Minekey Lunch 2.0 was an tremendous success. The 263 guests chowed down to BBQ food on the Plug and Play Tech Center Patio. Everyone seemed to enjoy the DJ’ed music, informal networking and presentation by CEO Delip Andra of Minekey’s Recommendations Widget. Guests included engineering, marketing, operations and investment folk from all corners of the Valley. Thanks to Terry, David, Joseph, Mark and Jeremiah of Lunch 2.0 for helping organize the event.

For more photos, see the Lunch 2.0 portfolio on Flickr.

We’re excited about the new set of features added to the Minekey website today, which we’re sure will increase the value of our widget to bloggers, publishers and end users.

New features include:

• Widget Gallery. The Gallery makes it easy for you to syndicate personalized widgets. By creating widgets for the Gallery that display content from your blog, you can secure exposure to a much wider audience.

• OPML Support. In just a few simple steps, you can now display relevant content from your favorite sources in Minekey widgets. By uploading your OPML files, you can quickly create widgets that display content from your blogroll.

• Network. Profile your blog and browsing interests, and showcase your widgets.

• My Reports. We’ve improved the charts significantly and now make available statistics, including the capability for you to track how many of your widgets are being used by other bloggers.

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.

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