dotting and that's one source of revenue for us. Also, lots of dots here come from e-commerce site so for example, if you look at a dot from Amazon, -- you are seeing everything on Amazon rain forest. If you look at a dot from Amazon you automatically include the shopping cart icon here. So we're hook into e-commerce sites affiliate programs as well.

Editor
Okay. So, what's the most surprising thing you've learned from starting…

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
We should just give our own answers but for me, I've learned, discovered lots of passions my friends had, I never knew about, like Kabir said earlier, like I never knew my sister was into graphic novels, I had no idea whatsoever. I've another friend who is a great drinking buddy of mine and I just thought he is a great drinking buddy but I discovered he is a really, really smart guy into politics and I had know idea before I…

Editor
You don't talk about politics over beers?

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
It's kind of funny, when you meet people in real life you get one side of them and you know sometimes there's sometimes barriers to really get to know somebody. On BlueDot when someone starts dotting something you really discovered interest about them and then you engage in conversation and really get to understand someone a lot better.

Editor
Very cool. Is there an API or a developer story or anything you guys want to talk to the geeks in the (Inaudible)?

Kabir Shahani - BlueDot
Yeah, there is. So, if you go to the bottom of the page, there is a developer's link here, and we have a SOAP API and a REST API, you can use.

Editor
And would I use that if I'm a geek?

Kabir Shahani - BlueDot
Well, I'm talking that.

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
Yeah, as you recommend the SOAP API, we have the REST API there if you already have tools built on top of del.icio.us you can pretty easily port them to BlueDot but I do recommend the REST API and there's a whole set of tools you can use to build solutions on top of SOAP very quickly. I personally recommend VisualStudio.NET if you want to get started really quickly, you just point it to a URL on our site and you automatically get a nice API library built for you.

Kabir Shahani - BlueDot
Yeah, couple of the other cool things that we'd might want to just highlight for you too is the authoring technology that Derek the man over there built, right there its right there so when you go to let's go to CNN.

Editor
In what language does (Inaudible), so was this all built in .NET or it was built in (Inaudible)?

Kabir Shahani - BlueDot
We're pretty agnostic about the technology we use, we put the right technology for the right part of our system. So, our myth here is .NET but our front end is pretty JavaScript heavy, you know we started doing this before the big Ajax frame but its pretty JavaScript heavy and our backend users from proprietary technology on top of LINUX.

Editor
Okay. So, you guys have a lot of former Microsoft (Inaudible) here right?

Kabir Shahani - BlueDot
Yeah, so we have Chris, Chris, Mohit and Ross all worked at Microsoft. Jigna was at Amazon, Derek was at Loudeye, I was at Avenod (ph) and our advisory board is primarily all former Microsoft.

Editor
Yeah, you have some big names too, (Inaudible) what 'z' they call him?

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
Smartz (ph).

Editor
He's left Microsoft didn't he, he retired after 25 years.

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
Twenty-five years and we were one of the…

Editor
The only guys working there (Inaudible) were Gates and Balmer.

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
That's right, no, it was not Gates and Balmer and its cool. One of the first things he did, was come and advice BlueDot and there was Mike Koss, Robert McLaws Richard Fade, I mean we have a former SVPS StarBuck Tom Valencia. He is also an advisor of the company. So, it's really cool to get that cross section and also very talented technologists and business people.

Kabir Shahani - BlueDot
(Inaudible) me a little bit about the start up community drive, we were hanging out -- which café?

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
Umbria, Café Umbria.

Kabir Shahani - BlueDot
Café Umbria I mean we kept getting interrupted by people who kept coming by, going hey I know you. But there is this whole networking community of money and advisors and technical talent that came through Microsoft's (Inaudible).

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
There's a great energy in this neighborhood, it's definitely a start up energy and its not just technology people actually like -- we're very fortunate to have some branding experts helping aside as well.

Kabir Shahani - BlueDot
Yeah and actually right on the other (Inaudible) guys who do the History Channel's website.

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
Oh really.

Kabir Shahani - BlueDot
Oh yeah, I just met them down there.

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
Oh that's awesome.

Kabir Shahani - BlueDot
They might be (Inaudible) just around the other side of the wall.

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
Very cool.

Kabir Shahani - BlueDot
Yeah, that's interesting with intersection of people together that causes lots of fun ideas to come to us.

