Bearbook

Bearbook heads back to class

After a bit of a late start in August, Bearbook is back in full force for the Fall semester.

We’ve made some big improvements to the backend of Bearbook, which will make new features quicker to appear, and course information more detailed and reliable.

Appearance

We’ve updated the interface with a new navigation menu and upload button. We’ve also tidied up the timetable information, and allowed you to see who’s available in your breaks right inside the timetable!

 

Search

Quickly find anything on Bearbook with the new search bar. Find classmate timetables, professors, and soon: courses and textbooks.

Course Info

Thanks to improved access to the University course database, we are now able to provide better course info. Stay tuned for more features in this area.

Magic Table

Building timetables on Beartracks is a big pain. MagicTable, an experimental feature, makes it a breeze. Type in the courses you need, and Bearbook will provide you with several different timetable options. Use the visual guides to find a schedule that fits your lifestyle: morning classes, evening classes, short or long school days. It even shows you which friends you would be matched up with!

Remember, MagicTable is an experimental feature. It might not always work perfectly. Consult the University Calendar or an academic advisor if you aren’t sure about a particular course option.

As always, Bearbook Books is still available and the classic ability to find the friends in your classes is still there. So what are you waiting for? Upload your timetable to Bearbook now, and get connected!

Bearbook breaks 4k users, begins FB Ad Campaign

Congratulations Bearbookers, you’ve done it again! Exceeding all our hopes and dreams, we now have well over 4000 installations of Bearbook on Facebook. It’s been great to see the timetable updates roll in from existing users in preparation for Winter semester as well.

Bearbook broke our Goal-o-meter once again!

In other Bearbook news, we’ve been playing around with Facebook Ads for a day or two. I found some free startup credit online, so if you aren’t already a Bearbook user, you might see it show up on your Ad bar.

Yuri has been hard at work bringing Bearbook into iframe world (we love Facebook…), and we hope to push it out in January. Coming up after that will be some great new features, so stay tuned! Hope you had a great semester, and best of luck on all your exams U of A.

Bearbook brings demo back!

After attending Edmonton’s DemoCamp for more than a year now, I was extremely excited to present Bearbook in front of Edmonton’s tech community tonight alongside chief programmer Yuri Sulyma. DemoCamp was one of the main reasons why I really felt motivated to develop Bearbook, in the hopes of someday presenting it alongside the awesome projects that came before me.

Going into tonight, Yuri and I joked that we would be bringing “demo back” by just giving a straight up demo of a project we’d been working on, minus some of the business jargon that seemed to have crept in over the year. (And I quote: “it’s a social media engine!”)

We got an absolutely amazing response both immediately on the twittersphere and afterwards at the meet-up. Here were some of our favorite comments:

@kenbautistaI like these Bearbook guys. Keep it simple, get users.

@kevin_swan I could see Bearbook scaling across tons of universities and colleges if expanded beyond the U of A. 5 Retweets

@BranigansLaw Great presentation on BearBook. Very unique idea, pure tech inspiration, embodiment of #democampyeg

@danaditomaso BearBook app for Facebook is really well done, kudos!

@dserink Bearbook definitely the best demo so far tonight – to me, this really embodies the spirit of #democampyeg

@outinc Ok #UofA students. If you haven’t checked out BearBook on FB, do it. I’m not a student and I want to be on it. #verycool

I also kinda saw this one coming as soon as I started logging into BearTracks…

@outinc Dude’s password is like 25 characters long, the entire room was impressed. #democampyeg

So thanks democampers, it was a really great experience, and it’s a huge encouragement to keep going and develop more projects to share. Hopefully we brought a bit of “demo back” too!

Bearbook.ca Now Online

This morning it occurred to me that Bearbook needed a presence outside of the world of Facebook. We’ll be posting flyers for Bearbook around Campus later this week in our first real ad campaign, and it occurred to me that people might be Googling “Bearbook” in order to find it. Unfortunately Bearbook of the dot com variety is definitely not our product. So I plan to try and take over them with my super awesome SEO skills (ok, not really) and at least make an attempt to Bearbomb them. Thus, I’m proud to introduce Bearbook.ca!

It’s not much right now, but keep in mind I went from domain registration to jQuery all in one day. Be sure to keep Feeding, Tweeting, and Discussing Bearbook, and its mini-promo-website Bearbook.ca!

Bearbook Doubles its User Base, Hits 2000

Holy cow you guys, we just doubled our user base in just 15 days. It was so quick I didn’t even post anything since the last time I updated my blog. Holy schmoly!

Also during that time, we’ve been tweaking Bearbook’s look. It is now officially out of beta, and notifications now let you know when someone has joined a class of yours. Keep spreading the word Bearbookers!

Bearbook Reaches 1000 Users

Some of you may remember (or use) a Facebook application Yuri & I launched a few months back, Bearbook. I’m happy to report that we now have over 1000 registered users on Facebook, with more than 1/3 of the users having uploaded their Fall 2010 schedules. We’re absolutely thrilled by the response so far, and look forward to growing our user base even more this fall as Ualberta students get back into the swing of things.

So what’s next for Bearbook? We’re experimenting with better and even simpler ways of getting your schedule into Bearbook. Also, we’ve been thrilled by the response in the ualberta tech community over the University of Alberta iPhone App (NO affiliation with it whatsoever) and are happy to see that demand is vibrant for helpful online tools for students at U of A.

If you haven’t heard of Bearbook, be sure to check us out on Facebook!