A postal revolution is on the horizon

Friday the 13th is a day steeped in mystery and superstition. Some people won’t leave their house, and others dare not even get out of bed. People say it’s the day when bad things happen. But we’re excited. It wouldn’t be an over-exaggeration to say that we can’t wait.

After watching the days, months and weeks fly by, we’re almost there: SendSocial is coming.

We’ve been testing our systems internally for quite a while now, and we feel we’re ready to go public. On Friday 13 November, SendSocial will launch in closed beta, before going live to the nation a few days later, on Monday 16 November.

Our recent blog silence hasn’t been because there’s been nothing to report, but quite the contrary. We’ve been so busy making the site look good and work well, agreeing partnership deals and planning world domination that it’s been hard to find time.

So here it is, the update you’ve been waiting for:

Courier partnership
We’ve been working closely with with one of the UK’s leading independent courier networks, myHermes, for a number of months now. myHermes is the consumer arm of Hermes UK, who deliver over 100 million parcels every year, and the partnership gives us national reach.

This collaboration has really brought Ben’s idea to life. myHermes will be able to read our unique, address-less delivery labels, ensuring absolute privacy for our members.

We’ve tried to simplify the postal service too. Our process is easy: as long as you know your recipient’s Twitter ID or email address, you can make a request. Once we hear back from your recipient, you simply confirm the weight of your package, make payment, print our delivery label and wait for myHermes to collect and deliver it.

When Antony first demoed this on our weekly conference call, we were all stunned at how simple and painfully easy the process was, and we’ve had the pleasure of watching an awesome process become amazing as he’s coded upgrade after upgrade, and integrated everything with Marc’s striking designs.

How we compare with Royal Mail
Not only are we easier and less time-consuming to use than Royal Mail, but we’re actually cheaper too – almost half the price in some cases. We will collect and deliver an address-less package weighing up to 2kg for £3.99. At the same weight, Royal Mail will charge you £4.41 for a delivery-only service.

We don’t strike either. Royal Mail already have a backlog of over 30 million items: not a good thing in the run up to Christmas and the busiest postal period of the whole year. Working with myHermes means that we won’t be affected by Royal Mail strike action, and will be able to stick to our 3-5 day delivery period regardless of what the unions decide to do.

Not just on Twitter
When we began working on SendSocial, the intention was to use Twitter as our medium, but we’ll be launching with email too. Email is a universal thing, and we’re confident that it will widen our appeal from the word ‘go’.

I hope this update has given you a taste of what’s to come. We’re counting down the days to launch with excitement. If you’re superstitious, there’s no need to worry – myHermes will collect from your door, so you can experience SendSocial from the comfort (and safety) of your own home.

Jonathan (@groob)

Progress report from the SendSocial team

We have been a bit quiet recently, so here is a short update on how we’re progressing. You’ll be pleased to hear that things are moving smoothly and the entire SendSocial team is working tirelessly towards launch.

Since we last blogged, there have been a number of developments: we are close to partnering with a large delivery company, and our website development and integration with Twitter is going well. The website, which we’ve been working on for a number of months, is really beginning to take shape.

Over the next couple of months we aim to launch a private Beta to those who re-tweeted Ben’s original message during March, then launch a public Beta shortly afterwards. We are looking forward to showing you some sneak-previews of SendSocial shortly!

Kind regards,

The SendSocial Team.

SendSocial Investor Portal is live

We have just opened our Investor Portal – if you Re-Tweeted Ben’s original message about SendSocial, you may now claim your shares!

Simply head over to http://www.sendsocial.com/investor and complete the registration process.

The SendSocial logo

I turned into Color-Man and created a few schemes. As a designer, you’re in the superior role to manipulate people according to your own opinion. If you like one logo and think it’s the best, just make the other logos look boring… of cause, I would dream of doing that, but I must admit that I made a few ugly ones to make the good ones stand out (don’t tell the other guys ). Take a look for yourself:

A logo… it means more than you think. Can you, standing on one foot, explain to me what exactly a logo is, and what all the glamour is good for? At first I could barely mention a thing besides “color” and “shape”, and I’m the designer on this team, Christ!