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
Oh yeah, that's cool.

Editor
(Inaudible) section know about BlueDot?

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
Yeah, there are a couple of things I want to show you on the product. So, I was talking about the authoring that Derek put together with the whole team support. And basically what we did was, we didn't really wanted to go whole popup route so if you pressed 'Dot This', it puts this layer on the page so this is not a popup, this is just a layer on top of the page and we (Inaudible) an image for you and you can choose just like a different image if you like. We code some tags from the underlying page on a popular subject and suggests some tags for you. So, here I can just enter a little note that says looks like some cool stuff in Japan and then lets say I wanted to share this with not everyone on the whole world, but I can choose to share it with just my friends, I can make it a private offer just to myself or any of the custom groups I created.

So, I'll share this with just the people that work at BlueDot so I have BD crew group that's only the people that work here, I had publish and there it's visible to all of them. And if we go back to BlueDot, here's the view of the dot that we see. Cool, so we get this (Inaudible) you saw it took me no time to create that (Inaudible) stop this and publish. Added a little comment took a (Inaudible) I explained it. Then here you've got the subject that we created, the groups that I'm sharing it with, the comment that I wrote, the text from the page and my friends can now come and add a comment to it. So, if I refresh my page likely I'll see comments that my friends have been adding since I've dotted it.

Editor
And this is friends only in that group?

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
In that group, exactly because they are the only ones that can see it. So, if I go down here like I actually have been dying to receive these comments. I've got five new comments.

Editor
So, I could start a Scoble Show group, and anybody who joins that Scoble Show group, can come in and leave stuff just for Scoble showers.

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
Yeah, if you wanted to start a Scoble Show group or if you just wanted to create a Scoble Show account, so it is one cool thing that we did because we all love Ze Frank's video blog as well, so if we go to the show of Ze Frank.

Editor
And we could Ze --

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
Ze?

Editor
I was talking to him on the phone yesterday and he corrected me, he says 'Ze'

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
Oh okay, and Ze sounds good to know -- we actually setup a -- we have a feature called Auto Dotting so if you have a blog, anytime you create a blog entry, it will create a dot in BlueDot for you and link back to your blog. So, we set it up on the Ze Frank show and here it says -- we wanted this is not actually Ze Frank this is a viewer who wants to watch a show everyday. And so people who've joined the group for the show of Ze Frank and we get this view of the most of his recent show every time he creates one. So we can add comments on this.

Editor
I just want 12 people in his group, I've got it (Inaudible) and by the time this video gets out that's when I'm going blog just the group.

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
That's great, yeah. So we should create -- it would be great you know when we're down with the show to create a Scobleizer group or a profile for you and you can dot things you're seeing on the web and if you want to dot just to the people that watch your show, they can come in, add comments on it.

Editor
Oh that's cool.

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
Yeah, it's very interesting.

Editor
This is really interesting because now I can see where I'm going to use this for a lot of things because I can build small groups and share it with those groups. It's almost like an RSS feed for I know that you are subscribing, so I can push out to specific people. From my RSS feed, my blog is for everybody and that's interesting.

Kabir Shahani - BlueDot
Now that's exactly what it's about. Like I share stuff with our office here that I probably wouldn't share with the entire world, so that's exactly what it's about.

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
Yeah, and we also kind of - we'd like you see the new things. So, one of the things like right now since we've been taping, I've been dying to know what new comments I have, they are telling me I have five new comments, I can click on that and see like, oh I dotted the TechCrunch article we had and here, all my friends are commenting on it.

Editor
Do you make an RSS feed for each group by the way?

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
We make an RSS feed for each user. So, every user has an RSS feed so I could give you the address of my RSS feed and lets not only use our API to help build applications but also you can put it through RSS reader and just get the dots that I'm creating as I'm creating them.

Editor
So, if I want to watch what happens in the Ze Frank BlueDot group, can I subscribe to (Inaudible)?

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
Yeah, because it is a (Inaudible).

Editor
I don't want to visit the website and keep checking at something to just come on.

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
Yeah, exactly you can subscribe to that page the user the show with Ze Frank.

Editor
I've asked (Inaudible).

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
Yeah, we've got a company meeting starting, this is Mike Koss, as I mentioned it to you earlier.

