Toogethr hits LeWeb as part of the Startup Competition

Last week we headed towards London to attend the LeWeb conference and its startup competition. With over 400 entries we were very pleased to hear that we made it into the final 16!

This did mean that we had preparations to make, so we got to work. Our team actually build some features from scratch from the time that we got notice until we got ready for our flight. That, and a pitch that needed to be prepared including a matching slide deck meant we had a lot to do.

We also heard that everyone at LeWeb would be wearing a suit, and since we didn’t have one, we had them custom made so we didn’t have to jump on the sowing machine ourselves. The result?

Those suits actually were the smartest decision we made since they provided tremendous value to us. They were comfortable, and we didn’t go unnoticed. We had several people walk up to us and interview us just because of the looks.

Our presentation didn’t go without problems though, we called it the demo-devil, some might just call it a demo snafu. Either way, we learned one thing; Never do a live-demo. You can watch our pitch and the failed demo below:

We did get positive feedback on our pitch though, as always some even said it was the best one they saw. But everyone agreed on one thing, our slides definitely looked the best.

Want to have a look for yourself? Go ahead:

Back on the floor our suits still grabbed tons of attention from journalists with cameras:

Amsterdam splash of colour from TechCityInsider on Vimeo.

We have been grabbed by a few more reporters and even a tv network, so we’re still on the lookout for more videos to emerge. Did you get to see the TechCrunch roundup?

For now, that’s it. But we’re definitely going places, and we’ll keep you in the loop.

To learn more about what we announced at LeWeb London, please dive into our press release.

Find all shared rides to Pinkpop and Oerol on a single map

Toogethr has a large database of rides, but often it can be difficult to get a ‘helicopter view’ of what is shared. Below you find a screenshot of all rides towards Pinkpop on a single day:



Do you rather play with an interactive map yourself? Just check this out: Oerol Festival interactive map and Pinkpop interactive map. As you can see, you can also adjust the date.

If you are heading towards Oerol Festival or Pinkop, do check out if you can help anyone with a lift, or maybe you can even join someone else’s ride. As always, you’re bound to go home after the festival. We know you prefer a safe and fun way to drive, so don’t forget to add you return ride to our database.

Toogethr now supports populair Twitter hashtags

With the release of Toogethr V1.9 today, populair Twitter hashtags used for tweets about a festival (for instance #pinkpop), are now automatically added to user-initiated tweets from Toogethr.



Anyone on Twitter searching or filtering on these hashtags, can now easily find all rides that are being shared to and from the festival.

Toogethr users don’t have to do anything to add hashtags to their tweet. As the hashtags are unique to a Toogethr group, the Toogethr app automatically adds them to the tweet. When a ride is offered (or requested) and subsequently shared with a Toogethr group and Twitter, then the tweet contains all the hashtags from the selected groups.



Furthermore, @liftNL - the Toogethr feed of all upcoming rides on Twitter - will also include these hashtags.

The Toogethr Facebook Page tab app
Support for Twitter hashtags is another important step to support social sharing. The Toogethr Facebook Page tab app that was released last week, is already installed by many festival organizers, venues and sports clubs. For example: Couleur Café, Oerol Festival, and Roda JC Kerkrade.



Other Toogethr V1.9 features and fixes
The following features and bug fixes are also released:

• Smarter sharing in groups - When offering or requesting a new ride, the dialogue showing the groups to share the ride with, now shows the four most relevant groups. This ensures that your ride is brought under the attention of those who care most about your ride.
• Username can no longer contain ‘@’ - To increase the safety of our community, we no longer allow the ‘@’ character as part of the username. This disables the possibility to have an email address as username.
• System messages better readable - Information, warning, and error messages are shown twice as long to ensure better readability.
• Lower suggested ride fee - The suggested ride fee has been lowered for shorter distances.
• Unread messages notification - The number of unread messages are no longer shown as a popup message. The number shown in the badge indicates the number of unread messages. This badge is shown both as part of the app icon as well as inside the app on the bottom navigation.
• Groups for multi-day events disappeared too early - Groups belonging to multi-day events disappeared already prior to the end of the event from the event list.
• Issue when requesting a group - When requesting a new group, the date field could stop finalizing the request.
• Improved chat and ride request dialog - The chat window can be used both for sending a message, as well as requesting a ride with a personal message.
• Show other rides in a group that match group criteria - A group shows all the rides that are actively shared with the group. The group now also shows rides that match the group criteria (date, location), even if the ride was not shared by the user.