Yeah, we know, lots of things to fix on the site - Thanks for all the feedback, it's been constructive and encouraging, and it feels great to have a responsive audience.  Please keep the ideas and suggestions for how to improve Pikum! coming as well.

It's going to be a busy weekend here at Pikum! Besides fixing bugs, enhancing functionality, implementing the new design (awesome - thank you Derek!), pushing code updates, and responding to user input; we are also going to have a nice number of Pikums happening this weekend in the world of Rugby and Football/Soccer. This means work for our Cape Town Operations Team, and Sasha and her team will be busy making sure that datafeeds are functioning properly, scoring works, and incoming CS queries get addressed. Well, at least the office's got ocean views!

Next week's going to see us lifting the veil on Pikum! a bit more. We haven't actually done anything yet to promote our launch, for reasons Sean and I have explained in our previous posts. So you'll see a proper press release, a promotional event in London, our first set of baby-steps on the affiliate front (Araz is jumping up and down with excitement already), more celebrity Pikums and a bunch of other stuff to help spread the word.

We will also continue product fixes and improvements. Our product has so much functionality, and is highly automated/integrated with data sources, payment processors, anti-fraud and anti-money laundering services; plus it is computationally quite complex; and so it comes as no surprise that not everything was perfect when we pushed the trigger yesterday. This is compounded by cross-browser issues (Emily had a hard time registering on her Mac yesterday - talk about a poor experience!) and new design still being updated in many of the product's pages - and you got quite the challenge (no pun intended). But we will get there, the team is working on it systematically and with a clear framework to prioritize the hundreds of known bugs and issues.

So now the big question is - who will be the first real-money Pikum winner? Can't wait to congratulate the lucky one.

Happy Piking, and pls stay tuned for more Pikum! news

-johannes 

 

 

 

The fix was just put onto our production system. I tested it and we're all good. Now when you challenge someone, the link in the email works and will take them directly to the Pikum you challenged them to.  Keep the feedback / bug reports coming. Our team will be working through the holiday week-end to continue to upgrade and tweak the site.

Thanks to everyone who's pointed out that the link that's included when you're challenged to a Pikum isn't working.  We found it first thing this morning. It's been fixed by our dev team, we're testing, and it'll be implemented onto our production application by tomorrow morning. In the meantime, you can get to all your challenges through the link on the challenge email. You can find any challenges there.  There are a number of cool pikums in the system - both for pikles and for pounds.  If you're in, make sure you've found one of the ones focusing on this week-ends premiership action.

As Johannes and I mentioned in our posts about launching, private betas is the test, listen, and iterate mode.  Last night we made a number of changes and they're live on the site.  Here are some of the areas we improved:

 

                Change made to:

1.       Biggest Pots (biggest prize pools)

2.       Featured Pikums

3.       Invite Contacts Options

4.       Most Active Pikums

5.       Recent Activity

6.       User Bulletin Board

7.       Main Stylesheet

8.       Invite Friends

9.       Invite Contacts

10.   My Challenges

11.   Play Pikum

12.   Play Pikum Confirm

13.   View Pikum

14.   View Profile

We'll continue to iterate (I probably wont' post changes everyday - however we will try to keep you up to date as we improve), so keep the feedback coming! Rock on...

 

 

Mike Butcher from TechCrunch has posted a quick blurb about our launch.. Thanks Mike!  We'll get him in soon.  Also, I commented quickly on the post as our seed round came from First Round, the founders, and angels (not Gemini Israel?).  Hopefully the first of many posts and articles about Pikum