Editor
Hey how are you doing, you were there originally in (Inaudible) right?

Mike
I worked on Excel; I started Microsoft in '83.

Editor
You don't have a mike (Inaudible).

Kabir Shahani - BlueDot
So, that's Steve (Inaudible).

Speaker
(Inaudible) don't want to show the phone numbers.

Editor
Actually his phone number is on Google itself. Actually, I memorized his phone number 15 years ago and it's the same phone number and usually I talk about that, well that's a cool card, I'm going to get one. I'm actually interviewing him tonight at the University of Washington.

Speaker
Oh hi, just walk in the office and hello camera. Yeah, well I watch a lot of Channel 9 so yeah. (Inaudible) and you want me to look at you, right? So, I started Microsoft in '83 and I was working on the original Mac team; working on Mac applications, and so worked on Excel - Excel 1.0 and then I started the Outlook Development team and then worked on SharePoint and then little bit on MSN and then retired in 2002 from Microsoft and got bored with that and got sucked into BlueDot.

Editor
Very cool -- all those products are favorites of mine, I am just happy to (Inaudible).

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
Thank you. Most people tell me that they really like Excel, but I get a lot of complaints about Outlook but…

Editor
Yeah, but when I fly on planes I see Outlook used more. So, Outlook probably had bigger impact on the world in terms of usage, that proves it.

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
Yeah, most people like, the number of geeks love Excel (Voice Overlap).

Editor
(Voice Overlap) plan about so much because they actually had to spend time in a program so much. I thought some of the eccentricities…

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
Yes, it does.

Editor
Copy and paste behaves differently on it and any other (Voice Overlap) -- is that you?

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
No, that's Doug Klunder - Doug Klunder was like, the main developer on Excel and that was just the way he thought it should work and it's kind of stayed that way.

Kabir Shahani - BlueDot
That's sort of, I like doing this because software is a expression of your mind, right?

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
Yes, your ideas are being cycled through millions of times per second on computers all over the world, it essentially...

Editor
So, how did you get involved with this group of people?

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
Well, when I retired from Microsoft, I still wanted to stay involved in the computer industry, and so I joined a group here in Seattle, called the 'Alliance of Angels', which was kind of an angel organization, and I started talking to more and more companies, I got invested in a few local startup companies. But actually I didn't meet BlueDot through that, I met BlueDot through a friend Rara Morlan (ph), he introduced me to these guys and I found out pretty quickly and I just started meeting with the (Inaudible) advisor and invested with them and I kind of, started working a day a week, two days a week and then finally in May, I started full-time every sixth day, getting sucked in.

Editor
Can you stay on a beach and go a certain area and (Voice Overlap)?

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
I like doing that stuff; I love wake Surfing and doing other kinds of things like that, but this is really cool too.

Editor
Tell me a little bit about the Angel Network here in Seattle, because that's very interesting and it expresses itself, like we were just hanging out (ph), right? All sorts of people were coming by and…

Kabir Shahani - BlueDot
Yeah, this area in Seattle is kind of cool, I mean, we have this startup police (ph) that are recruiting things; I don't know if you talked about that? Five startups from around this area got together and said, hey -- Red Fin actually proposed it and got a bunch of people together and we had a huge turnout, and lots of people were interested in what's going in startups around here, and kind of recruiting fare and it was a blast talking to people. But the Angel -- I mean, obviously compared to the bay area, Seattle just kind of has this nascent VC community and it's a lot smaller here, and the Angel community I think is also a lot smaller but I think…

Editor
It's very significant.

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
It's significant. Yeah, I think there're more and more people…

Editor
It's not one or two companies; there is a group of companies here which are doing interesting work.

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
Right, I mean, there is a lot of like, Angel organizations, there is probably four or five big ones here in Seattle and so I think its something Seattle is growing into…

Editor
So, BlueDot, what's the coolest thing -- what the thing you show up to people and say this is so cool?

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
Well, to me the experience was, staying connected with my friends actually was really interesting, and when I first started the company, roaming bookmarks, kind of interesting I had like 30 in my browser, I kept a (ph) backup saved them online in Rome -- big deal. That's not really the point behind BlueDot. I had maybe 30 bookmarks in my browser; I have over 2,500 dots on BlueDot over a period of a year. So, its really kind of history of your life, what things you are interested in, and be able to kind of, mind your own brain, go back into the past and find things that you remember that were important to you before. But, the biggest…

Editor
(Inaudible) BlueDot group.