Anyway, I looked in our dictionary, and as usual it has a pretty neat explanation:

A logo is a graphical element (ideogram, symbol, emblem, icon, sign) that, together with its logotype (a uniquely set and arranged typeface) form a trademark or commercial brand. Typically, a logo’s design is for immediate recognition.[1] The logo is one aspect of a company’s commercial brand, or economic or academic entity, and its shapes, colors, fonts, and images usually are different from others in a similar market. Logos are also used to identify organizations and other non-commercial entities.
Wikipedia – “Logo”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo

Now, one thing is the final result and the importance of it, another thing is the process of creating an “aspect of a company’s commercial brand”. A process can be long or short, and if I were to describe our logo creation process, I would describe it to be a bit longer than expected, since the final logo has been through a lot of thoughts, previews, colors, shapes and considerations; which I guess is pretty standard procedure anyway. Not that we’re not happy about the outcome, we really are – time well spent.

I went through my SendSocial-inbox, and I found some words of inspiration, among our frequent discussions, describing our needs for the logo. 1½ month ago we wanted a logo with arrows (symbolizing logistics), some kind of social element or icon in it (since using our service requires action from both sides), and at the end we wanted the “S” to play a certain role.

My first attempt, with inspiration from @antonystevenson, was this one:

People thought “Okay, that is nice…”, but we weren’t looking for a “Okay, that is nice…”-logo. Giving the S and the arrows a second look, you’ll immediately think of the devil’s tale and

a certain object I don’t want to explain any further (@tombeckenham – team member, SendSocial)

Therefore it was requested that we continued our journey towards an acceptable logo, which I’m very happy we did. I sketched a bit which resulted in following logos:

Looking at these was a start. I mean, we had only considered one logo, so having 4 of them gave inspiration for new thoughts. The clever eye might notice some social elements in the first one, and some in the other ones, but we were not convinced that any of these logos would do what it would take to become the breathtaking “SendSocial Logo” (wow!). We spent a conference call brainstorming, and I grabbed my pencil and paper whereas I began my trip to the lands of logos. The next round of logos was… multifarious in some way.

I sent these around, and we all agreed that inverted arrows were THE thing we had been looking for. With help from Antony, I came up with the following logo, which we decided to be our final one (in black & white):

Now, a polished logo in black & white is cool, useful and (hopefully) recognizable. When you’re making logos for web applications the first part of the process is finished when you got yourself a b/w logo. Upcoming is part two which includes colors and color schemes, and it can now and then be a war in itself to find the right set of colors. I kept my mind positive though, I have worked with these guys for a while now, and no matter what decision we need to make, it WILL be made.

I turned into Color-Man and created a few schemes. As a designer, you’re in the superior role to manipulate people according to your own opinion. If you like one logo to be the best, just make the other ones look boring… of cause, I would never dream of doing that, but I must admit that I made a few less beautiful ones to make the good ones stand out (shh! don’t tell the other guys). Take a look for yourself:

By now you know a little about the SendSocial logo, and my intentions are not to keep you here forever so I’ll make it short. After the color schemes had been sent around we decided to go with the pink/blue scheme (might as well call it the “the Flickr scheme”), but we wanted a few modifications to it. Furthermore, a few ideas from Antony led to another set of schemes, and the last preview I sent the team was this one:

Everyone agreed that one of those would fit SendSocial, but we chose the blue/green logo because WE think it has funkyness, a corporate touch and great colors for the website (speaking of harmony and balance).

So, now you know the story of the SendSocial logo, which in my eyes, fought brave battles and finally reached victory, to the delight for everyone. May it live long and last forever.

Thanks for reading, take care – @marcfalk

Our progress so far…

It may have been a while since we last blogged but fear not, we have been making great progress in getting SendSocial underway!

Since Ben formed the SendSocial team in March, we have met on several occasions in London, as well as having weekly conference calls to consolidate ideas and update the whole team on progress made during the week.

We recently welcomed Simon Campbell (@simon_campbell) onto the SendSocial team. Simon has a wealth of experience in mail and logistics from heading up one of Ben’s other companies, Viapost, and will offer invaluable advice and introductions for the venture.

We now have a development plan and strategy in place, which expands on Ben’s original idea of being able to send physical items to your virtual friends. SendSocial will have some great features you will just love, and we’re really excited about it!

Marc has been busy dreaming up some fantastic ideas for our logo and website design, which we will display here shortly! Antony, Glen and Tom have been meeting regularly in London, designing the way SendSocial will work and meeting people who will help us make it the success we want it to be.

