Buru.com casual blogging..

It’s so awesome when you hear from someone that they like your product! James just made our day by giving us feedback about the usefulness of Buru as a research tool.  James is an internet marketer, web evangelist, blogger, searcher and adopter of many fine things web related. He posted his review on Buru in his blog, todaysbesttools.com.

…The ability to capture and save the variations of data from around the web and mash them into a Buru is a great way to consolidate and condense thoughts on a topic. It also captures the source of the data so that you can attribute reference sources when you use the data in the future. For a collaborative research project using Buru would be a great way to stay up to speed with what the other members have researched…

You can view his whole review here: http://todaysbesttools.com/gather-condense-save-and-share-content-with-buru/56/

We also have another review from Techlusive:  http://www.techlusive.com/2008/07/19/buru-the-web-collections-aggregator-and-search-engine/

…Buru has just released a Firefox plugin so that you can add items to your Buru collection from your browser. Buru also has a plugin for Internet Explorer. This is much like a shopping cart feature where you add items then check out your collection when you are finished…

The shopping cart comparison really explains what the Buru Toolbar can do. Install it and use it while you browse the internet and then when you need to reference the source just visit Buru.com. We hope to get more reviews and learn more about what the users are thinking.

Thank you!

Dear users,

Our IDC (Internet Data Center) has notified us about an emergency maintenance this Friday evening at 9pm-1am US Pacific time.

This maintenance is being done to ensure that the network continues to provide you with the highest possible level of service. This maintenance is scheduled for 9:00 PM PT/12:00 AM ET to 1:00 AM PT/4:00 AM ET. We are expecting approximately 30 minutes of downtime within this maintenance window. Please note that we have opted to schedule this emergency maintenance on the weekend in hopes of minimizing customer impact.

Thank you very much for your understanding.

Sincerely,

The BuruTeam

Hello Everyone,

We are very excited to announce our third winner.

Congratulations to compwoman for winning an iPod Touch!

Here’s why we think it’s one of the best web collections:

• Compwoman has an amazing collection which ranges from technology, sports, social science, classical music and etc. It’s hard to believe that it’s only been ten days since she joined Buru! She has 39 burus and 12098items! Wow~ we’re all just blown away.
• Every single buru is described in details. Descriptions are very helpful in making sense of the information she is collecting.
• Compwoman is very diligent in organizing all her web findings. Compwoman has several specific burus in a folder that represent what her interests are. Her burus keep growing and growing.
  

Announcement to all other runner-ups: You are all winners!

Thank you for your support and we’d like to reward our runner up users with $20 Amazon Gift Certificates:

We will email you the gift certificate soon. Great work!

Thank you all for your participation. Looking forward to seeing more of your burus.

Best Regards,

Buru Staff

Hello Everyone,

We are very excited to announce our second winner.

Congratulations to snahm for winning an iPod Touch!

Here’s why we think it’s one of the best web collections:

• snahm’s collection is a very specific to her interests, “design in all its forms”.
• snahm added her notes and tags to the items she collected and this makes it searchable and useful for everyone.
• snahm’s collection keeps growing little by little as she conducts her research on the web. Using buru can help you manage your interests on the web.

Thank you so much for your great buru collection! Please keep up the good work.

Announcement to all other runner-ups!

We still have one more iPod Touch and 20 Amazon Gift Certificates to give away! We will announce another iPod Touch winner again next week on June 16. You’re very close to winning so please try harder: sophie, jungwoo, aozaru, jason, terababy, bibi, weeder, rand0m, drchoi, yonggoghi, JanosHaits, yanuar

• All of you have a very good collection and a lot of potential to win.
• Visit our blog for more details: http://blog.buru.com

So don’t give up yet and start growing your collections. You could be the next winner to win an iPod Touch!

Thank you!

Hello Everyone,

We are very excited to announce our first winner.

Congratulations to aroyalty for winning an iPod Touch!

Here’s why we think it’s one of the best web collections:

1. aroyalty describes his interests in his profile and the burus are based on these topics. (I’m interested in education, design, design thinking, business, and social enterprise.)

2. aroyalty ’s collection is very organized. Burus are categorized into folders and this makes it easy to navigate and make sense of the information he is collecting from the web.

3. aroyalty added notes and tags which makes it searchable and useful for everyone.

4. aroyalty’s collection keeps growing little by little. You can tell aroyalty is constantly adding things from the web. We all want to view things that are worthwhile which is user filtered content. To discover good and new content, we need more users like this!

Thank you so much for your great buru collection! Please keep up the good work.

Announcement to all other runner-ups!

We still have TWO more iPod Touches and 20 Amazon Gift Certificates to give away! We will announce another iPod Touch winner again next week on June 9. There are pretty good collections and we want to let you know how to improve your chances to win;

1. aozaru

• Aozaru’s collections are growing very well. This user’s buru collection has a potential to be more useful to others if the items have tags and notes from the collector. If we all add tags and add notes, it will be easier to search and organize your items later on.
• You could translate some of the Japanese(?) to English so that other English speakers may enjoy your buru.
• Please write something about you so we know what you are interested.