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
The BlueDot group?

Editor
It's public I mean?

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
Well, I mean the…

Editor
That (Voice Overlap) to your group, right?

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
You can see -- most of my dots are public; I'm kind of an open book. I publish a few things about competitors within the workplace here but most of them are pretty open. And I like a mixture of funny videos and kind of technical stuff too; but I had a high school friend in Texas who was an early Beta customer and he was the kind of guy who I would send email once a year, we were really close in high school -- and he is a great guy, really funny. And he joined BlueDot and all of a sudden we're staying in touch -- just kind of informally everyday, I get to see a little bit of what he is finding interesting and he is kind of crazy, he has got really interesting dots. His name is Brad on BlueDot. You look at that his dots are pretty cool.

Editor
What's your user name (Inaudible)?

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
My user name is Mike.

Editor
Mike - just Mike?

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
Just Mike.

Kabir Shahani - BlueDot
And Mike (Inaudible) probably, what's your name?

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
He has got TechCrunch, so that's okay. (Inaudible) our systems. Yeah, Mike Atherton (ph) is using BlueDot every week, so that's pretty cool. He doesn't talk about it too much; I was a future web apps...

Kabir Shahani - BlueDot
You are on there right now, so...

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
That's cool; that's great. I just heard that this morning, like, oh great. When I -- future of web apps, he talked about us on stage. I think it was us, he said, I don't use del.icio.us anymore, I found something I like a lot better, and then he didn't say her name. So, bluedot.us.

Kabir Shahani - BlueDot
I found a silent gesture in -- Steve Gillmor's was (Inaudible) and actually like ours is (ph) more just because (Inaudible) I go, what?

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
What is it, yeah.

Editor
Michael did in fact, he told me that it is us. He did say it.

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
That's good.

Editor
I'll ask Mike about that, why he doesn't give you guys a better figure (ph) out of it. So, anything else we should know about the community here with -- or BlueDot?

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
I think BlueDot is a very great way to stay in touch with your friends and to learn more about your friends, so it's that kind of thing as well, and we are a great kind of focused team here, 10 people in the office, and we would turn the cycles pretty quickly; like, every month we have a pretty significant release, it's a different -- when I was at Microsoft, we were used to three year releases in office. Yeah, that was fast.

Kabir Shahani - BlueDot
But, I was on the Longhorn team and it still hasn't been shipped and I (Inaudible) performance.

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
So, it's pretty kind of a culture shock for me coming -- stepping in here and say, okay, let's talk about features and two weeks later they are all written and we are doing stress testing and then deploying a week later, so its pretty cool - very immediate stuff. So, come back to BlueDot often and you'll see lots of cool new stuff out of the company I think.

Editor
Well, thank you, it's been…

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
All right, great meeting you. Thank you.

Kabir Shahani - BlueDot
There's one last thing we wanted to show you. Earlier on, you had asked us what's really unique and what's really different about us, and I think this is a very good example. So I just did a search for funny videos.

Mohit Srivastava - BlueDot
So, this is like me calling all of my 378 friends and saying, “Hey do you know any funny videos or have you heard about any funny videos?” But instead I can just plug it right in.

Kabir Shahani - BlueDot
This is very different from doing a search for funny videos on Google or even U2 because these are what my friends are finding on the web that they think is funny.

Editor
And just your friends, not the wider…?

Kabir Shahani - BlueDot
That's the really important piece; it's just my friends.

Editor
Now, that's interesting because now I could have a group of people let's say, who are really good at picking stocks and I could get them in a BlueDot group, have a stock picker group and pull up really cool information from them and share information, and we could be on top of the stock market all of a sudden and (Voice Overlap).

Speaker
That's a great example and I actually use BlueDot that way with my investment club. So, I just did a search for investment club, so I actually dotted a book -- I actually dotted a site on stock picking right here, and my friend dotted something on the decline of the US Dollar relative to the Chinese Yuan. And these will be our topics of discussion at our investment club next week.

Speaker
Wow! That's cool. So we can have a whole user group or a new kind of thing online. It's really, really neat, so...

