As we wrote here, we’ve got new plans for september. The activity is growing, we’ve some issues to work on and we’d like to start the autumn with new energies and resources. In order to do this, we’ve started a new round of investments and we can now announce that we just received a new investment of 1.5 ml of dollars that leads up founds to a total amount of 3 ml. This will let us have the opportunity of increasing quality and focusing on the mobile versions of the application.

As we told you in the last blog posts, we are working hard on quality to offer you a better experience with Dixero. We are now implementing new voices that will read your feeds, you’ll start hear changes in a few days with new channels you create and then we count working again on pronunciation during the next weeks. As the changes will need improvements day by day, all your feedbacks are welcome.

Well, here we are. As we’d like to have more than a glance into american culture, we decided to open a new office in Silicon Valley. It’s not only a matter of market, even if it being on site will help us to understand it better and keep tighter contacts with our actual and future business partners. What we’d like to do in our new office is to improve Dixero on site, observing behaviours and listening to your needs. We want to understand deeply how you are using the service to create something closer to what you really want. It will probably lead us up to start introducing local talented people in the team. We have huge projects in mind.

The office is located in Plug and Play Tech Center, Sunnyvale, CA. Here’s a picture Luca took there.

Yesterday we went to the Zürich’s date of  TechCrunch Euro tour, one of the events organized by TechCrunch UK. 40 swiss startups (si sono passate il testimone) on the stage to present what is their product in… 20 seconds. Never have had so a little time to present Dixero! We are very satisfied both about talks and interesting people we met.

As we discussed yesterday about future plans, we are now refilling ourselves with new energies. Right now is time to planning and reorganization of the company, investing almost all our resources in quality improvements.

We are, first of all, human like you. We like to share, enjoy our work and get in touch with you. So, maybe, you’d like to see us at work, or read what we’ve doing, or even have a loot at our faves, our faces, our voices, as we care to know yours. If you want to find it out, you can visit our profile on plurk or digg, or even join our group on Facebook… Sounds good? :)

Last week Dafne and I went to Reboot 10, a wonderful conference in Copenhagen (DK). 500 people from all over the world met to discuss about the theme of “free”, ranging from social media to biology to hardware. It was wonderful meeting and hearing from people like David Weinberger, Chris Messina, Dan Gillmor, Stowe Boyd. We was impressed by talks about user experience and guerrilla usability and had a chance to chat around about Dixero. We also had the chance to get some feedbacks and new ideas about the features, let’s see…

Now we are planning some others trips in the summer time, getting around to see new faces and discover new possibilities. Stay tuned and come to say hello to us!

Luca

Supernova 2008 has been a great place to be in the past days. It was characterized by the focus on people and interaction between speakers and attendees. More than 400 people from 15 countries were in San Francisco to discuss about the 4 bases of innovation: technology, business, society and policies.

What impressed me most was:

• Bob Iannucci (Nokia) showing phones with sensors able to create an ambiental intelligence to provide benefits for the users
• Jordan Hoffner (Youtube) focusing on contents that enable social connections
• Jonathan Schwartz (Sun) talking how new IT open models are a business driver really simple but effective
• Joe Kraus (Google) explaining trends that are changing the net: individual to social research of contents, active to passive act of sharing, open social.
  

Some other discussion that impressed me were about social network and how we can now observe patterns and behaviours but every time someone try to bring the whole social networks known back to rules, the net evolves and theories are no longer valid… So, we actually can’t predict behaviours accurately.

A personal good story that happened the second day I was there: the day started with a coffee poured on my trousers and a pen that, after some minutes, broke in my pocket :(

I also have to say thank you to Nokia, because I won in a sort of lottery a Nokia N95, and many thanks to Deborah from Los Angeles too, she seemed to be very impressed about Dixero ;)

Luca

Are you an american english mothertongue? Want to help us improving our written language? We’re looking for you! If you want to collaborate with us and want to find out more,  please email Luca at luca[AT]dixero[DOT]com

As you probably have seen from our website, in the last months we considered your feedbacks and added some new features. If you have a look at the public channels (eg. technology channel), you can now find the public URL and, as you like it, you can send it to a friend of yours and let him or her know about it. And did you noticed the new face alongside of the player? It’s the avatar that’s reading your feed :)
What’s new in your personal channels? Now you can embed them and add subscribed feeds directly on the “create channel”. After importing feeds and creating channels, have a look at the new “mixed” voice you can choose: Luke, Claire and Lois will take over randomly in reading your feeds. Want to have a look around? :)

Well, we could not really be everywhere, but surely we’ve almost ready to leave again. If you want to meet us, you can find us at Supernova 2008 conference, San Francisco. Yes, we’re in love with that part of the world, but that’s not all. We’d like to meet you in Europe, too, so if you have the chance to be near Copenhagen on 26 and 27 june, we’d like to shake your hand at Reboot 10. Nice places to get in touch, aren’t them? :)