We rented a car and pretty soon we were introduced to the American driving experience: 4-5 lane motorways full of cars and in Palo Alto, traffic lights every quarter mile.

Getting to the US on the 4th of November also meant landing in the middle of the election. Apart from some people wearing Obama tshirts, there was not much else around us announcing this most important event. Seems like TV reporters are way better than us at spotting these things.

We got to our room, turned on the TV and were happy to watch Obama winning state after state. At least we did that until 7pm, when we fell asleep. That’s a really lame curfew for 20-something year old guys, but hey, it was already 3am in London and 5am in Bucharest.

And next morning, we were meeting really interesting people at the Web 2.0 Summit.

I know what you’re thinking. Isn’t this like, the third Beta or something? What’s so special about this one? And how many more Private Betas will there be?

We have some explaining to do.

This is the Private Beta for the uberVU that won Seedcamp in September. uberVU is about finding out what people are saying all over the web around stories. These stories might be something you came across while surfing the Web or something that you published to your blog, your Twitter account, etc.

uberVU is now trying to map the conversational graph on the Web. In the past, uberVU was a multi-service publishing platform. Two totally different things, hence the new Beta.

So how does this work?

1. You either click a bookmarklet while you’re browsing a story you’re interested in and we start mapping the conversation around it

2. You tell us where you publish stuff and every time you publish something new, we automatically track the conversation around it. You don’t have to do anything else.

Interesting, you might say, but why this change?

We started building a publishing platform because that’s what we felt we needed at the time. In the mean time, we thought

“why not also get comments for what you published? That’s time consuming to track”.

It was a good idea, but then we noticed that a certain story got comments everywhere on the Web, not just where it was published. We thought:

“This is actually the tricky part. Getting distributed conversations together. This is really difficult to do right now and very time consuming”

We started working on the technology, it worked for people’s blogs, YouTube accounts, etc. But it kind of made sense to use the technology for any story, not just the stories you publishes, but any story you might find interesting. So it was time to get back to work. Fast forward to a few months later and we’re here, launching the uberVU Private Beta.

We’ll be sending about 200 invites/day so in a few days everybody on the list will get to use uberVU.

We’re sorry for the long wait guys, we changed the product 3 times and we had a lot of work to do to get it to this stage.

We built uberVU for you guys, so you know the drill: FEEDBACK PLEASE. You can tell us what you think here:

* hello@ubervu.com
* getsatisfaction.com/ubervu
* @ubervu on Twitter

Thanks and looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

We got to dissect our product more than ever before. Interesting questions structured around important themes led to a conference table full of ideas and connections.

We started our journey back in time. First thing was to decide where we wanted to be in one year. What kinds of experiences would uberVU provide. If uberVU was a person, what would it be like?

Moving on we got to the people that wanted to have those experiences, our users. Who are all our possible users, what are their needs and how could they use a product similar to uberVU?

It was then time to face the facts and describe how things are done right now in our market. What experiences do the users have, what technical capabilities are they using and what’s the personality of the products or processes they are using.

The most interesting part was when we had to come up with how things were done before the Internet. How did people fulfill the needs that uberVU will fulfill in a year?

All this process led to an interesting product/user life cycle. It was now clear what stages our product would have to go through to reach its maturity, what the important features were at each stage and what road a user might take from the first encounter to using uberVU every day.

All in all, a very inspiring session and highly recommended for any startup that’s trying go focus and better define what’s important.

Here are the Swede team thoughts on our workshop.

It’s that great time in a company’s life when you really decide what you’re building, and who it’s for, and what’s the best path to change the world with your product and company.

What you realize, though, is that after setting the vision and making all the tough decision, you have to actually build a great product. Vision without execution means nothing.

We couldn’t have built what we have right now without a great group of people that have been working hard with us side by side during the last few months. uberVU got where it is right now thanks to these great guys.

Here they are, in no particular order:



Mihnea – always dependable and a great photographer.



Mihai D – really fun to be around, great addition to the team



Mihai P – really loves to work on difficult problem, search, scaling, architecture and the likes.



Manu – really fun guy that brings the “element of surprise” to the team



Cristi – always willing to work on whatever needs to be done if that helps the team

Thanks guys, we would not have got here without you.

- We’ll support these channels: Wordpress, Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, Picasa, Flickr, Webshots, YouTube, Vimeo.

- You’ll be able to get your content from all the locations above, edit it, and also post content to all the locations above from inside uberVU

- The blogging platforms are integrated with the video/photo sharing platforms. You’ll grab pictures from, say, your Flickr account, some videos from Vimeo and insert them in your blog post as a gallery directly. You just click a few buttons, we do the rest.

- You’ll see all the comments that your content gets on all the channels mentioned.

This is what you’ll get in the Beta 2, alongside increased speed, fewer bugs, OAuth support, etc.
———–

In the 3 months to come we’re also planning the following:

- Posting comments to the channels directly from uberVU

- Automatically changing your status in Twitter and Facebook

- A much better interface that will be more consistent and have better usability

- Unified search across all your distributed content. You’ll be able to also place our search bar on your blog so that your visitors can search all your public content across the Web

Do tell us what you think of this.

——

Later Edit: Webshots, Photobucket, Zooomr and the likes will come a bit later (matter of weeks) and will not be part of the Beta 2 launch. I guess I got a bit too excited

We’re close to showing you guys something really useful. But until then, take a look at a version of the new interface and tell us what you think.

As you may notice, there are no more tabs in the app. We’ve made a single consistent interface for everything. The channels you’re using are a lot more visible and the most usual tasks are at hand.

Although it’s not finalized yet, we think we’re on the right track.

Honestly, we went there to just get some feedback on uberVU. Feedback from other startups and tech gurus. We loved what we heard. 90% of the people said: “Wow, that’s an awesome idea. It’s the type of product I’d be using every day“. The other 10% said “I don’t understand“. We need to work on the way we communicate, but otherwise, we got great feedback. A lot of people spent 30 to 45 minutes talking to us about uberVU and its potential.

We also took part in a local BarCamp, where we met lots of incredible developers and startups. Really young people that were so passionate about their ideas. Most of them had been working for months, even without getting paid at all, just because they believed in what they were doing. Very inspiring indeed.

We really appreciate that people took the time to check out uberVU and even write about it. If you want to know more about what people think of our product, check out some of the links below:

• Ubervu: participating in communities from one place
• uberVU- Keep All of Your Content in One Place
• uberVU – find, organize, publish
• UberVu – Gestionar toda nuestra Web 2.0 en un solo lugar
• UberVu concentra todas tus redes sociales
• uberVU, Para Manejar Todos Tus Servicios.

Thank you for your kind words, guys. Reviews like these make working for the project that much more rewarding.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present you the uberVU dashboard, your welcome page each time you log in. Click for a larger image.

Here is where you will see 2 important areas:

• A space for all your recent activities: your latest blog posts, pictures or videos. Doesn’t matter where you published them, from within our app or other tools. Synchronization baby!
• Your comments from all your platforms. No need to check up your Wordpress admin 2 times a day, your YouTube account etc. You have them all in your dashboard. More time for you to work …. or do other stuff

Of course you can add some new stuff right from this page or search for your archived items.
What do you think?