Speaker
And you can - it's all in one place. So, one user can have a group of people that they want to share just their investment dots with it versus a…

Speaker
(Inaudible) really groups -- because that would be a good way to find out what -- if I keep a set of people constrained to people I trust…

Speaker
Yeah.

Speaker
They could share movies and say -- there got to be a better movie reviewer than even -- and that's like -- because that is for everybody, and everybody doesn't agree with me, but maybe if I have 5 friends and I know that they are all like French movies with sub titles, they are going to be telling me the French movie -- the subtitle's a lot faster then the wider Yahoo or Google review sites or what not, or Yahpro (ph) whatever…

Speaker
Yeah, they are not public groups. So that's the key is that, there are the groups that every individual usage uses to create; so they're custom.

Speaker
Right.

Speaker
So, you could create a group of just the people you want to share your movie dots with; and those are the people that will comment and can add another dots for you to look at. So, if I want...

Speaker
So, I could make my -- can I make my movieDOTpage public?

Speaker
Public. Yeah, you could do that. So, and the way that we get that, it's all based on tag. So, if you want to go to -- I'll go to my Dot, to give you an example, so here is my Dots, and I can have a - I can dot - I do have movies here. I've 51 movies that I've dotted; and so this page -- I've dotted most of them to be everyone. So some of them are everyone, some of them are friends. So, for example, I dotted -- three days ago, I dotted this (Inaudible) thank you for smoking. I actually just saw a commercial ad on TV, and I wanted to remember it; I didn't want to forget about that movie. So, I just got in and I said, “Then why don't you see this movie, maybe I'll pick it up this weekend, anyone who's seen it” and this is why -- this is my demo -- I got six comments back from my friends and (Inaudible) dot, I like that, because he always dots his movie reviews and then my friend Grant said, “Awesome movie” (Inaudible) like it, because (Inaudible) in this satire. So, Grant's a good friend of my mine, I trust his recommendation, (Inaudible) a good friend of mine, I trust his recommendation; Gary commented on it and my friend Adam commented on it, and my friend Chris commented on it. So, I could just ask a question passively, I don't have to e-mail all of them and interrupt them and just got these comments back.

Speaker
That's really cool. Can I have a public group that only the three of us could dot things in, but anybody in the world could read?

Speaker
We don't have that feature today; but we should put it on the backlog. It's a good idea.

Speaker
That would be interesting, because then the three of us could have like a conversation -- could dot…

Speaker
A public conversation…

Speaker
(Voice Overlap) but people around the world can listen to what we have sent and they could include it, right?

Speaker
That's a very cool idea.

Speaker
That's a good idea; we don't have that right now.

Speaker
Because, maybe we are the three experts on movie -- we had French titled movies or something like that, and we don't like (ph) some guy who -- who's just there to cause trouble in our group (Inaudible) the three of us.

Speaker
And that's a good...

Speaker
But, we do want public -- that would be a good…

Speaker
That's a cool idea, yeah.

Speaker
We would separate (ph) now, I mean, right now…

Speaker
Give him a mike.

Speaker
Yeah, you don't know this is going to be a serious comment or a joke?

Speaker
I've never made a joke before.

Speaker
Who are you by the way?

Derek Sligger
I am Derek Sligger, I am a developer here.

Speaker
Excellent. A geek?

Derek Sligger
Yeah.

Speaker
Yeah.

Derek Sligger
I was -- I wish I could deny it.

Speaker
(Inaudible) knows.

Speaker
Yeah, exactly. They didn't know before.

Speaker
So, yeah, I mean, the feature you are talking about is being able to sort of, see that comment. You as the Dot creator, control the permission scope of that content. So, it could be you've publicly dotted that, then anybody can see that conversation, but he gets to limit who participates in the conversation based on his friend list.

Speaker
Yeah, so all of my friends can comment on that.

Speaker
That's cool.

Speaker
That's true. So how is it working here? What kind of tools do you use as a developer?

Speaker
Well I use - yeah I use Emax for everything.

Speaker
(Inaudible) the PR people, all (Voice Overlap).

Speaker
There's no knowing smile that (Voice Overlap). I use Emax for everything; I mean, we're constantly jumping around languages, C++, C#, Java, Java Script, loads of that, CSS, everything, so I just use the one tool for everything. It's easy.

