If you’re in the Bay Area, please join the Minekey crew at our Sunnyvale offices for a Lunch 2.0 on Thursday, September 6.

Started as an informal and regular gathering of Silicon Valley tech workers in corporate cafeterias, Lunch 2.0 has rapidly evolved through word-of-mouth into a national series of events.

As told in the Wall Street Journal today, Lunch 2.0 “has grown into a social-networking phenomenon that now draws hundreds of engineers, venture capitalists, and even summer interns to various companies for free meals and conversation.”

Come out and learn more about Minekey, network with a really interesting mix of people, and enjoy the delicious lunch provided by our co-host and landlord, the Plug and Play Tech Center.

To RSVP, go to either the event listing on Upcoming.org, or search for the Minekey Lunch 2.0 event listing on Facebook.

This past weekend Delip Andra and Alex Gault took part in the Palo Alto Barcamp — a self-organizing two day conference for technologists and startup companies, with programming supplied ad hoc by the attendees themselves and a schedule devised on the fly. There was an amazing exchange of energy and new ideas between the 1,000+ participants.

Several companies located around the same block in downtown Palo Alto — including Socialtext, IDEO, Edgeio, Searchspark and EchoSign — donated their offices as meeting spaces.

Alex gave a 5 minute presentation at DemoCamp on Saturday evening, the one pre-scheduled session at the conference. First, Alex demo’ed the widget installation process, emphasizing how easy it is to customize and install the widget onto a blog. Then he demonstrated how the widget works on a blog — dynamically presonalizing content, as he clicked on blog entries or links in the widget itself.

This neighborhood in Palo Alto is densely populated with startups. Just around the corner, Facebook will be hosting the Facebook Developer Garage on August 25, which Minekey will also attend.

Rajiv and James here at Gnomedex in Seattle, anyone who is in town for the event please stop by the Minekey booth Friday or Saturday just outside the main conference hall to pick up your fresh bananas and share your feedback on our free personalized recommendations beta widget for your blog.

“Fresh bananas” is our term for the personally relevant and always surprising (we hope) content we will discover for your readers. Get ‘em while they last!

Following several months of beta deployments of the Minekey widget by over 800 bloggers, last week the widget was officially launched. Since, we’ve been delighted with the great feedback we’ve received from many bloggers and other users – including Techcrunch, Mashable and Webware.

To keep you all well informed on our progress, here’s a short list of the new features we rolled out with the launch:

1. New User Interface for our website. We’ve introduced a more sophisticated design, including more instructional information and a framework built to accommodate a host of other exciting features that will be introduced in the coming months.
2. New Widget styles. Now you can choose between three widget designs – Cheerful, Grey and Full Customizable. The cheerful option is more colorful, and to date the most popular. Look for yourself.
3. Dashboard. Our Dashboard page gives a snapshot of the following core features available to you:
1. My Widgets – Here you can configure your widgets. If you need to add feeds or change the style and colors, you can do so by just clicking on the relevant widget.
2. My History – Anyone who has signed into the Minekey website is able to view a history of all the articles they’ve visited which sport Minekey blogs. So even if you’re not a blogger, this is a good reason to sign up with Minekey. Stay tuned for some really exciting updates to this section of the website that will soon be available.
3. My Reports – We’ve received lots of feedback on the usefulness of Minekey’s analytics. Don’t miss out on this feature if you host a blog. The statistics we offer on the behavior of your visitors will definitely add precision to any efforts you make to profile your users and their interests.

We could on and on about everything else, but We’ll leave it up to you sign up, create a widget and take full advantage of Minekey’s features.

We’d like to give full acknowledgements to the hard work of our 2 teams in India. They worked tirelessly to get this out before the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit

Raymond
Product Manager