StartUpLA Starts Today

Hi Everyone,

I've been meaning to post about this for quite a while, but I didn't want to until I was sure it was going to happen and that I was going to attend. Anyway, the LA tech conference called StartUpLA starts today at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. This is the first tech conference that I have been to in a while as E3 has been pretty much demolished, and CES isn't until January. The Southwest Computer User Group in July was quite a bit of fun, but other than that I haven't been able to get to attend TechCrunch40, Web 2.0 Conference, D Conference, etc. The biggest reason I haven't been able to attend any of these great conferences is their location either down in San Diego for the D Conference or up North in the San Francisco area for the others. Whenever you have to go on a trip the costs become incredible as you have to eat out, pay for the hotel, and pay for the airplane ticket on top of the conference fee. Well StartUpLA is looking to bring the tech conference to local LA start-ups and investors.

The cost is quite reasonable if you are local to the area, and the conference has some great sessions lined up, and what should make for quite the interesting chat with Jason Calacanis.

Friday – Oct 26^th 2007 – A half day of invited panel speakers

• 1:00pm-1:30pm: Registration - Venue: Alumni Plaza
• 1:30pm-2:25pm: Welcome & Keynote Speaker
• 2:35pm-3:25pm: Parallel sessions
• Topic 1: Raising Money (Venue: B313)
• Topic 2:Top 10 Legal Mistakes (Venue: C301)
• 3:35pm-4:25pm: Parallel sessions
• Topic 3: Marketing 101 (Venue: B313)
• Topic 4: Technology Infrastructure (Venue: C301)
• 4:35pm-5:25pm: Parallel sessions
• Topic 5: Success Stories: How to succeed in today global market (Venue: B313)
• Topic 6:Networking How-to (Venue: C301)
• 5:25 – 6:25pm: Fireside Chat with Jason Calacanis (Venue: Alumni Plaza)
• 6:25 – 7:30pm: Network reception (Drinks & Appetizers)

___________

Saturday – Oct 27^th 2007 – Day of unconference

• 9:05am-10:05am: Networking
• 10:05am-10:55am:: First round of Open Space sessions (Venues: A202 & D313)
• 11:05am-12:05pm: Fast Pitch Competition (Venue: Alumni Plaza)
• 1:05pm-1:55pm: Second round of Open Space sessions (Venues: A202, D313, B301)
• 2:05pm-2:55pm: Third round of Open Space sessions (Venues: A202, D313, B301)
• 3:05pm-3:55pm: Fourth round of Open Space sessions (Venues: A202, D313, B301)
• 3:55pm-4:15pm: Announcement of Fast Pitch Winner and Closing Remarks (Venue: Alumni Plaza)

So if any of those sessions sound interesting to you, and you have a free Friday/Saturday afternoon there are still a few tickets left. I'll be at the event from about 3PM until 7:30PM today (Friday October 26th), and tomorrow (Saturday October 27th) from 10:30AM until 12:30PM.

Hope to see you there. If you do decide to attend be sure to contact me so we can meet up.

Have a great weekend,

-Brad Jashinsky
CEO/CoFounder of
Reimagine Memories

Internet is Out in Our City

Update: As of 9:50PM we are back-up and running. I apologize again for the short outage, and I will be talking to the cable company ASAP to see why our Internet Connection went down. If you have any questions contact us at: http://www.ReimagineMemories.com/contact

Thank you for using Reimagine Memories,

-Brad

Hi Everybody,

I wanted to let all of you know that the Cable Internet for the entire city is out right now (At home I have DSL, which is what I'm on right now), and has been for the past 20 minutes (It's 9:40 Pacific Time on Wednesday). Once the outage happened all of us at the company get text messaged and then all began to man the battle stations by coming in at this late hour. We got there to find our systems are working perfect so we call the cable company (They provide our Internet connection), and were told the entire city is out right now. I wanted to let you know that we are down, and we have no ETA of when we will be back up. With such a big outage affecting so many people I doubt it will be long. All of our systems are working wonderfully and will be back online as soon as the Internet connection is restored to Simi Valley, CA.

Sorry about the outage, I wish it was our problem so we could fix it.

