$1.23 Million would be nice in the spirit of 4/1

Ok, I’m sorry if you popped a champagne and got to celebrating on April 1st when you read about our “Closing of Series A funding with April Fund Ventures“, it’s was a bad April 1st joke. In the spirit of April Fool, the April Fool blog post is almost becoming customary even with traditonal news media site.

So yes, to set the record straight, ”April Fund Ventures” never existed and having $1.23M is our bank account would really be nice, so Happy April’s Fool day.

FYI, are you an investor? We are still pursuing Angels.

Simplebucket closes $1.23M Series A funding

I just want to share a piece of great news.

Simplebucket is announcing today that we just closed on a $1.23 million Series A round. Closing this investment round has been both exciting and, to be frank, a bit scary. There was definitely a bit of giddiness on my part when I first saw the money hit my bank account. I’ve certainly never seen that much money in one place before, much less under my control. This round was led by April Fund Ventures along with a couple of undisclosed Angels.

In celebration, all Simplebucket users will get to upload unlimited photos tomorrow on April 1st. After that, you will be dropped back to your regular account.

Khang Toh
Founder, Simplebucket.com

Simplebucket is the most “Simple Photo Hosting” Website

It’s been quite a ride since the Release2 launch and I’m happy to announce a significant milestone in the history of Simplebucket. As of last March 31th, 8:30EST, Simplebucket officially hits 1000 photo uploads.

Another big news that I would like to share with all our users and you SEO folks is Simplebucket is the most simple photo hosting website on the “internets“! Looks like Google and Yahoo are in agreement here too.

Google search for “simple photo hosting” #1 spot (Yes!!!!!!)

Yahoo search for “simple photo hosting” #1 spot (Double Yes!!!)

Google search for “photo hosting” (Bottom on Third Page)

I know everyone loves having seeing some stats, so here’s a peek to never been revealed information (in code) … and only you get to see.

>> User.count #Number of users
=> 426
>> Image.count #Number of images
=> 1011
>> Note.count #Number of notes
=> 289
>> Comment.count #Number of comments
=> 120
>> Rating.count #Number of ratings
=> 163

Alexa’s stats were pretty interesting too and I was pleasantly surprised that Simplebucket was well loved by the international community.

What keeps the fire burning and motivates you to keep working on your startup

If you’ve been following the Simplebucket blog, you would have read that we released Simplebucket Release2 last week on March 20th. Release2 has the goodness that I’ve been working on for the past month. I won’t go much into how awesome is Release2.

But I want to specifically talked about how great it is to see what you have been working on is getting appreciated and getting all the great feedback from different sources definitely keeps the fire going.

1) The YCombinator Hacker News Community is great!

There is a little well-known hacker community known as YCombinator Hacker News. Hacker News is the community for hackers (not the type of hackers that goes around breaking into peoples website/servers) but the type that lives and breathes the excitement of turning their ideas into reality through nights of coding and maybe coolaid.

So being a reader of Hacker News for a while, I thought I tried my luck and posted an AskYC. AskYC are specific questions directed at the community, and the intend is for the poster to some answers/feedback from the community for their questions. After 24 hrs, I was getting comments from people that I did not know and they replied with really, really good feedback. They were not only feedback but also they took the time to try out Simplebucket and reported what’s wrong, what could be better. I was especially appreciative of one commenter, hoyhoy, who posted a comment with 18 different things/issues that he sees as things that can be improved.

There was a total of 6 comments and those comments definitely gave me a lot of ideas what direction to take marching towards Release3 and thanks to hoyhoy, everyone will be getting a custom profile page soon.

So my advise to other hackers out there, don’t be afraid to ask. Ask the YC Hacker News community on what you have been working on and be wonderfully surprised.

2) Emails from users.

The other great motivational factor for me was receiving emails from Simplebucket users. They start off expressing how great Simplebucket was and go on to saying what they thought like to see in future. I can only say “Thank you!” to all who’ve emailed and said “Hi, I love Simplebucket” and everyone email is well-appreciated and I keep all your suggestions in mind.

Its here. Simplebucket release2

Yes, its finally here, after nights of coding and endless css … I’m presenting Simplebucket release2.

What’s so awesome about this release? First of, yes, the admin portion now works. A lot of admin options is now built into the admin interface. You can also page through all your photo uploads with no reloads. Yes – NO RELOADS. Ajax is in the house!

The other feature that got out with release2 is the javascript embed. What’s that? Well if you run your own site, or has blogger, you can embed your photo with notes on it! Yes, it’s what we call a photo widget. Of course, you need to have notes added first on the photo page, then select and copy the code with the “Photo Widget” selection. Paste that onto your page and voila! In fact the example on the main page is a photo widget embedded there!

Now on to other features to make photo sharing more joy:

1) Notice the ShareThis button, just click on it and you can post the photo onto Mixx, Digg, Propeller, etc.

2) How about tipping us for our hard work? You can now do that easily through TipJoy! Just click on the TipJoy button, enter your email and yes, we get a $0.10 tip!

3) Add your comments, start a conversation about the photo.

4) Rate the photo if you like it or even if  you do not like it.. whatever

5) Photo page views… yes, you now will know how many page views your photo got

I think that pretty much sums up all the photo features.

What about account features?

