Hi All

We know that it has been sometime since you heard from us.

A brand new website and announcement of pricing plans will happen within the next 2 weeks.

Thanks for all the ongoing support and feedback.

Team spellr.us

We are very proud to announce that spellr.us was chosen as a TechCrunch50 Semi-Finalist.

Today we are launching and showcasing our product in the “Demo Pit” at The Conference.

spellr.us will remain free for the next month or so.

Please feel free to register and scan your site.

And as always we love feedback on the system.

Thanks for the great suppot from The Team in Sydney and all our Beta Testers.

Kevin @ The TechCrunch50 in San Francisco (picturesand videos coming soon)

Well well well.

I did a search on Google for spellrus and low and behold - a desktop spellchecker (a competitor of sorts) came up with an adword.

This competitive company are directly targeting people who search for spellr.us.

I always take it as a compliment when a competitor (in whatever form) takes notice. I do however think it is very uncreative marketing to just target a competitor’s search term on Google and throw an Adword at it.

Whilst I see the value of desktop applications under certain circumstances the benefits and elegance of SaaS (software as a service) are significant. As long as our execution is spot on - I remain convinced that our target market would prefer this type of application as a web based tool.

Good luck to our competitors, competition is healthy, but I hope they get a little more creative with their marketing techniques!

Kevin

I was in error yesterday - the custom dictionary feature is available on our internal accounts only, they will be made live across all beta accounts next week - apologies for the confusion.

Adam has also been working on a summary page that will evolve into a printable version of the report so many people have asked for.

Kevin

I nearly forgot to mention, we have given beta testers the options of increasing their scan pages up to 10 000!

Enjoy and give us your feedback.

People who registered for beta accounts round 2 should receive their logins by Monday.

Kevin

Really … we are!

Google’s main aim of existence is to present search results that match peoples’ search requests as accurately as possible.

spellr.us main aim is to point people to their genuine spelling errors.  The better we can do this - the more compelling our product will be.

spellr.us and Google both have to try make match what the user wants with the data it has to sift through.

Custom dictionaries on spellr.us will go a long way to getting rid of a large batch of false positives and thinning out the signal to noise ratio.

Please if you are a beta tester provide us with feedback on your ideas how we can refine your results.  This feedback is invaluable to us.

You can either click on the feedback form in your account or you can mail admin@spellr.us .

Over time we really do want spellr.us to hone in on only your genuine errors.

Kevin

Hi All

Well the last couple of days have been exciting.

All our beta testers should now have their login details.

Last night Sydney time was the busiest time yet for spellr.us with lots of beta testers scanning away.

If you have not received your login details or are having problems please email admin@spellr.us and we can get one set-up for you.

If you are not yet a beta tester - please register on http://spellr.us as we will be registering round  2 of beta testers this Monday.

We have read and replied to every bit of feedback and we thank everyone for their time and effort in giving us feedback.

Everyone is begging us for custom dictionaries and printable versions and also asking us to tweak formatting and a couple of other bits and pieces. 

We hear you - custom dictionaries are not too far off (thanks Adam and Charl).

We had a request to add Swedish - which has now been added (thanks Charl).

Some selective feedback:

• “Wow! I’ve just received the invite, and just tried out my (under construction) website. One word; “Wow”. this is great! Ok, it’s a bit scary to see my website plastered with orange and red, but you guys are onto something truly useful.Indeed, I’d say it’s essential! Spelling mistakes make things look unprofessional, shoddy and quite frankly rubbish, so helps get the detail (which is as critical as the design or colour scheme) on a website spot on.Great job, and keep up the hard work! ” William
• “Fantastic little tool that found a few mistakes on blog posts, keep up the good work this is an awesome tool.” Azzam www.socialprofilr.com
• “Very very nice. It actually caught a few errors that even our editors did not catch. I like the fact that it looks like at some point you will be able to customize things such as “add to my words” etc. I like what I see.” Brandon http://www.LateralLineCo.com

And we scored a nice video review at http://blogs.tech-recipes.com/podcasts/2008/05/20/spellrus-beta-review-screencast/ (click on play).

So over the next week or so keep an eye out for custom dictionaries, account configuration (password change) and ongoing formatting tweaks.

Kevin

Well we continue to roll out our beta accounts.

Some feedback already in:

• “Make it easy to give feedback!” - we have added a super easy feedback form in the spellr.us account so users can make feedback
• “Custom dictionaries” - we hear all of you! This is definitely the most requested feature and we are rolling it out soon - hang in there for a while.
• “Would be great to have a print to PDF” -we are looking at the best way of printing to PDF for what sometimes is a long report.
• “What is with the time zone?” - currently the time zone reported is on our server at Rackspace.  We will eventually be adding a time zone setting so you can see when your reports were run in your time zone.

And thank you for all the positive feedback too.

We read every single bit of feedback so please drop us a line with any thoughts.

All beta accounts should be active be active by Tuesday night Sydney Australia time - approximately Tuesday morning US time.

Kevin

We will be upgrading the FAQ on the site over the next few days.

We will be providing a little more detail on the product and service - including limitations and hints for best usage.

Kevin