I'll let you know when everything is back up,

-Brad Jashinsky
CEO/CoFounder of
Reimagine Memories

Free Upgrade to 500MB of Storage Space

Happy Labor Day Weekend Everyone,

To coincide with Labor Day we are ironically working this weekend on adding new features and switching over to our new Internet Service Provider. The most exciting feature is we are upgrading everyone's free accounts to 500MB of storage space and every new account will also receive 500MB of storage instead of our previous 100MB of space. We know how much digital media all of you have, and how that media continues growing more and more making 100MB of space just not enough anymore. We heard your cries for more space and decided to implement the 500MB of space to satisfy your digital needs. As the site continues to grow we will continue upgrading accounts every few months, but if you have a ton of files the best option is to sign-up for our Premium Account to receive unlimited space.

The next exciting news is that this weekend our amazing Chief Technical Officer, Daniel Story, is reinstating the edit and delete features that have been missing from the site for the past couple weeks due to our platform switchover. Those as well as a quick login button on the front page should be added to the site by Tuesday. We also have a ton of other features in the pipeline right now such as more tutorials, an easy to use sharing page that allows you to post your files on other sites, public profile pages, and much more. This weekend will also mark the beginning of our first set of ad campaigns, which will run all throughout September.

The last development of note over here at the Reimagine Memories' headquarters is we have switched providers. We no longer are hosting the site in a third-party data center, but instead at our own data center at our offices. All of the servers are in the brand new rack system from APC that we got last month, and we have new servers along with much more capacity. Our new Internet Provider is Time Warner Cable, which allows us to grow our bandwidth with just a quick phone call. With back-up battery power along with a gas generator as well as full earthquake mounting protection and fire protection, you can be assured your files are safe with us. We also do full back-ups all of the time to insure that even if our office was attacked by aliens your files would still be safe.

And on that note have a great and safe Labor Day weekend. Be sure to share all of your memories from this weekend using http://www.ReimagineMemories.com

Thanks for Reading,

-Brad Jashinsky
CEO/Cofounder of
http://www.ReimagineMemories.com

Reimagine Memories In the Business Section of the Paper

Those are scans of the front-page of the business section of the Monday Edition of the Los Angeles Daily News with the red box I placed on top of it containing the little blurb article about Reimagine Memories. Waking up on Monday morning and seeing this while browsing through the paper was unbelievably exciting and validated the work that we have done over the past two years. The text of the article is:

"Simi Valley-based Reimagine Memories recently launched its Web site, www.reimaginememories.com, where members can share video, sound, text and image memories with people around the world for free. Reimaginememories.com also offers a premium service that allows members to upload an unlimited number of memories and to use the Memories Through the Mail system. This system allows members to mail their CDs, tapes, records and photos to Reimagine Memories for them to digitally convert and upload to the member's account."

I hope this will be the first of many occurrences for Reimagine Memories in the media.

Stay tuned,

-Brad Jashinsky
CEO/Co-Founder of
Reimagine Memories

Reimagine Memories at the Southwest Computer User Group Conference

We went down to San Diego on Friday, July 13th, and spent the rest of the weekend at the Southwest Computer User Group Conference (SWUGC) where we finally launched Reimagine Memories to the public. We attended the conferences and dinners with the attendees, and during these were able to meet some really passionate computer users. By far the most fun was the vendor faire where we had a booth fully-decked out in an Island theme featuring an inflatable palm tree, inflatable monkey, grass table skirt, beach balls, and surfing music to complete the theme. It was incredibly popular with the attendees and we saw the most foot traffic as our sweepstakes was a big draw for people to come all the way to the back of the convention center to visit our booth.

I personally gave about 20-30 complete demos of the site and pitched it at least 150 times to eager attendees who wanted to know what Reimagine Memories was about. We generated a lot of interest, got a few hugs, gave away a ton of stuff, and had the other vendors jealous of the attention we were receiving. By popular demand we gave away both the palm tree and monkey to attendees with the monkey being especially popular with the woman who one it. So much so she ran up, gave it a hug, and gave the monkey it's own sit at the table. It was moments like that, which made the weekend unforgettable despite all of the hard work that went into it.

Special thanks to Derek Palmer who is a honorary RM employee and a best friend of mine for coming down to San Diego and helping me out all weekend. Couldn't have done it without you.

Check out the booth pictures below.

