Good Luck, Javan

Some sad news to report today. Javan Makhmali, the first developer we ever hired, is leaving us to go work for 37signals.

Javan has been an amazing help to us over the past 2 years. There isn't a single aspect of our application he has not touched at some point and he has taught us all quite a bit. He has been a pleasure to work with and always brought some wit and humor to our chat room conversations, starting off with a simple "Morning" each and every day. It's a testament to Javan's skillset and character that he's going to work for 37signals. We know they only hire the very best.

We're looking forward to staying in touch with Javan for years to come. He wasn't just an employee to us. We think of him as a friend.

Now as my mother used to say when people quit my Dad's department at the University of Illinois to go work someplace else, "may fruit flies infest his home!"

Seriously - good luck Javan, you'll be missed.

Inkling now supporting multiple languages (German done, more to come)

Some good news for those who want to run an Inkling marketplace in a language other than English.

In preparation for working with one of our German consulting partners on delivering Inkling to one of their clients, we've just completed the grunt work of "internationalizing" a vast majority of the Inkling experience. While we just have the German translation complete, it's trivial for us to now introduce new languages.

If you are running a pilot site or are thinking about introducing Inkling to your company or community in your native language, we should be able to work with you to quickly get a translation done. Just contact us to get started and we'll continue to update this blog as we get more languages complete.

New trading interface is live

At 5pm CT today we took Inkling down for 2 minutes to push out our new simple and advanced trading interface. Everything seemed to go smoothly as we witnessed trading immediately start again as soon as we came back online. All hosted marketplaces are now running the new capability and we're anxious to begin hearing what you think. Even more importantly, if you find any oddities, let us know and we'll investigate them right away.

We'll also be updating our "on-premise" version and pushing out these changes to those running Inkling in their own corporate datacenter within the next few weeks.

Improved Trading Interface Coming Soon

Based on lots of feedback and our own use of Inkling, we've been working on some long needed improvements to our trading interface. Amazingly, the trading interface has not changed significantly since we first introduced it in 2006. Some things have been streamlined and functionality added here and there, but for the most part, the trading process is the same as it was when we first designed the application. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right? :)

But we've known for awhile some things could be done better. Going in to the re-design process, we knew we wanted to address a few issues:

1. Make trading a one-step process. One screen, minimal clicking and decision making


2. Introduce two trading interfaces: a "simple" interface and an "advanced" interface


3. For the simple interface, we wanted the thought process to be dead simple: "I can spend x to change the chances to y"


4. In the "advanced" interface, introduce more transparency of information and control of what can be done

Instead of trying to explain things with lots of pictures and words, we've cut a screen capture video that will walk you through what the new interface is like to use:



We will be transitioning to this new trading interface next Tuesday (27 Jan) early evening, Chicago time.

If you have any questions, concerns, or comments, please don't hesitate to use the "contact" links in your marketplaces to write to us and your marketplace administrators. Or you can always send email to [email protected].