Emily Chang - eHub: ElfURL

twittering: worked all night on our site ideas. good progress!

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Oct 06, 05
ElfURL
A URL shortener/redirector that offers click through stats via RSS, automatic delicious tags, and automatic Microformats Rel-Tags.

Link: ElfURL

Also see: eHub Interviews elfURL

eHub Interviews elfURL

Thanks to Alexander Muse of M Ventures and elfURL for this email interview posted October 11, 2005.

eHub: What is your web application/service about?

elfURL: elfURL.com provides URL shortening combined with stats via RSS, delicious tags and Microformats Rel-Tags. ElfURL is part of a larger project called “Big in Japan” that will include various tools including FrankenFeed, MailFeed, smsFEEDs, FeedVault, and Feeds-by-Mail.

eHub: Why did you start this project?

elfURL: Weblogs Work is a portfolio company of M | Ventures providing blog consultancy services to businesses. Brian Oberkirch is the CEO and each time he had a need for a tool we would have our coders build one to meet that need. Brian suggested that we ‘open’ up these tools for anyone to use. We decided to give away these tools to the blogging community at no cost.

eHub: How much time do you devote to its growth? Do you have a day job?

elfURL: The tool business, Big in Japan, officially gives everything away, but the tools are helpful to the management of our portfolio company. We have four coders working fulltime on the projects as well as a freelance designer working on UI and design. Our day job is helping our companies grow.

eHub: How large is your team and what are your backgrounds?

elfURL: Brian Oberkirch is the CEO of Weblogs Work and as a result ‘heading’ Big in Japan. I am the managing partner of M | Ventures. We have 25 engineers (involved with several of companies) with four dedicated to Big in Japan.

eHub: What is your design philosophy?

elfURL: Get it to work fast first, then make it look nice and give it away.

eHub: What technologies are you currently using?

elfURL: 50% LAMP development and 50% Rails + Ajax development.

eHub: If your project is live, what are the most requested features from your users/community?

elfURL: Widgets, everyone wants our products in widget form factors.

eHub: Does your user base reside in a primary geographic location or is it distributed?

elfURL: Distributed.

eHub: Where do you see the project heading in the next 6 months? The next 2 years?

elfURL: We would love for lots of people to find our tools and find them useful.

eHub: What is the greatest challenge to your success?

elfURL: Project management.

eHub: What is the one thing you need to get to the next phase of the project?

elfURL: Time.

eHub: Do you have a business model? If so, what is it?

elfURL: Officially we decided NOT to have a business model.

eHub: If you’re able to disclose this information, how much traffic or usage do you see on an average day?

elfURL: elfURL is lightly used with around 300 users each day. Big in Japan should offer quite a bit of value and should see more traffic.

eHub: What is the one thing you’re most proud of about the project?

elfURL: The parts we have not released. FrankenFeed is very cool.

eHub: How would you describe the shift that’s occurring with the web right now to future generations?

elfURL: My four year old Skypes with our designer in Argentina in Spanish. He is growing up in a very different world than we did. It is amazing how the Web 2.0 is shrinking the world.

eHub: What site(s) do you visit everyday other than your own?

elfURL: Via RSS feeds - lots…

eHub: How many hours of sleep do you get a night?

elfURL: 6

Thanks to Alexander Muse of M Ventures and elfURL for this email interview posted October 11, 2005.

Posted by Emily Chang in Blogging • Development and/or open source • RSS

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