We're a small team of 3 people - Michael Nordling, Rohan Reyhdners  (last year and a bit) and myself (Michael Guilfoyle) from Canberra Australia who have spent the last few years developing Readmine whilst doing many other things. We took on a pretty big task with our spec for Readmine but we were motivated to it becuase we were frustrated, very frustrated. The shear volume of information we have to deal with each day is overwhelming and once through that, it left no room for us to create and express even the most humble identity on the net and be part of some sort of group. We didnt just want a pic and a static bio - we wanted to be able to continually roll out some sort of reflection of who we are and want we're interested in. Blogs will do that but you have to take the time to write about stuff and you especially have to take the time to find something interesting to comment on. So we needed to build some tools to make all this happen and happen within 15-20 mins a day. The result (and still evolving) is Readmine.

On the 1st of October we  officially  released Redmine to closed beta and only gave it out to two people outside our small team.Then we spent the next two weeks going over every bit of the application to get out all bugs and issues that could cause a problem and would make the general use of Readmine frustrating.

We re happy to say as we start releasing to a wider closed beta group; Readmine will install and give you good results and a feeling of getting some value out of your time within around 20 mins.

Our goal all along was to make a piece of software that would take away the pain of dealing with the hundreds of news and blog post updates each day from a handful or hundreds of RSS news and blog feeds. We also wanted to provide something at the end of your reading time that would be useful (the Readlog).

My biggest wish is that those who start using get value from Readmine and I hope it makes a difference to their online life and inspires people to be more actively apart of the internet, rather than just a consumer of content.

 It s been a heck of a journey for our small team over the last few years pulling Readmine together and I can t tell you just how good it feels after so much time and work to be able to put it out and get some feedback. 

Compared to the speed of which many internet sites and products are developed today, many have commented on how long we took to create Readmine. We were incredibly ambitious with our spec for Readmine and we took on a monumental undertaking for our small team of 3 people .

We wanted to release a product that would give people some serious benefits and value for their time using Readmine. We re trying to tackle some pretty big objectives with empowering and inspiring people to be more actively apart of the internet with their thoughts, opinions, comments, expressions or just simply leaving a record of what was of interest to them   and then some.

OK  enough rambling. I just needed to get a few things off my chest. I also just wanted to show that we re a small team of open minded genuine people eager to ensure Readmine is a valuable and highly useful tool for you. I hope you sign up for our closed beta and send in bug reports and feedback and we ll be working hard and fast to get them all sorted out.

Over the coming weeks we re working on a Readmine.com website for the public beta release. We ll pull together some better Video Overviews (yeah the current one is incredibly rushed and saying it is bad would be, well, being very polite - just wanted to get something up to give you a rundown). A lot of the work we ll do from here on will be based on feedback from people like you.