Posted by darien on June 25, 2010 under Announcements, Features | 
Last night’s reboot of the YongoPal service brings with it t
he addition of a number of new features that you may notice, if you signed up with us back in April. Chief among them are the ‘Chat Center‘ and the ‘Recommendations‘ page’.
Chat Center (Conversation Center)
The first to address is probably the Chat Center. Previously, Conversation Partners in our site were required to create a TokBox account, where they would need to be signed in at the start of any scheduled conversation session. This was problematic for several reasons, as some of you know. Primarily, signing up for a separate service and linking your YongoPal account to it was complicated and kept many people from completing their setup process, and the connection often suffered from severe audio lag. It also meant that only students could initiate conversations; CPs could only sign into TokBox and wait, without knowing if a student was even online or not. Read more of this article »
Posted by Jon on under Fun Stuff |
If it wasn’t obvious already, I’d like to say we are very excited about both South Korea and the United States making it to the round of 16 in the World Cup. So excited, in fact, our graphic designer Daron made this awesome World Cup themed YongoPal image.
We love the World Cup. Almost as much as we love Daron.
Both teams play tomorrow. Korea plays against Uruguay at 7:00 a.m. PST while the United States takes on Ghana at 11:30 a.m. PST.
Posted by darien on under Announcements |
Some of you who have been involved with our service since April or earlier know that we got off to a slow start. We encountered some problems and bugs, which we certainly expected to encounter with a private beta launch, but our biggest error was in timing.
In late April, Korean university students were just beginning to shift gears toward focusing on their final exams. While here in the US, the cramming period might only last a week or two, we found that Korean students (at least at the university campuses we were focusing on) prepare for exams during a cramming period lasting a month and a half or more. The feedback from Korean students whom we invited into the site at the time was all the same: they were really excited to use the service, but couldn’t actually use it until summer vacation.
Well, it’s finally summer vacation in Korea! Last night, at around 11pm PST, we sent out our first small string of invitations into the freshly rebooted YongoPal service. This morning, I woke to see that a few students had already registered and begun scheduling conversations!
For all the great Conversation Partners who had signed up back in April or earlier and had to sit on non-active accounts all this time, I sincerely apologize. But it looks like this summer is going to be a different story. Make sure you keep your availabilities current, and I hope you all enjoy using the new YongoPal!
Posted by Jon on June 24, 2010 under Announcements |
Summer is upon us! We’d like to let our conversation partners know that we will be inviting students into our site this week, so make sure your schedules are up-to-date and your profiles are accurate.
Posted by Jon on June 23, 2010 under Fun Stuff |
The YongoPal team went to Sport down the street from the office to watch the South Korea vs. Nigera game yesterday. The game was an important one for the South Korean soccer team. If South Korea won, they advanced automatically, but if they tied, they needed Argentina to beat Greece to make it to the next round. While most people at the bar were there to watch the Argentina/Greece game, we wore our YongoPal shirts and made sure the South Korean team was properly represented.
It came down to the wire, with South Korea going down in points early in the game and coming back. Argentina scored their first goal late in the game, and South Korea barely held off a hard fighting Nigera team to tie and qualify for the next round.
South Korea plays their next game on Saturday at 7am. We will definitely be cheering then as well.
Interesting fact: If both South Korea and the United States win on Saturday, they will play each other in the next round. This would leave YongoPal in a quandary. Who should we root for in such a case? I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens this weekend.
Fighting!
Posted by Jon on June 15, 2010 under YongoFashion |
We’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about how to get one of the YongoPal t-shirts our team members have been wearing around. One option is to buy one from our CafePress store. The cheaper and more fun option is to make one yourself. Below we’ve provided you with the tools necessary to make your own iron-on YongoPal t-shirt. Enjoy. Read more of this article »
Posted by Jon on May 28, 2010 under Announcements |
We are very excited about our recent win at the University of Washington Business Plan Competition. With all the amazing teams at the competition, we were quite shocked to be chosen. The victory comes with a $25,000 grand prize and, most importantly, a lot of amazing connections and support from the startup community in Seattle.
We’d like to thank everyone that has given us their time and support the past few months as we prepared for the competition. Without your help, we certainly would not have won this honor.
Now time to focus on preparing for the summer. It’s only a month away!