The biggest thing is now you can password protect your account. And this is optional. If you do not password protect your account, you will still be able to access your photo admin page through the super secret url we email you with each uploads. But you may ask, so what the heck does the password protected account do? Well, if you experiencing account or email abuse, for eg, you receive emails for photos that you did not upload with your email address, which means someone else is probably abusing your email address for uploads. Don’t panic, they will not see your super duper secret url. The super duper secret url is only sent to your email address. So only you will know it.

So what’s a password protect account?
Well, it basically means that any upload using that email will required the user to login. There’s just one gotcha, you will need to login first, before you do your upload, if not, you will be redirected to the login page and then you will have to login and do your upload all over again. Once you password protect your account, you cannot unprotect it.

So to protect your account, just access your admin page using your super duper secret url and then click on “My Settings” on the top right hand corner. Type in the password you want to use and you are all set!

OK… That’s a lot of typing.. Anyway, I think release2 is going to be awesome, but I love to hear from you. What you like, what you don’t like, what you like to see in release3. By the way, since I’m the only, yes THE ONLY developer, working on Simplebucket, sometimes it really hard to make sure that everything works right in all browser species. I’ve only been using Firefox for all my browsing, so if you are having any problems with IE8, or predecessor, drop me an email, and I will try to look into it, no promises. But I would tell you to change over to Firefox, yes.. you need to but its your choice.

Simplebucket updates coming soon.

Oh yea it’s been a while since I last wrote anything here…. Things are just fine over…

As a matter of fact, I’ve been working on the upcoming features and upgrades for Simplebucket and it looks very promising…. Anyway, I’ve was beta testing YouNoodle, a site for fostering startups, a while back and added Simplebucket to the lists of startups on their site. I am very happy to find out today that Simplebucket has 40+ followers now on YouNoodle.. and Kris Tate was one of their them .. I’m truely honored.

I’m now more inspired in crunching out our next release and hell yea… it would be definitely be something worth waiting for! Stay tune…

TinyURL blocked by Digg?

TinyUrl is one of the very first small url remapping sites since the very beginning. And all the sudden after reading about a story on Centernetworks on Twitter/TinyUrl, I decided to find out which url is the very first at TinyUrl. And indeed, the first url can be found at http://tinyurl.com/1. So being a Digg fan, I decided to submit TinyUrl first url to Digg as a story, but when I tried to do it, I got the url blocked saying TinyUrl is in violation of Digg’s term of service, what a bummer! I have no idea why Digg is blocking TinyUrl, perhaps they are coming up with something similar or perhaps they are tracking urls? Here’s some images (hosted on SimpleBucket, of course) for your enjoyment. Click through on the images on to see my notes.

SimpleBucket – Reviews and Surprises

The other day, I was having a chat over skype with Thomas, on how well things has been progressing with SimpleBucket and how other things are not. For eg, we got quite a few good reviews from the blogosphere, here’s two excellent reviews if you are curious:

AppScout.com -Simplebucket: Simple, Ad-Free Image Hosting – AppScout

KiilerStartups.com – SimpleBucket.com – Host photos with a good vibe

So it was a great motivation for us to see that people actually think that SimpleBucket is a great app and seeing more people using it. The hardest part is of course getting the message out to everyone out there who is just dying to find a really simple image hosting app with powerful and useful features. If you google for “simple image hosting“, guess who is on the #1, surprise surprise, Google thinks that simple image hosting is US – SimpleBucket. That comes as a great surprise to us since we’ve only launched 2 weeks ago.

Thomas, Tim and myself have great ideas in making SimpleBucket the best damn image hosting app that you will ever need, of course that is a big statement but we think we can achieve that by making little “great” improvements and features over time. As a matter of fact, we are now starting work on the next release for SimpleBucket and hopefully you will see something awesome in the next few weeks .. or maybe sooner!

Simple stats for Simplebucket

Stats is pretty important to me, so I was checking out how many people, how many photos, etc SimpleBucket is serving. So we’re happy to announce we’ve broken the 3 digits milestone. We’ve officially 103 photos uploaded, 71 notes ( which averages to approximately 0.7 notes per photo ), 34 ratings, 29 comments and of 63 users so far.

Even though the numbers seems small but it tells us something really important. Notes is our most used feature, and is the best way to communicate something you want to put forth on your image! So, no big weekend parties for us here to celebrate this important day for this.

Just so you know, we will be working on enhancements for SimpleBucket and hopefully we’ll have a nice surprise for you soon. And oh, don’t forget to vote for SimpleBucket if we’ve make your life better with real simple image hosting!

SimpleBucket reviewed on KillerStartup.com

Hey everyone, finally I’m up on my two feet after 24 hrs of sleep, just kidding. The 48 hrs Rails hackathon was a blast. Sleep was not something we expected to have in the normal capacity, but hey we made it. So I tried googling for SimpleBucket, just to check if the giant indexer of the web has picked up anything about us. Not too bad, googling for simplebucket came up with quite a number of results, more than I had expected since we were only live 72hrs now. To my pleasant surprise, I saw a link to Killerstartup.com. Nice… They reviewed SimpleBucket and pretty much hit the spot in describing what our vision is with SimpleBucket.

“The site is dummy-proof with clear instructions and large readable text. The main page gives the user a few easy steps to start filling up their simple bucket.”

“This site is like a cool person with whom you want to be friends. The vibe is good and it’s a no-brainer. A very important feature is the large font, because it’s embarrassing to have to use bifocals to look at your own photos.”

As we moved on from RailsRumble, we will be taking on bugs ( we’ve found some but nothing major) and working more on features just you SimpleBucket lovers. PEACE OUT.