We're back !

27 October 2009

Yet another start at Drivemeup, here the story… This adventure began during a ‘friendly’ poker party almost 3 years ago. There we were, yet another burgeoning team of student-friends looking for Master’s thesis ideas. We wanted to find a project which would be useful to regular folks, like the ones you find out of school, as well as for nerds like us.

After several brainstorming sessions, we still could not find a way to bring about peace on earth (we really did try but it was kind of hard…), cure cancer, help people buy and sell things online ( wait a minute it has been done! ) , …

All along our studies, we met the moning in a café, to talk about anything, uber-geeky or not and reinventing the world. We always finished in a car to go to high-school that was far from our appartments. And a day, Louis had an idea (so inusual !), “Why not helping people to move ? in the same way we do it … met at a point and share a car … carpooling !”. We deeply thought about that and had some really kick-ass ideas.

So, we started to think and build a carpooling website which would help people build an online ridesharing community. That’s why we thought about this community as very social network-oriented one, with the capability of creating events, groups, inviting friends, …

After few months of intense development and a growing addiction to coffee… the first prototype was born! Bugs, a not very clear navigation scheme, a controversial (contentious) site design… in short, lots of progress but still a big mess. But yes the idea was there! Initially, we attracted some users but the site was arguably half-baked enough to not be too attractive and we clearly did not have enough experience to make a convincing case for users at that early time in the project.

Today, after growing a thick skin by surviving many jobs in the .com arena, along with a firmly acquired addiction to coffee, we’re back ! (not in black). After following developments in the carpooling and carsharing communities very closely all these years, and learning new and smarter ways to build web applications, we decided to give Drivemeup a well dissevered fresh start.
Our new roadmap is as easy as: Keep it simple!
We began development a few weeks ago, we prepared an action plan and we are working hard on a new release.

We’ll be launching in 2010.

We do have a lot more to share as well. If you’d like to stay connected to what’s happening with Drivemeup, you can subscribe to this blog’s feed, follow us on Twitter here, or signup for a preview and we’ll let you know as soon as it’s ready.