Come out and enjoy a day at Austin’s door64 Tech Fair Thursday April
30th.  OtherInbox will have a booth set up and will be giving out some
T-Shirts and demos of our newest features.  This is a first-of-a-kind
grassroots event with a great potential for networking and being
involved in what the Austin Business Journal recently quoted as “The
No.1 city for job growth potential”.

The door64 Tech Fair will be at the Goodwill Center located at 1015
Norwood Park Boulevard, Austin, Texas 78753 on Thursday April 30th,
from 11am until 4pm.  There will be panel discussions and even a
party following the Tech Fair.  For more information and to RSVP for this event please, visit http://door64.com/techfair.

If you follow us on twitter, please @otherinbox and let us know you
will be there. We would love for some of our current users to show
their support by wearing an OIB T-Shirt and would like some of you to
come by our booth to speak to potential new OIB users. Please help us get the word out there about this event and RT this blog.

If you are attending and would like to speak at our booth or help us demo OtherInbox, please email door64[at]peeps.oib.com.

You might have already heard the exciting news: OtherInbox will be at SXSW Interactive in Austin, Texas from March 14-16. What you probably may want to know more about is the mailbox full of $1,000 cash we will be giving away!

The first step towards winning the $1,000 is to stop by OtherInbox’s booth at SXSWi and sign up for your own OtherInbox account. No purchase is necessary, however, you must be in the OtherInbox database to win. You can increase your chances of winning and number of entries into the contest, by taking your picture with OtherInbox’s trusty superhero, Mr. Spam. He will be carrying a camera and raffle tickets on him while walking around the convention site as he pleases. You must successfully have your picture taken with Mr. Spam in order to obtain your extra entries where you will then write down your OtherInbox email address on the back.

There are several other ways to increase your odds of winning. If you are lucky enough to bring your own camera, take a picture of yourself with Mr. Spam, then TwitPic it @OtherInbox. If you don’t own a camera, you can also wear your OIB T-shirt during SXSW to receive 5 extra entries.

At the end of SXSW, we will draw one lucky winner and send them a message in their OtherInbox congratulating them on winning the Mailbox Full of Cash, aka $1,000. If they do not respond to the email within 7 business days, another winner will be drawn.

You could be the winner! Come out to SXSW Interactive and see what OtherInbox is all about.

For more information, please email sxsw[at]Lchaney.oib.com

This is Joshua Baer, the founder of OtherInbox. Sorry I haven’t written an update in a while — Leah, Hoon, Caroline, and Erica have been hard at work here while Mike has been working with the product team and I’ve been working on the launch and some exciting partnerships that we have lined up for later in 2009. I also had my first child over the past few months!

We’re looking forward to seeing y’all here in Austin for the annual South by Southwest Interactive, Film and Music festivals March 13-22, 2009. We’ll be opening OtherInbox up to the public, releasing Gmail and calendar integration, presenting at numerous events, throwing a party, and generally just hanging out with all of you who can make it to Austin!

While you’re at the show, stop by our booth and say hi! Come meet Leah, Hoon, myself and other members of the OtherInbox team. We’ll be giving demos, talking about what’s in store for 2009, and giving away a mailbox full of $1,000 in cash!!!

We’re showing some extra love to our Austin peeps by organizing an OtherInbox meetup at Dave and Busters next Tuesday, March 3 at 6:30pm. We’re still a startup, so don’t expect an extravagant affair — but you can meet members of the OtherInbox team and get the inside scoop on our plans for SXSW and the public launch. If that’s not enough, one lucky winner will walk away that evening with a Gold badge to attend the SXSW Interactive and Film festivals worth $695!

Please RSVP for the party so we can plan accordingly!

We’ll be kicking off SXSW at the City of Austin Interactive Showcase on Friday from 5pm-7pm at Fogo de Chao. OtherInbox will be presenting along with 24 other local Austin companies at this exclusive, invitation-only event. This will be particularly fun for me because in addition to representing OtherInbox, I am an investor in 3 other companies presenting at the showcase – Bazaarvoice, B-Side Entertainment and Onespot. We’re honored to be included!

If things go as planned, it will be hard to miss us on the SXSW tradeshow floor this year. We have a double-sized booth that will be staffed by Leah, Hoon, Caroline, Erica, Mike, myself and other members of the team. Our booth has 2 numbers, so look for 213 or 312 at the end of one of the rows. We’ll be giving live demos, signing up new users, and talking about what’s in store for 2009. I have a personal goal to meet as many OtherInbox users at SXSW as possible – if you see me walking around or at the booth please say hi and introduce yourself in person!

We need your help to make SXSW as huge success and spread the word about OtherInbox! There are 2 things you can do to help if you’ll be at SXSW:

1. Sign up to spend 1 hour at the booth with us so that you can share your experiences with other prospective users
2. Wear an OtherInbox t-shirt at SXSW to show your support.

If you’re at SXSW, you probably will notice Mr. Spam. Don’t worry, you’ll recognize him from the cape! Take your picture with Mr. Spam and email it to us to get a chance at the mailbox full of $1,000 in cash. To get an extra chance at the $1,000 and updates on Mr. Spam sightings, follow Mr. Spam on Twitter.

