Patrick de Laive

It’s really hectic at the improvised Fleck office at 32nd street and Broadway. After the party I’ve been mailing almost all night long, to finally waking up with my head on my keyboard and an open email to my girlfriend looking something like this:

Hi amorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreeeeeeeeihujjjjjkkkkkk kkkkkkhdfcccokoooooooooooooooodjjnnnnnnnnnffn

My powerbook was soaking wet (When I’m really tired I drool, sorry). Then at 6:15 one of our investors called, so I was awake instantly .

A lot of stories are written about Fleck. Check out the Techcrunch review with the great headline: Fleck offres zero friction web annotation

For my Dutch readers check out my comments on the Emerce post

It’s a great, but very long day. It’s time for my daily burger!

I just got of the phone with Remco Tomesen of emerce. It was a 40 minute interview about the launch of Fleck. 40 minutes at a rate of 2 EURO per minute is like 100 bucks (dollars) for the phone call.

I’m not sure if this is my most expensive phone call ever, but it will for sure be in the Top 5! At least its my most expensive interview:)
I hope it’ll be worth my Benny!

My mobile phone refuses to mail, so no pictures here. But we’ve changed sceneries. We left the suite 804 in Amsterdam and opened up our computers at 43 West and 32nd street (at the corner of Broadway) in a coffee bar next to our hotel.
We got ourselves a 25 dollar internet connection and took over the place with computers, camera’s, phones and iPods sucking electricity out of the wall.
Arjen got really sick this morning. I hope he will be able to make it to the party tonight.

I’m going to buy some permanent markers and grab a burger (rumor goes that Americans know how to make good burgers I’m gonna find out in a minute)

For the TechCrunch party I ordered a very nice white suit at Otto.nl (with the intention to order 4 suits in total for the Fleck Launch). Otto is an online store where you can buy a lot of stuff and among it this nice Berto Lucci Suit! (White size 98).
They deliver within 10 days (if its your first order). But as always when you really need something, the shit hit the van. After 5 days I called Otto to ask about the status of my new Fleck Suit. They told me that my address was not correct so they could not deliver (As if I wouldn’t know my correct address!!!). Of course the address was correct but I asked to deliver it at the Fleck office, as I’m here day and night. “AHA!”, the lady told me, “we don’t deliver at offices”. That is pretty stupid, right, but no worries We still had 15 days until take off, so I gave her my home address.
Today I called again to check if everything was OK.

Guess what!! They don’t deliver to home addresses where multiple people live!
So I asked if she could switch the address (keep the same order) into Boris’ address. That was possible but it would take another 10 days to deliver.
They don’t take credit card payments, iDeal, Paypal, or any other online payment system!!! And they call themselves an internet warehouse?

So, if anyone out there is customer at Otto, please order my suit (you’ll have it within 1 day). Of course I’ll pay back the whole 48,99 euro including transport costs, but you’ll get a free Fleck Gold account as well (and I owe you one).
All others that have their own suit company and want to help us out, your more than welcome!

The Otto had a great flat screen incident last week. In the Fleck office this is already called the White Suit incident

Today the Fleck extension for firefox is ready. You can install it in Firefox 1.5 and 2.0. But I have to tell you that you still have to wait for 10 days until you can actually do something with it. The extension you can download is a test for us if everything is working ok.

Once we will put the beta service live you don’t have to download it again, it just works.

So if you have 10 seconds, get Fleck here

thanks!

I haven’t been able to post a lot this week. We were all working very hard (late hours). But, we’re progressing! I can’t wait to show Fleck to you!

At the Fleck office we are all Firefox users and as you can read in my previous post, the extension is working in Firefox. Of course we are aware of the fact that still 80 % of the world uses Internet Explorer (I believe my dad even thinks that the e on his desktop IS the Internet -no offense dad, your the best!-), so an IE version of Fleck is high on our wish list. AND….. as of today it is actually working in IE!

Thanks Wouter

The extension seems to be getting ready. I’m working on the finishing touches right now. As you can see in the image the extension installs a Fleck button in the menubar. When you click it it adds a Fleck to the page you are currently visiting.

I a few days, or as soon as I’m done, I’m going to ask some of you to install the extension. It will not offer all of the functionality yet and will just show a nearly empty page when you click it but it will enable us to test if it installs correctly and might help finding the first bugs.

So, if you are interested in helping with that just let me know here in the comments or send me a message by mail.