Blog
Looking for beta testers
Hi there! We’re happy to announce that our upcoming iPhone app – SongMix – has entered the beta testing phase. If you have an iPhone/iPod Touch running iOS 4.1 (or higher) and you’re interested in testing this cool new app you can register as a beta tester using this link. Thanks!
NextRoot at RestartRomania
Last weekend we attended the RestartRomania hackhaton in Bucharest. RestartRomania, a partnership between the United States Embassy and the NetSquared pillar of TechSoup in Romania, tries to demonstrate the power of using the web for social change projects in Romania. Romania is proving to Central and Eastern Europe that online platforms can create serious offline change.
Over the course of the event more than 140 projects were submitted and nine of them got to the final. Our team got the ‘Ghid Practic Anticoruptie‘ (Practical AntiCorruption Guide) project proposed by Oana Dan, Cristina Stoica and Vlad Stoicescu. After a weekend full with Coke, Red Bull, celery and carrots we managed to create a little platform for reporting corruption cases. With the help of the Grey G2 team the site got itself a new identity – Dispari.ro.
The site allows you to report bribes you paid/you were requested to pay at public institutions in Romania or to see all the corruption cases reported. The site also contains a blog and a map that displays the corruption level in each of Romania’s counties. HotNews.ro covered this event and here is a little interview on this project.
We are currently working on a mobile version of the site to ease up the process of reporting bribes. This event was a huge challenge for us and we very happy to be a part of it. The project will be present at a pitching event on the 4th of November and we wish the idea leaders the best of luck in winning this competition!
New office
Howdy! It’s been almost 2 months now since our last blog post. Exciting things have happend in the meantime.
First of all, we took the decision to work on this startup full-time. We had a couple of things to sort out before taking this decision and that is one of the reasons we were not as active on this blog as we used to be. We now have one month since we moved in the Timisoara Software Business Incubator, where we now have a stable office.
Some updates regarding Instamap – it got featured in Gizmodo (as App of the Day for iPad on August 29) and CNET. We were very excited as this kind of news drive us forward. We are planning a new update for Instamap (probably in the next month) in order to be compatible with iOS 5. We also want to fix a couple of issues our users reported and maybe include some new features.
Last but not least, we’re pretty excited with the project we’re working on right now. We’re going to announce details regarding this new app in the following weeks. Meanwhile I can assure you it’s going to be a fun and entertaining app (at least that’s what we believe) so stay tuned!
User profiles come to Instamap!
Today we launched the 1.2 update for Instamap. Here are the new features included in this update:
- User profiles: this was one of the most requested feature and it’s finally here. Whenever you’re browsing through a set of photos you can tap the avatar of the author to bring in the profile view. This view includes information about the author as well as two options (Subscribe and Follow user) and the last photos posted on Instagram.
- User subscriptions: along with the location, venues and tag subscriptions you can now create user subscriptions that allow you to see the photos in real-time.
- You can now follow somebody on Instagram straight from Instamap.
- We fixed the ‘Add tag subscription’ bug which occurred on some iPad devices.
- Other bug fixes and improvements.
We would like to thank you for all the support and feedback you provided and we hope we’re one step closer into having a better Instagram client with this update.