To save some time in the comments, I will answer three popular questions about Mr. Spam now:

1. No, I’m not Mr. Spam.
2. Yes, Mr. Spam really has a cape.
3. Yes, Mr. Spam really has super-powers.

Come hear OtherInbox co-founder Mike Subelsky’s presentation about Scaling Rails Applications in the Cloud. Skeptics argue that Ruby-on-Rails “can’t scale”. In this talk, Mike proves them wrong by demonstrating how cloud computing technologies have changed the game, enabling developers to use the expressiveness of Ruby and Rails to build high-performance applications that scale easily. Includes case study and live scaling demo.

Scaling Rails Applications in the Cloud
Saturday, March 14th
3:30 pm – 4:30 pm
Room Hilton C

If you liked Mike’s presentation, you’ll want to head straight from there to my presentation titled, Should I Build My Startup on Ruby on Rails? You’ve heard Ruby on Rails is the hottest new technology for developing web applications. You’ve also heard of concerns about scalability and hiring talent. How do you separate the facts from the hype? Hear the business perspective on why to consider Ruby on Rails now and why you might want to wait and see. Get ready for a head-to-head comparison with PHP, Java and .NET!

Should I Build My Startup on Ruby on Rails?
Saturday, March 14th
5:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Room Hilton D

On Sunday night I’ll be honored as one of the top 25 people in social media in Texas at the Texas Social Media Awards at Ballet Austin. This event will attract the who’s-who in social media and the proceeds go towards a great cause – the Sunshine Camps for high-potential, low-income kids. You can still buy a ticket for $12.

During the day on Monday we’ll be presenting the new, public release of OtherInbox to Guy Kawasaki, Brad King, and others at the SXSW BizSpark Accelerator along with 7 other companies in the Innovative Web Technologies category. I’ll be showing off OtherInbox for Gmail and also our new calendar integration. Please attend the event and wear your OtherInbox t-shirt to show your support!

We’re wrapping up SXSW with a party, of course! OtherInbox is teaming up with FiveRuns to sponsors the SXSW Austin on Rails Party at Buffalo Billiards on Monday night from 6pm-9pm. This is always one of the best parties of the conference! In addition to beer, music, and pool tables there will be other games and lots of interesting geeks to talk to. Of course, Mr. Spam will be there taking pictures. Please RSVP if you plan on coming so that your name will be on the guest list and you’ll get free drink tickets. There are already hundreds of people who have RSVP’d so you’d better do it soon to make sure you get a spot.

Even if you can’t attend the party, please become a fan of OtherInbox on Facebook.

If you haven’t seen the OtherInbox demo in person, here is your chance! Come to the Innotech conference Beta Summit in Austin to meet me and see the demo in person. We’re the first company presenting at 11 AM and we will have a booth in the exhibitor space.

Please stop by and say hi! If you’re an OtherInbox user, I’d love to meet you and hear about how you are using OtherInbox. If you have heard about OtherInbox and are skeptical, this is a great opportunity to get your questions answered and talk to other users.

Gregg Pollack filmed me and the other Lone Star Ruby Conference speakers doing 30 second versions of our talks. So if you missed the conference, here’s me using excessive hand gestures to explain why Ruby is so great for cloud computing. The entire hour-long talk is also available with fewer hand gestures.

Last week we launched OtherInbox to the world at TechCrunch50 in San Francisco and since then we’ve been overwhelmed by the response! We were the last company to present on Monday, and even though it had been a long day we still received a resounding cheer from the crowd at the end of our demo. It was obvious that the TechCrunch50 crowd all have email overload and would benefit from OtherInbox!

Almost 1,500 new users signed up for the beta program in the first two days and another 2,000 are on the waiting list. We received broad coverage in the press including 4 of the top 5 blogs in the world and the Washington Post. Plus almost a thousand tweets!

The entire OtherInbox development team has been attending the Lone Star Ruby Conference this week and has enjoyed meeting up with so many other excellent peeps from the Texas Ruby community and beyond! We wish we could tell everyone exactly how OtherInbox works today but I assure you that it will come soon.

OtherInbox was a major sponsor of the LSRC this year so we got to hang our banner and have the first ever “red tag” OtherInbox logo on the t-shirt sleeve.

Our very own Mike Subelsky gave a presentation on Ruby in the Cloud to a packed house yesterday. We are 100% hosted on Amazon Web Services and it has been an incredible platform for us so far. We think this positions us well for taking on all the users who are going to sign up once we launch!

The highlight of the evening was hearing the keynote from Matz, the creator of Ruby, who flew in from Japan for the event. He was quite entertaining and we even got our picture taken with him!

I’m excited to be presenting some of the technical work behind OtherInbox at the Lone Star Ruby Conference on September 6th.

My talk is called “Ruby in the Cloud” and is a case study of our experiences using Ruby to deploy, monitor, and manage a cluster of servers running in the Amazon Web Services virtual cloud. I’m going to make the case that using Ruby to handle tasks traditionally handled by cron, shell scripts, and other more OS-specific technologies can make you more productive and agile. Hope to see you there!