We hope to be back next year,

-Brad Jashinsky
CEO/Co-Founder of
Reimagine Memories


Check out the pictures that we took:

Other booths next to us

Buffet Eating Area for the Attendees

Our booth with our inflatable palm tree, and our poster
advertising Memories Thorough the Mail

Another poster advertising Reimagine Memories at our booth

3 computers showing off our website (2 Macs, 1 PC, all running FireFox)

Our inflatable monkey with an RM shirt on it. Along with our fortune cookie,
beach balls, and poster giveaways. Also our sweepstakes entry forms.

Inflatable Monkey with the RM Shirt

Our whole booth

Another picture of our booth

Moving Our Datacenter In-House

Hi Everyone,

Reimagine Memories started life on our personal computers, specifically Dan's machine (Our CTO), where he hosted the site during our first months of development. As we entered the alpha stage of development I purchased an old E-Machine Computer from a friend for $100 that finally gave us a dedicated computer for our site. My great ISP, DSLExtreme, allows for sites to be hosted through their DSL connection, which is exactly what I did. I ran some wire to the back of a closet in my family room, and hooked up the E-Machine Computer, and then we began to offer hosting services to our first testing members (TBSUnion.com). A month or so after moving the server to my house my Vonage phone that runs through the same Internet connection began to stop working, and causal browsing had become slow and difficult due to how much traffic we were getting. I soon began looking for an outside service to host with, and that's when I was referred to a local place only minutes from my house. After visiting many data centers around the state I decided to choose SiteServer, and bought a new server to put into their data center.

Now after a nearly a year at SiteServer as Reimagine Memories has now finally opened to the public and is offering premium services we have made the decision to move the servers back into our offices. We have always had the back-up servers here, but want to move the primary servers here as well now that are able to get Business Cable from TimeWarner at an economical cost for a faster speed than we currently get at SiteServer. The transition will be happening during the month of August, and users should not be interrupted at all by the move as we are planning for a no downtime transition.

If you have any questions about the move just ask.

Thank you for your membership,

-Brad Jashinsky
CEO/Co-Founder of
Reimagine Memories


P.S. Here are some pictures of our first server rack from APC:

ReimagineMemories.com Launch

After more than a year of on and off development, ReimagineMemories.com is finally at a point where we feel it is ready for public consumption. An unbelievable amount of work as been put into Reimagine Memories over the last year with constant funding meets, early acquisition talks, and corporate phone calls that made us realize that going it on our own with self-funding might not be such a bad thing. And that is where we are today; releasing the first version of ReimagineMemories.com with numerous features implemented and numerous others in the works both physically and mentally. It is my pleasure as CEO and as one of the co-founders of ReimagineMemories.com to welcome you to our corporate blog and to our site. So now you're asking what the heck is Reimagine Memories. Check out our launch commercial:



The biggest innovation created by Reimagine Memories isn't even an innovation at all; it's a realization.

We are giving free members:

500MB of Storage for Videos, Music, Photos, and Documents
(Perfect for podcasters, vidcasters, MySpace/LJ, bands, directors, etc.)

Unlimited Bandwidth
(Share your creations with as many people as you would like)

For only $10/Month:

Unlimited Storage for Videos, Music, Photos, and Documents
(Perfect for podcasters, vidcasters, MySpace/LJ, bands, directors, etc.)

Unlimited Bandwidth
(Share your creations with as many people as you would like)

Memories Through the Mail
If you have a premium account (Upgrade "link the word upgrade to PayPal page") an included feature of your account is unlimited use of our Memories Through the Mail program. The Memories in the Mail program allows you to send your tapes, CDs, DVDs, DV tapes, Hi-8 tapes, LP records, photos and other physical media formats to be reimagined into the digital medium. Share all of your classic memories with your family and friends all over the world and reimagine your lost memories preserving them forever on the Internet.

Reimagine Memories brings a social community to the web by putting memories on the Internet for the first time. Allowing members to upload memories captured as videos, pictures, music and text for free. ReimagineMemories is the new social-networking site on the Internet taking up the net by storm with innovation and the bundling of many different features on one site. You're able to share video, sound, text, and image files to people around the world as well as all of its tools and community interaction for free.

Go check out the About Page and the FAQ for more information and become a member of ReimagineMemories.com