Martin Wells

The cosy little world that is Tangler has been shattered… we hired a marketing guy!

Tangler’s new Chief Marketing Guy is Mick Liubinskas (that’s him in the Santa suit). He joins us from previous gigs as the CMO of Sharman Networks (makers of Kazaa), helping kids in Africa and more recently, Zapr.

Mick and I have known each other for a while and I’ve always had respect for his ability to turn innovation into need. Most importantly: he gets 2.0. He gets community. He gets Tangler.

Over the years, I’ve think I’ve directly hired more than a hundred people. Most of the time I knew within the first 3 minutes if they were the right person for the job — after those 3 minutes I’m looking for reasons they’re not. I had that feeling about Mick and my impression has only improved as we’ve gotten to know each other better.

I’m really psyched Mick has decided to join us. He’s an experienced guy who could have had pretty much the pick of startups at the moment: including starting his own thing. His belief in Tangler and the team is great to see.

Dinner 2.0 is a Sydney event designed to bring together people involved in local ‘next web’ companies.

Another one was held tonight and with some slightly too expensive [but very nice] food, alcohol, VCs, startups, consultants, and a location like the Centennial Hotel, you get a great setting for 3-4 hours of chatter on all things next web. Another great night with some fantastic people.

Thanks to everyone who attended. I was repeatedly told people had a great time, so I’m obliged to believe them! Next one should be late October, bigger and better. Maybe I’ll organize some startup demos (hmm… a Tangler preview perhaps…)

Attendees (which grew rather suddenly on me when everybody called at the last minute to ‘just squeeze in a friend’):

• Peter Crowe (Quotify)
• Marc Woodward (Neo Technology Partners)
• Vivian Stewart (Hall Capital)
• Kerry Pynor (TMD)
• Rhandy Lado (Tangler)
• Yorke Hindes (Zookoda)
• Mike Cannon-Brookes (Atlassian)
• Michael Liubinskas (Zapr)
• Mike Zimmerman (Technology Venture Partners)
• Nick McNaughton (Zookoda)
• Timothy Hughes (netus)
• Paul McCarney (Quotify)
• Jeff Cotter (Simurban)
• Craig Baker (Tangler)
• Alex von Kotze (Tangler)
• Ben Hamey (Simurban)

All the photos are here.

Tangler is hiring again. Our Sydney office needs another web 2.0 developer.

Must have:

• Web standards awareness
• Cross platform / browser awareness
• Ability to create pixel perfect layouts
• CSS, HTML, XHTML, AJAX, DHTML, Javascript
• Java, JSP, JSP tags

Nice to have:

• An eye for graphic design
• Experience in Photoshop / Illustrator, Spring Web MVC (or equivalent), DWR
• Javascript libraries like Prototype, JQuery, Script.aculo.us

Send an email to jobs at tangler.com if you’re interested.

So after considerable effort, endless refinements, complete about faces and six months of time, here's Tangler's new logo.

Thanks to Rhandy Lado for his considerable effort and skill managing this to reality and to the team at Loaded, who ultimately did all the hard work in taking our requirements — "well it's gotta be a chaos, but organised… you know, tangled up simplicity" — and turning it into something both athestically pleasing, simple and unique all at the same time. Well done… we love it.

TechCrunch, Web 2.0’s mother ship, continues to go from strength to strength, and for good reason. Michael Arrington is doing a fantastic job in a position earned through knowledge, respect and hard work — not through the blessing of a media mogul (how very web 2.0ish).

As the industry’s primary information gateway, it’s about time we saw some awards (“The Crunchies”), so in the hope to spur things along here’s my suggestion for categories:

• Best New Product
• Most Promising Startup
• Most Promising New Product
• Best Innovation
• People’s Choice for New Product – based on votes
• Best Web 2.0 Podcast
• Best Web 2.0 Blog
• The Nik Cubrilovic Award for Contribution to the Industry (cannot be awarded to Nik)

We could get a little more specific as well, however I’m not sure specific product categories (like Best Calendar) would work, so maybe some more abstract ones based on user value:

• Best Productivity Application
• Best Collaboration Tool
• Best Information Management Tool
• Best Communication Tool
• Best Information Retrieval Tool
• Best Group Communications Product That Starts With the Letter T

Now it can’t all be down to Mike’s choice, so we need a panel of industry experts who vote on the nominations made by everyone. My post will get too long if I start listing who those people might be, so feel free to comment.

And finally, no awards are complete without an extravaganza dinner, complete with red carpet arrivals and supermodel presenters; maybe Amanda Congdon could host it.

Of course, somebody has to then start the alternative piss-take awards (“The Crunched”). This could be held on the same night across town. Awards should include:

• Best Commenter Without A Blog
• Most Hyped Non-Product
• The Microsoft Award for Best Web 3.0 Product (they’ve already moved on from 2.0)
• Most Money Raised Without a Product
• Best Funding Deal (no details will be disclosed, and you will have never heard of the winner)
• Best Web 1.0 Pr… Never mind, that’s so ‘05.
• Best Definition of Web 2.0

So come on Mike, embrace your destiny.

Tangler turned 1 the other day — whilst we’ve been working at this for about 18 months, we became an “official” incorporated entity 12 months ago.

So we threw a hugely expensive silicon valley style internet startup mega-bash involving the entire team (all 7 of us) and a small muffin.

It’s been a great year, and in hindsight I think we’ve done exactly what we set out to acheive: concentrate as much as possible on realising the vision and building a great product foundation for the future. That’s been acheived with a minimum of distraction.

Thanks to a great team of stunningly bright and motivated people (Rhandy Lado, Alexander von Kotze, Scott Garnett, Craig Baker, Phong Mai and Minh Tran).

Can’t wait for the next 12 months…

Ask any number of people off the street what their ultimate goal in life is and most likely 9 out of 10 won’t tell you they want to be featured by Amanda Congdon on Rocket Boom. Actually most have probably not even heard of Rocket Boom. For the rest of us though (and I mean that in a very non-elitist-you’ll-be-a-fan-soon kinda way) it was lovely to see Tangler have 15ns of fame during today’s feature (watch carefully about 60 seconds in). I wonder if Amanda will talk to me at parties now…

Tangler was featured on TechCrunch yesterday and I have to thank Nik for a great write-up, especially considering the little information we were letting him release. We’ve since received nearly a thousand tester registrations (in under 24 hours), as well as lots of emails and calls – amazing what one blog post can do for a startup.

I’m really pleased with how much Nik “got” our product concepts, especially in understanding the uniqueness of what we’re trying to do and the technology behind it. Being a new concept makes it hard to describe sometimes, and people tend to leap to conclusions. Nik took the time and had the ability to understand the difference (and no, we are not simply an ajax web chat system – not that I have anything against web chat systems).

When Nik first suggested we disclose some details on TechCrunch I was concerned it was still too early for us. I’ve seen startups get bubbled up on hype (with no substance), so I wanted to make sure people didn’t perceive us this way. Ultimately though we can’t do this alone, and the chance to attract some quality testers and other support was too good to pass up. After seeing the flurry in the past 24 hours I can’t thank him enough.
Anyway, enough gushing.

Thanks also to Ravneet from Emergintex and Ahmed Bilal, who both did some congitating on what instant grouping might mean for the future.