We are now busy working on developing SendSocial, so things are really beginning to take shape. Over the coming months we aim to launch a beta service and will look forward to hearing your feedback so we can continue to make SendSocial the service you want it to be.

In the meantime, hold tight – we will launch our new logo soon and maybe even start giving you a few sneak previews of SendSocial as we develop it!

Kind regards,

@antonystevenson

CTO @sendsocial

You can be a part of this

But first, I’ll introduce myself. I’m Marc. I love colors, the use of colors and the outcome of mixing colors. If I were a superhero, people would call me Color-Man, and I would paint the streets with colors of happiness and anger, because the sweet is never as sweet without the sour. And as you can read, I’m also the designer at SendSocial; a part of the team behind this beautiful service.

It is no secret that we are developing SendSocial as a virtual team . Even though we met through Twitter, discussions, ideas and the progress of this project in general is moving forward, and it’s moving fast. We have been working on this for 6 days now, and we have discovered a lot of situations, challenges and problems about this concept, but the more complications we seem to find the more solutions appear. Though we are a solid team of 5 entrepreneurs, and some of them very talented in their field, we are not the experts, who can say if this is going to work or not, we can only believe in it.

What we need for this project to be a success though, is help and feedback. And this is where you can play an important role in the development of SendSocial, so listen. No one is better at developing a service than users themselves, without their need and use of it, there wouldn’t be a service. Since we haven’t launched SendSocial yet, I understand if it is hard to come up with something, but I will promise you that every suggestion will be discussed and considered, with no exceptions.

So, if you got ideas, thoughts, things you do not understand or anything else, and I mean anything else, then let us know…We’ll be happy to hear from you

Take care – @marcfalk

A business is brewing

In just a few days since the team was formed, there has been plenty of action. We have had our first team call and have already started drafting a plan.

The team consists of 6 talented entrepreneurs – the youngest being just 17. I will be acting as a non-exec director offering commercial and development advice to the team and helping this project come alive.

So rapid is the progress that at one point today, we had 4 people simultaneously editing the google doc of the SendSocial plan.

We are looking at the primary form SendSocial will take. What SendSocial could evolve into is something like PayPal for delivery. It is extremely exciting. As we go, we will be inviting the community to participate even further in the development.

Keep coming back to this page for further news

Very best regards

@tombeckenham

The true power of social networks

I keep being asked what’s so great about Twitter: “it’s just Facebook’s status feeds”, “I don’t want to know what you’re having for breakfast”, etc. etc., but it really plugs an important gap – as the creation of Send Social shows.

The fact that Twitter’s so open means that it’s easy to get in touch with people who you don’t know well enough (or at all) to send an email to. It’s unlike Facebook, which I keep for the preserve of people I know and have met. The creation of Send Social really represents what’s possible when the right platform is there. Ben’s initial idea has, in just a few days, spawned a great team who I’m really looking forward to working with, but none of whom I would be in contact with were it not for Twitter and Ben’s original ‘what do you think of this…’ tweet.

In two days, around 50 emails, brimming with ideas, have been sent around the group, and I can’t imagine how many other creations and similar partnerships Twitter may have created and will go on to create. The social network makes finding the right people easier, and it’s breaking down contact barriers.

It’s fitting that a business being set up to serve the needs of social networks has spawned from one – I wonder if it’s the first?

Looks like sendsocial is a go!

About a week ago I came up with an idea for sending gifts or items to anybody on a social network or email without revealing their address, this could be done anonymously or not.

Within a few days of posting it on Twitter, and coming up with an idea to spread the idea virus by giving anybody who re-twittered the idea a stake in the company, we got responses from all kinds of people and now have over 100 shareholders and counting….

I identified 5 individuals who could add huge value to the business and who were passionate about the idea, I will let them introduce themselves on this blog, but they are now the sendsocial team.

We aim to develop and launch this business in full view of the social community. You can see our communications and ideas on this blog and we will extend these tools so you can input into the business too. We value collaboration over competition so if you have advice or ideas throw them into the mix, we would love you to get involved.

More information on the actual idea can be found on www.benway.co.uk where it was discussed modified and developed. Before commenting on this blog please read the www.benway.co.uk blog as this will answer a lot of the questions regarding security, safety and how it works ect

I look forward to working with my new team and with you.

Yours Sincerely

Ben Way