Here is a summary of yesterday's developer staff meeting. I just got assigned the job of taking notes and publishing them in advance of the Friday Mumble session with Bytemaster. Hopefully this will give everyone more time to get Fuzzy your questions where he can organize them rather than trying to respond to Bytemaster's opening statement in real time.

This week was spent continuing to harden and polish the system and squashing bugs. James and Valentine continued to refine the user interfaces and add market functionality to their new wallets while Vikram and Ben completed some urgent market bug fixes and released version 0.8.0. Meanwhile Dan and Nathan continue to work on refactoring the code to improve maintainability and enhance performance. Check out the new database back end they just committed to github.One of the coming updates will add features to help users avoid fat-fingering the wrong accounts. The UIs will display an account number with every account to serve as another form of visual check sum and additional help in distinguishing between registered and unregistered accounts will be provided.Meanwhile SynaptiCAD been working on adding support for "registered users" to http://blocktrades.us (currently the site only supports anonymous users). Registered users will be able to track their transaction history, get reports on realized gains/losses, and generally be able to trade in a more organized fashion. On the backend of the gateway, they have improved their purchasing algorithms, which in turn allows them to offer better conversion rates between asset types. In addition, they're offering a near zero fee on Bitcoin to BitShares conversions to encourage new users to enter the BitShares ecosystem. On the BitShares client side of things, they've been assisting in the analysis of the recent shorting bugs, the design of algorithms to correct them, and building/testing a new Windows and Linux binary that incorporates the fixes.Adam has been in Scandinavia meeting with some people interested in his voting solutions. Expect a report from him when he gets back later this week.Business development is also proceeding at a brisk pace. I just jotted down a list of fourteen different efforts I am currently tracking with outside entrepreneurs. We have ongoing Skype meetings with more than a handful of them each week. You already know (or have had hints) about some but many have not yet been announced by these partners. It's great to see so much stuff happening behind the scenes!Do not let our new, more careful communication strategy fool you. Every minute of each long workday is jam packed with activity to build up the value of the BitShares ecosystem.Please send Fuzzy your questions for Bytemaster on Friday.