J-Squared Media: Inside

New Things On The Way

Jesse Tevelow — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 14:47:31 +0000

This is just a quick post to let everyone know that J-Squared has some new and exciting things on the way. We’ve been in development for several months on a very exciting new project. We’re excited to get it out to the public. It will likely be launching in early 2009.

Happy holidays to everyone!

TechStars 2008

Jesse Tevelow — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 04:11:21 +0000

TechStars is open for business! Applications are now being accepted for the 2008 summer session. J-Squared got its start through the TechStars program and we highly recommend it to anyone interested in starting their own company. You’ll meet some very influential people, experience the beauty of Boulder Colorado, and give yourself a great shot at success. Check it out here, and read this article from TechCrunch if you’re interested.

Hey, We’re Hiring. Work Here.

Jesse Tevelow — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 23:50:13 +0000

Here is our craigslist post. If you’re interested in social applications – this is the place to be. If not, maybe you know someone else who may be interested. We’re looking for Ruby Rockstars. Come talk to us.

Facebook “Advertising”

Jesse Tevelow — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 16:08:36 +0000

Tuesday, Facebook unveiled their new advertising program, Social Ads. We’ve placed ‘advertising’ in quotes because the term is changing. What is an ‘Ad’ exactly? Facebook is continuing to push the envelope in letting users decide what they want to consume through social interactions and trends versus strictly business-to-consumer solicitation. This is a great way to increase the virility of products and we think the program will be successful.

Facebook Pages is another advertising initiative that continues the trend of Facebook taking existing features of MySpace and offering them in a more effective and organized way. Facebook Pages will allow Brands such as Businesses, Products, Artists and Celebrities to interact with users on Facebook by creating their own profile pages.

For J-Squared, this means new challenges and new opportunities – a normal day like any other.

Open For Business

Jesse Tevelow — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 01:44:59 +0000

It’s now easy for us to answer the question: “How will you expand outside of Facebook?” From day one, J-Squared was confident that the market would be forced to follow Facebook in opening up their platforms. Google’s Open Social has validated our predictions. As part of Google’s initial beta-testing group for the Open Social API, we were able to contribute to the platform during its creation period. Google has done a good job overall in providing a strong set of resources for developers to begin creating new products and re-vamping old ones. The market continues to develop at increasing rates, as now a more homogenized technology will allow rapid development and distribution across a multitude of networking properties, all at once. We’re very excited to continue building our company in the midsts of such a revolutionary time. Ramping up is our biggest challenge at this point.

BusinessWeek Profiles J-Squared

Jesse Tevelow — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 16:53:55 +0000

Today, J-Squared is the featured story in the Small Business section of BusinessWeek Online. You can read the story here. We’re happy to be featured in such a high-profile publication. The article mentions some exciting developments including some early investment information as well as our latest revenue projections.

We also recently launched a new version of Sticky Notes that we are particularly excited about. This new flash version will enable us to roll out new features more quickly. Go to Facebook and check it out! Several new projects are also in development and should be live soon.

Our business continues to mature right along side the Facebook Platform. It has been a great springboard for us. We’re looking forward to getting involved with other platforms to keep our business and products diversified. We’ll have more updates in the coming weeks, so stay tuned…

Widgets Abound

Jesse Tevelow — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 01:35:07 +0000

With the recent success of the Facebook platform and the surge of ‘third party developers’ into the market, the world of widgets is opening up. Everyone is excited about it, even Google apparently. This bodes well for J-Squared as we expand our products to other places on the web. We see widgets as the next development of interactive rich content and advertising online. As people learn where they ‘like to be’ online, bringing rich content to them will be paramount, both for advertisers and content providers.

Facebook’s New Metrics – Activity

Jesse Tevelow — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 06:51:53 +0000

Facebook has changed their rating system to rank applications based on their active users. However, many people don’t know what ‘active’ means according to Facebook. Here is an excerpt from their developer blog:

“With a change this foundational to Facebook Platform’s measurement, we want to make sure that you completely understand how we will be measuring engagement. We define engagement as the number of users who touch your application every day (measured from midnight to midnight each day).”

These touch points are:
- Canvas Page Views
- Link Clicks in FBML
- Mock-Ajax Form Submission
- Click-to-Play Flash

“The number of engaged users is calculated by putting all of these touch points together. We display this as the number of “Daily Active Users.” Next to it we also show what percentage that is of the application’s total number of users.”

This is a good measure of engagement, but we don’t think it’s the best indicator of overall utility. If lots of people are clicking to play flash in their profile, that’s a quick way of engaging the user, but canvas pages seem more important to us. That’s where users can really interact with the software. It’s also where companies can drive revenue.

This early in the game, stats and rankings should all be taken with a grain of salt.

Investors, Presentations, and Products

Jesse Tevelow — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 19:35:53 +0000

We haven’t written a post in several days and we wanted to bring everyone back up to speed. About 2 weeks ago, J-Squared gave a presentation at the TechStars investor day event in Boulder, Colorado. Ten companies participated and about 150 investors, reporters, and tech enthusiasts attended. It was an all day event, and an exciting way for J-Squared to channel information out into the community.

Since the event, we’ve been contacted by several large companies and investors in response to our growth and the media’s attention on the Facebook ecosystem in general. We have several new applications in development and are excited to continue development of the Sticky Notes application.

We’ll have more technical posts soon.

Lawsuit Fun

Jesse Tevelow — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 21:58:14 +0000

Recently, Facebook has faced two lawsuits, one from their old friends at ConnectU, and now another from Cross Atlantic Capital Partners. As the company’s profile has been continually raised by the media over the past few months, everyone seems to want a piece of the pie. What does this mean for Facebook developers? Not much. Facebook will likely weather these storms, possibly losing a negligible chunk of their wealth in the process.

To those of you out there trying to battle with Facebook to earn a buck, the war has already been won. Give up!