Renkoo Typepad

This Blog Has Moved.

Typepad has served us for the 18 months, but we're moving, so we'll no longer be publishing here.

Renkoo has completed our migration to Wordpress... a/k/a...

Blog.Renkoo.Com

See you on the flipside... with love,

The penguins have flown!

To help us celebrate a momentous December, we've put a special logo up on our front page.

(Renkoo users might have to log out to see it.)

Happy happy joy joy!

YM upgrade tomorrow

We want to apologize for the quality of Yahoo Messenger notifications, which has been abysmal of late.  Yahoo Messenger plans a 2-hour outage tomorrow between 5 - 7PM PST, which will hopefully improve matters.

Props to Bob

We pause a moment from building Renkoo to give props to our investor, Bob Lisbonne, who just joined the Mozilla Foundation Board.

We love Firefox, which keeps the web free from the tyranny of closed browsers.

November Rain

It's a beautiful day in Redwood City, and to celebrate the end of November we are taking a brief outage.  Thank you!

Update, 4pm. And, we're back after a nice facial. Mmmmm, it tingles!

Mmmmm... chocolate...

On Thursday, the employees of Renkoo took a short break from testing the new version of our application (coming soon!) ...

We used Renkoo to arrange a tour of the Scharffen Berger Chocolate Factory in Berkeley, CA. If you've never had the opportunity to see how chocolate is made, we highly recommend the tour. (Hint: it's nothing like the one built by Willy Wonka!)

After the tour, we lunched at Cafe Cacao, and then went back to work...

Wanted: Front-End Webdev

It's a rare engineer who wakes up every morning and can't wait to tweak CSS in pursuit of beauty and elegance. JavaScript takes a few moments to learn but a lifetime to master! Renkoo seeks a fearless DOM manipulator who is eager to spend a lot of time knee-deep in the Web's lingua franca.

This job is core to our engineering team, and you will work closely with our entire company to provide an extraordinary user experience on many flavors of browser.

Requirements:

• 3+ years of CSS and DOM experience, preferably on JavaScript-heavy Web-based applications.
• Scripting experience working on a consumer-facing application (preferably PHP5).
  
• Familiarity with version-control software (preferably Subversion).
• An eye for detail, and a desire to provide a great user experience.

Bonus:

• Obsession with the CSS Zen Garden.
• Familiarity with Dojo Toolkit.
• Knowledge of testing tools such as Firebug and Selenium.

If you're qualified (or know someone appropriate), please send a resume with subject "FRONT-END WEBDEV, BABY!" to

jobs -at- renkoo -dot- net

U.S. Citizenship or Permanent Residency required. We're very sorry to say that no sponsorships are available at this time due to U.S. government regulations. :(

Renkoo is a new, technically innovative consumer website dedicated to helping people have fun. We help users coordinate small, frequent, casual get-togethers with their friends: drinks, meals, movies, sporting events, etc. Our UI employs a whole lotta Javascript, with LAMP and Python on the back-end.

Our Redwood City crib is convenient to Caltrain, driving, and Mmmmm... Beard Papa's.

As a bonus, you get to work with Troutgirl. :)

We Got the 'Beat

Our very own Joyce Park just submitted a guest post to VentureBeat, “The Downfall of Female Role Models”:

There are few terms more abused in public life these days than “role model”, of course — I always admired Charles Barkley’s take on the subject, and certainly none of these women could be said to overtly have volunteered for the role — but like it or not they enter into the calculations of many women below them...

There’s a world of difference for me and my friends between “theoretically possible to succeed as a woman in this business”, and “lots of women have done it, maybe I could too.”

It occurs to me, as I'm posting, that our team has been heads-down lately, busy as bees building the next version of Renkoo for release later this year.

As a result, we missed posting some fun recent mentions of Renkoo by:

• Matt Marshall at VentureBeat,
• Liz Gannes at GigaOm (twice!),
• Michael Arrington at TechCrunch,
• Steve Poland at Vested Ventures, and
• Michelle Kessler at USA Today.

We'll write more soon; for now, it's back to heads-down for us...

Goodbye, Summer of Mud

Our second Renkoo summer came and went so quickly, we didn't get to tell you about the Cleveland mud volleyball tournament to benefit the Muscular Dystrophy Association.

Team Renkoo got down and dirty...

...and mud baths are so good for the skin...

Renkoo Tummy

kitta.net's Nikita wrote, "I adore the little bee... Kitta's Tummy schwag brought to you by Renkoo."