Speaker
Very cool. Well thanks. All right, is there anything else I need to know about…?

Speaker
You need to know how to create your own BlueDot account, so we can get you going on the (Inaudible) auto dotting (ph).

Speaker
Well, we are going to get it done (Inaudible) second, its pretty (Voice Overlap).

Speaker
We can do that, yeah.

Speaker
(Inaudible).

Speaker
We also want to show you how you can put BlueDot on your blog; it's probably relevant to the audiences (Inaudible) this right now.

Speaker
Okay. What does that look like? Do you have a blog that you can show me what the BlueDot…

Speaker
Yeah.

Speaker
Because this is just a little icon that says, Dot bits (ph) right?

Speaker
Yeah. So this is one of our very active users - friends (ph) in the company.

Speaker
We got to know him just because he started using our product. So we said, "Hey, this guy is online all the time." And so, on his doing Boeing blog -- he works at Boeing. He's got his BlueDot widget. So, it's -- his latest dots, and it populates with the three most recent dots that he is sharing. So, if I am looking at his blog, this is a great way to be fresh and maintained, so he may not have posted this when he posted last; he last posted on Sunday, September 17th. So he hasn't even done a blog post in a while, but there is fresh content on this page because this Dot was one hour ago. So, even though he hasn't blogged in a few weeks, he still has content that's an hour old -- an hour new on his blog. And then of course, the other feature I am seeking -- and you can add -- we'll show you -- you can add -- now, if you just go to Mike Howard (ph) and you say, add BlueDot widget to your site, you can choose to do it via the image list that we just saw in Adams blog via the bulleted list. So, that's just a bulleted list of the things that you dotted most recently, and then just the heading only. So, you can have just the heading of the things that you've -- just say that you've recently showed six dots, and then the person clicks on it to see what those six dots are.

Speaker
Okay.

Speaker
Oops.

Speaker
And for the more technical crowd out there, we also have in RSS feed -- so, if you're tech savvy, you can take your RSS feed and you can put it on your blog in anyway you'd like to.

Speaker
That's so important. But, you can build something for it, and use an API too, and (Inaudible) blog. And then the last piece -- there's two other things, there's the autodotfrom (ph) blog, so if I am a blogger, I can select autodot, and right now I have my personal blog (Inaudible) and I have -- I gave BlueDot the address for that, and every time I create a blog post, it creates a dot. And then, the last one which is what -- TechCrunch announced today that you also might be interested in, and we were talking about earlier is, adding Dot This (ph) to your website. So, by adding Dot This (ph) to your website, users visiting your blog can share it with their friends, who are not even having to create that account. So they first adopt this button; they can create a dot and they can give us the email addresses of their friends, and we'll create a virtual community for them to share; and you can have a little white button like that or a little blue button like that.

Speaker
That is cool. And there's the Java Script, you just kept that and put it right in to your blog (Inaudible) just kind of do testing, make sure it all works up. So -- and this obviously works on Mac, Windows, Firefox, Opera, IE…

Speaker
We officially support IE and Firefox, although we've been told it works well in Safari.

Speaker
Okay. And do you have a mobile dotter coming in?

Speaker
We do have a mobile version already available at that bluedot.us/n and we don't support all phones -- do you which ones?

Speaker
No, right now we don't…

Speaker
It's not officially supported; this is the first time we're actually announcing it. But if you want to…

Speaker
See, I can detect those…

Speaker
I want to go, open up my (Inaudible) and I am going to go, Mike, you think it's a whole therapy?

Speaker
If you want to apply this blue -- this could be -- I said it's bluedot.us/m…

Speaker
It may not work on your phone, feel free to send this feedback, let us know and we'll take a look at it…

Speaker
(Inaudible) it's really cool.

Speaker
What's that?

Speaker
(Inaudible).

Speaker
Yeah, last night we were in Freemont, and if I wanted to go get dessert after the (Inaudible) service thing, I could just pick up my phone, go to bluedot.us/m, type in Freemont dessert, and I would get on the go, recommendations from my friends -- I'm willing (ph) to get dessert in Freemont.

Speaker
Okay.

Speaker
So...

Speaker
Very cool.

Speaker
Yeah

Speaker
Well, thank you very much.

Speaker
Great, thank you.

Speaker
Thanks.