Looking for Graphic Designers!

With some new flashy flyers popping up all over U of Waterloo campus, I thought I would advertise on our own flashy blog as well!

 

Unbounds is a startup company based out of the University of Waterloo, started by Waterloo students just like yourself! We are actively seeking new developers to help with database design and work on our separate but integrated iPad, Android, and Web-based applications. If you are interested in books, ebooks, ereaders, or just like to design and want to get involved in an exciting new startup, send us your resume at the below contact information:

Contact:

sam@unbounds.ca

We are looking for active, self-motivated individuals who can work well by themselves and are able to set and meet goals and deadlines consistently.

 

So let us know if you have some sweet skillz with the photoshopz! We know you are out there somewhere!

-Sam

Hack-A-Thon Update 3: Looks good

So the Unbounds Hack-A-Thon November 2010 edition has come to a close, and as we all move on to our somewhat regular lives I thought I’d leave all those interested with a good group photo (not including our BB developer Tyler) and some good shots of our beautiful office space at the new Communitech Hub.

Be sure to stay tuned for updates on our new website and site launch!

All photo credits go to the amazing Stanley who came to our office on Sunday to record our lives…creepy eh. Just kidding of course, thanks Stan!

-Sam

Hack-A-Thon Update 2: The sweet smell of progress…

Energy is a bit lower than yesterday’s long session, but nevertheless we are getting somewhere as all sides of the platform are moving forward as fast as a gazelle runs while being hastily pursued by a much faster cheetah.

Reading about a pile of sleep-deprived, Mcdonald’s eating students, is probably not the most entertaining thing to do on a Saturday on a brisk November night, so to make things interesting here are some interesting statistics on the ebook industry:

Self published authors increasing by over 200% a year

Ebook industry in the U.S. is growing steadily at 185% growth year over year according to latest reports by the American Publishers Assoc.

Both Apple Inc. and Amazon Inc. are being investigated by the FTC for antitrust infringement regarding ebook price fixing

Ereader device platforms are growing faster than one can keep track of with approximately 2 new devices entering market every month since late 2009. 

So if at least one of these points don’t make you want to put all your hardcover books in a large funeral pyre and burn them until your neighbors complain to the local Smokey Bear, then come back tomorrow for some even more convincing arguments! (I’ll try to get straight to the point next post, promise).

Cheers,

Sam

P.S. DST –> best . idea . ever .

DST to the rescue…

Looks like the Unbounds team is going to luck out this weekend. Some may ask, “is this because you get an extra hour of sleep?”. And we will respond that “no, it means that we get extra time to work on Unbounds!” as there never seems to be enough time in the day lately. Stay tuned for info on how we plan on utilizing our extra hour to our greatest advantage!

-The Unbounds Team

We’ve moved

Our blog location has moved to our own server just because we think we are that important:

www.blog.unboundbooks.ca

Check us out as all the rest of our posts will be there!

Thanks,

-Sam

Hack-A-Thon Update 1: Debates Galore

So it’s the first day of Unbound’s second Hack-A-Thon. So far so good, as it’s the first time the whole team, both tech and business dev have been together in one way or another to start discussing the full project, our goals and evaluating where we need/want to be in a reasonable time frame. Adam and I have been mainly setting up some business model discussions along with some full scale marketing techniques that we hope to see implemented soon. Also we are continuing preparation for Wednesday’s presentation at StartupCampWaterloo10.

And as far as my non-techie knowledge goes, it looks like the dev side is really chugging along at a reasonable pace with raised voices, and lots of whiteboard drawing as seen below:

Come back tomorrow for more updates and exciting news (and to find out how much caffeine has been consumed so far to keep us going).

Thanks for the read,

Sam

New Digs

So we’ve been busy bees here at Unbound Books. As of Monday we have successfully moved into our new office space in the Tannery at the Communitech Hub. The office space is amazing with a lot of great facilities that we are hoping to take full advantage of in the upcoming month (and there’s some free coffee to keep us chuggin’ on those late nights).

I thought that I would show you a couple of pictures of us at the oh-so important office. The following picture sizes are based off of company importance.

Naman (far left), Adam (centre), Sam (far right)

Thanks for the read,

Sam

[04/11/2010 – Order of importance fixed – Naman]

If you can code, come work for this UW startup

Hi there,

So its been a good 6 months since we first decided on this idea of a cloud based e-book service. We met, we fought, we cried (well…) and built a business model around the idea. Its been a good ride, but the ride is just starting.

Now we are at a point where 2 developers just aren’t enough. We need more coders and designers to come join us and help us take this to the next level. Thats where you come in.

Come join us.

We need people who want to hack together an iPad app, an Android app, a Blackberry app, and a JavaScript (or Flash) app. By the way, the server is in Java and Ruby.

Don’t worry if you are a student with too much homework. If you want to be part of this startup, just email me. I will personally work with you and your schedule to accommodate your workload into the scheme of things. Same goes for working remotely.

OK, now I need to get back to coding.

-Naman

naman @ unboundbooks.ca

October Update, plus a new face

Wow…what a rewarding three weeks its been at Unbounds. We have been away for a bit on this blog and we apologize, but it is all worth it because we have so much good news to tell you about. In a way it is good that we saved this all for one post.

For those who don’t know I am a new member of the team and have been on the team for about a month now. I had been keeping up with Unbound even when I was not on the team, and when I finally joined I was absolutely impressed at how driven and focused everyone was. After the first couple of group meetings I realized that they had so much focus on what they wanted to do and that I had to catch up if I wanted to be effective. At early stage start-ups everyone is doing everything they can to get things up and running as fast as possible. I have been doing many things, but my primarily job been spreading the word about Unbound to publishers. Since our last post we have engaged the Association of Canadian publishers and had our first in-person meeting. What a great meeting it was! We were able to make the first steps to developing what we see as a very important relationship going forward as the Association has a lot of publishers under them that we would love to get out to you guys and gals to read. Unfortunately many of the things that we talked about cannot be discussed here, but it went as good as we hoped it would, and now we are focused on the next step toward getting licensed content on our servers.

With that being said all eyes are on tech now to perfect the model and we are doing everything we can to get this going. Oh, and the other somewhat menial thing that us non-technical folks are working to get is…FUNDING! FUNDING! FUNDING! We are ready to pour some real green into this, and it gives me the shivers to see this start to actually happen.

Well thats all for now and we will do our best to keep you guys up to date with all the latest happening as they get thrown at us.

Until next time,

Adam

Update – September 2010

Hey everyone,

So as of recently the UnBounds group has been a little bit offline with our updates. Yes we admit we took some time off, but while taking some time off we have made a lot of progress in relation to both the technical and business development of the company.

On the technical side we are pushing and pushing for a release date in the near future, sure plans for that will be announced as soon as possible.

Business development wise we have a new member, Adam, on our team who has been in charge of contacting and coordinating with Canadian publishers preliminary contract arrangements for our company’s media library.

All in all we are excited about progress so far, and are optimistic about the near future in terms of what we will be able to offer to you, our users!

Thanks for the read,

Sam