2. snahm and jason

• snahm’s buru collections are very specific and focused toward design and research. Good descriptions of the buru helps others what you are collecting so add descriptions to your other burus, too.
• jason’s buru is one of the most popular burus. People from digg really liked it. Keep growing your buru so you can share your great web findings with others who are following your burus.
• The buru community wants to know who you are - the real person who has interests. Uploading a picture and telling us something about you will help us connect with you.
• Adding tags and note will help all of us makes a better sense of the information we get from the web.

3. terababy and bibi

• These users collected a lot of things in just one day. bibi uploaded more than a thousand bookmarks in just one day! Many items looks as if it was imported. This is very good way to start your collections. Our website makes it easier to organize your web contents by making sub-folders and burus. Try organizing your contents and you’re have a awesome collection!
• Why not try our Buru toolbar while browsing the internet? This will makes it super easy to collect the parts you want to save for later.

4. weeder, rand0m, yonggoghi, JanosHaits, yanuar, hung, sophie, jungwoo

• All of you have a very good collection and a lot of potential to win.
• Please read our recommendations above to improve your chance to win an iPod Touch.

So don’t give up yet and start growing your collections. You could be the next winner to win an iPod Touch!

Thank you!

Best regards,
Buru Staff

We got our first Press release on Mashable on May 15th, 2008!

May 15, 2008 — 05:46 PM PDT — by Kristen Nicole —

Editor’s Note: If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion in “The Startup Review” series, please see the details here.

STARTUP DETAILS:

Company Name: Buru

20 word description: Users can collect web contents into collections and easily share them in buru.com.

CEO’s 100 word description: There is always someone who has better knowledge on a topic and has collected contents while browsing the internet. It make sense to provide a better way to collect and search for these user filtered contents in collections. Buru is a platform for people to collect and save the actual web contents based on their interest and also made for people who search for these topic related collections. Buru is based on the belief that human-filtered contents that are organized into collections are the most valuable information on the web.

Mashable’s Take: If you hadn’t noticed, we’re seeing a serious upsurge of new bookmarking tools, most of which are looking to provide a central, personalized service that enables individuals to better organize content they find across the web, or even from their computer.

Buru is a new bookmarking site that lets you bookmark items from across the web, or import options from a handful of blogs, photo and video-sharing sites, or Delicious. Even though Buru has a clean design and is easy to navigate, it’s still emerging in a space that’s becoming increasingly crowded as search and personal recommendations enter the equation of social and/or tailored bookmarking services.

Nevertheless, I like Buru for its current offerings, and appreciate the option to import items as well, though I had a bit of trouble importing some of my items. Viewing others’ items is also simplified, as there are slideshow features and FriendFeed-like following options. However, I’m still fully aware that the monetization of such sites is still being explored, and mainstream web users don’t seem quite ready for ultra-personalized recommendations beyond media (movies).

It’s not entirely clear how Buru provides recommendations for users, and it doesn’t even appear to be a major focus for the site right now. But as the space matures, we’re seeing a number of different ways in which bookmarking services are being applied towards practical scenarios, such as semantic search, and even task management.

We are very proud to announce the release of BURU v.1.1 beta.

On May 6th 00:30AM Buru releases it’s new Beta version 1.1 to the public. We’d like to thank all people who helped in making enhancements. The comments we got from our users were very helpful. So let me give you the summary of the new changes:

Big Changes made in Buru 1.1 beta:

1. Simplify the Structure for Clarity : [My collections] & [My Subscriptions] changed to [My Burus] & [My Followings] in separate tabs

2. Showing Buru as a Web Collection : Buru is a web collection. We’ve tried to show that a buru consists of bookmarks, articles, images and videos… We also put little icons that represents the media source so people knows where the item is collected from.

3. Showing the users a preview of the content in buru : So we’ve put in preview features so the users can get a sense of the most popular(first we tried popular then decided recent is better) recent contents in the buru. (We’re still discussing which is better - popular or recent? We’ll experiment on this but we’re all ears to hear what your opinion is on this)

4. More Human Interaction : Having people to interact with the creators of buru is very important for motivation and communication. We will keep working on this aspect. Meanwhile, we’ve made the buru wall for comments and plan to introduce more user ratings and etc.

We’ve been working pretty hard on our new revision which will be open next week, MAY 5th. We got some friends and people to test the site and we got a handful of comments- good and bad.

Good - people like the technology and said it was cool.

Bad - It was a bit overwhelming. The message was not clear until you tried the site.

Addressing the Communication: So we’ve tried to clarify the concept so that we can communicate a clear message.

1. Scrap web contents from everywhere | Use our buru picker to scrap articles, images, and videos. With one click, store bookmarks and feeds into your collection.

2. Mix it your way | Organize the web contents the way you like. Add notes and tags so it’s super easy to find it later.

3. Enjoy your buru with others | Share your buru collection instead of emailing links. Let others enjoy your buru.