The launch and the bug fixes…

The launch the public beta version of the Indorse platform took place last week on 29th November. I gave a presentation at SGInnovate at the Ethereum Singapore Meetup on 28th to officially announce the launch and explain the technology in more detail. It was a race against time and bugs for the 2–3 weeks prior and the team really came through and delivered a great, (relatively) bug-free product on the deadline.

Indorse Keynote at Ethereum Singapore Meetup

This is the link to thepresentation video — https://youtu.be/Hy1UWoIRtic

I go into a bit of detail in the second half of the presentation video on the features of the platform, which you can see at the above link, and in this dev update, I am going to also touch on some salient points.

First of all, this release is geared towards putting up a profile (importing from LinkedIn right now + adding additional stuff) on a decentralized stack, starting right from decentralized authentication, right up to the storage of data on a decentralized database like Bigchain to storing the static files on a decentralized network like IPFS. So there are no transactions going on the Ethereum mainnet right now.

Also, it is important to note that the Bigchain cluster we are using is hosted as a federated cluster of nodes, and our aim is to distribute it in a trustless manner in the coming months. There are two things stopping us from doing it — the technology itself is not at a stage which allows for true decentralization, and secondly we need to figure out the legal implications involving the storage and distribution of personal data on nodes outside of our control. Our operations team is working with our lawyers on this. You can find more information about this in the presentation I had posted in one of the earlier Dev Updates — https://blog.indorse.io/dev-update-4-november-2017-6fb2dba92a75

Product Side

The week before the launch, we were focused completely on testing and bug fixing. The week after that, until today, we have focused on actually fixing the code.

Done

Bighcain setup on a multi-node environment

A basic profile timeline visualization

Ability to import and parse LinkedIn profile

Integration of Airbitz as a signup and login mechanism on Indorse

Integration of Mixpanel for EDMs

Integration of Optimizely for A/B testing the landing pages

Implementation of Toaster messages for notifications

Creating a model for prevention of Sybil attacks — attaching multiple social network accounts with your Indorse account

Creating a model and design of the referral system Smart Contract

Doing

Refactoring of the code

Finishing up the remaining tickets

Working on the UI bugs, improving the timeline visualizers

Creating multiple landing page variations to test out the conversions

Migrating the old data to the Bigchain cluster (for accounts and profiles that were created before Bigchain was implemented)

Implementation of the Sybil attack prevention mechanism in the NodeJS layer

Writing of a basic Smart Contract for the referral/affiliate system so that it is truly decentralized in nature

Documenting the entire codebase, APIs, on-boarding guides, etc

Re-visit the build automation and finish up the integration of JIRA with Bitbucket

Scaling up Indorseans

Our PM, Harsh Nene (not to be confused with Haresh, the blockchain dev) has finally joined us full-time, after serving the notice period at his previous engagement. The entire team is getting ready for the planning juggernaut (quite frankly, people are scared of the 1-hour sprint retrospectives, to be fair). On a serious note, it will actually really help us get things organized and improve the existing development practices, including better planned sprints, more spec’ed out tickets and overall, more reliance on user-focused product development.

Business Development

We have finished the migration to Rocket Chat and moved our community there. You can join it at https://community.indorse.io/.

Our team is continuously working on getting more partnerships and exchanges listings. We will update the community once we have something concrete.

We had a great start with the MVP launch, with 1000 people creating a unique user url on the platform and giving us some very valuable feedback. The bug reports have been invaluable as we improve the platform and feature requests have given us great insights into what the members of the platform want.

Total signups — 2056

People who have claimed usernames — 1217

People who have uploaded a LinkedIn import PDF — 155

On a different note, last week, Indorse was mentioned in an article reporting on “pump and dump” schemes that have taken place within the industry. The article stated that we were unavailable for contact- this is not true. We were never contacted. David emailed the reporter to find out more information and see if they would publish a statement that we have no involvement in such schemes- they would not. They then followed up with another article where they did mention that we reached out to them.

Indorse is focused on the development of our platform, and building our community. We do not have any association with these schemes and we do not encourage or condone this type of activity.

Current positions we are looking for: UI/UX designers.

Please feel free to drop us a mail at info@indorse.io should you be interested or know of anyone who should be a good fit for us. You can join our community on Rocket Chat at https://community.indorse.io/