MyQuire.com

Quire, Inc. CEO David Steinberg took the stage at this years DEMOfall 2007 Conference. Enjoy a sneak peek of the new MyQuire. Keep an eye out for updates this Fall. More to come concerning DEMO later this week.

San Diego-based Many Hands Foundation is our Craigslist Boot Camp attendee award winner. Many Hands will receive $500 from Quire to be used to support their efforts in 2008!

Many Hands was founded by Mack and Mary Alice McKinney, who have been leading volunteer work teams to places around the world since 1969. Since 1992 the focus has been on rural villages in the Mpumalanga Province of South Africa, and in 2006 to the community of Silindile.

Next year, two Many Hands teams of 16-24 people each will spend 24 days in Silindle to construct a multi-purpose annex to the church building Many Hands helped build in 2006. The community will decide the uses for the new annex which will be designed for classroom, meeting space, and even small community library uses. Volunteers will also be working to find an internet service provider willing and able to provide service to Silindile. As in past years some team members will also be teaching computer and business skills to budding entrepreneurs in the community.

Between now and then, Many Hands will be coordinating delivery of donated books to Silindile and putting together computer hardware and software packages to be delivered by the teams.

In years past, coordinating trip project information was cumbersome. Many Hands administrators in various locations used multiple emails to coordinate efforts. In reaching volunteers participating in the trips, newsletters were a static, one-way flow of information. MyQuire unites communication among the Many Hands community with a dynamic and collaborative communication flow. Many Hands administrators can get real-time feedback and MyQuire is well-suited as a toolset for the people coordinating the work that directly impacts quality of life in among Silindile's community.

Exciting news to share!

MyQuire will make its public debut at the prestigious DEMOfall 07 conference held September 24-26 in San Diego, California. Out of hundreds of aspiring participants, MyQuire was one of only 70 companies chosen to present at this invitation-only event.

The conference format is well-known (for those in the know): each participant takes the stage to present for 6 -- count 'em: 6 -- minutes. That's only 360 seconds. But as our CEO David assured me yesterday, "In some ways, 6 minutes is a very long time."

For us, it's going to be an incredibly fun challenge: with everything that's going on with the product right now, there's so much we want to tell everyone about. But being constrained to 6 minutes will be an excellent object lesson in the importance of brevity.

Can't wait!

Beginning with the original MyQuire Alpha release in late 2006, the upbeat Quire management & development team has maintained a blistering pace of revisions and updates aimed at improving the MyQuire application. Since joining the Quire team in June, I've experienced this fast-paced development cycle first-hand while working closely with both management and backend developers to improve public facing pages.

The result? Newly introduced "personas" - real MyQuire users who utilize the service to organize, manage, and collaborate on a personal and professional level. Find out how a non-profit administrator, full-time college student, and recruiter / PTA president use MyQuire.

In addition to providing examples of how MyQuire can be leveraged to help everyday and professional individuals alike, we've tinkered with the layout to make it a little easier to understand what we're doing, review features, and see where we're going.

Want to poke previous iterations of MyQuire? Check out the Wayback machine for some "historic" link love.

By the way, my name is Derek. If I'm not staring at Photoshop or TextMate, I'll be one of the coffee runners narrating the development cycle, news, and releases on the MyQuire blog. If you haven't met our CEO David S., say hi. The rest of the team will find their way on to these pages in due time.

Stay updated with development updates by subscribing to the blog via RSS. Alternatively, bookmark us on del.icio.us and spread the word. Poke, tinker, and play around with the public pages and application. Let us know what you think, features you would like to see, or a simple "I've got my eye on you".

Hello! I'm psyched to kick-start the first posting on the MyQuire blog. After weeks of banging on our computers and burning the midnight oil we have some stuff we want to show you. We're still midway through our development process and many of the core technologies aren't available yet (coming this fall…). That said, we're happy to share with you some of our early prototypes and ideas.

Before I get ahead of myself let me introduce you to the basic idea behind MyQuire. The concept is deceptively simple:

we want to provide a software-as-a-service (read: web-based software) that doesn't look and feel like the hard-to-use desktop software we've been subjected to for years.

We figure, why spend so much time making software for the internet that tries to look and feel like software on a desktop? Well, the internet is not the desktop, we might as well build a house on the moon with pulleys and cranes! At MyQuire, our hunch is that by wrapping up our core technologies in an interface that's more fun and people-centric, we provide a path for people who aren't "good" with technology to use collaboration tools that respond to real pains. The first real pain on our list we're trying to alleviate? Make running a team and a project less of an ordeal…

I'll keep this short and sweet for now. In the future we're going to use the MyQuire blog as a forum to continue our conversation with you, our user. Since our product is literally in mid-development (I don't even think we can call this a "Beta" or "Alpha", that should come in the fall), your comments and ideas will have a direct impact on our first product launch. So let us know! Of course, there's also a bit of a selfish side to this blog – it's a place where we will share with you some of the humble thoughts, ideas and aspirations that led us to the MyQuire project, along with the challenges we face as we move forward.

So, thanks in advance for your help and for getting involved with your feedback!

David Steinberg

CEO