Weekly Update: Jan 14th
This past week has been crazy! Last week we released a little earlier than usual so that we had time to get ready for CES. Our big announcement: for the first time ever, you can rent a Tesla! We also had demos of our next-generation plug-and-play hardware. It’s a pretty cool feeling to unlock a Telsa Roadster Sport from an iPhone :).
This week we’ve been focusing on streamlining the messaging targeted towards newer users as they go through the system. Aside from the 10 or so bugfixes this week, we’ve added a “Facebook is required” message to the top of the signup page, added viral widgets and cleaned up the edit cars page.
We noticed that users who we thought should have been auto-approved into our system were not being approved. Our criteria is pretty simple: if you sign up in the bay area or San Diego, and are at least 20 years old, you’re in (except in a few cases where car owners share cars that don’t meet our insurance criteria). This bug has been addressed, and all those users who were supposed to be approved are now getting approved. Sorry about that :).
We’ve spent our time doing a few more interesting things:
- We’re really interested in testing the vast numbers of different path’s through our application — as such we’re building a system for describing the various interconnections between the pages, and a tool for walking through this graph verifying each page through selenium on every browser. We’re pretty excited about the possibilities here, and will be open-sourcing it as soon as we can. (by the way, we care a lot about open-source; we’ve already released some of our code)
- We now ask which state your car’s license is, for insurance purposes
- Fixed a bug we introduced last week with declining rentals
- We’ve released an iPhone application for unlocking carkit-enabled cars; look for that in the appstore soon!
- Next generation carkit development continues :)
