Today, we’re very delighted to announce the opening of the Presdo API, and the Presdo iPhone 3G Contest, both of which were released over the weekend!  More about the latter in a minute.

What does the Presdo API mean to us?  When we first launched Presdo, many users wrote in to ask if we were planning to release an API or an integration with their favorite productivity tool.  They recognized that Presdo helps them with an important activity that they already do, albeit not in a very good way today.  Presdo would help them do it much better if only it were easier to access.  More so than many other web apps, Presdo makes a lot of sense when it is embedded in the existing flows of the way people work.  We agreed.  Also, we mentioned at the beginning that we wanted to actively engage our users and community to create a great product together.  We also realize that we don’t have a lock on all the best ideas.

With the Presdo API, we wanted to enable not only a few integrations that we could do on our own.  We wanted to enable our users and developers to create many integrations at once.

Like our product, the initial Presdo API is simple.  (But we’d like to think it’s not simple-minded!)  In speaking with many developers over the last several months about a possible Presdo API, we realized that there were many capabilities we could build into the API, and in fact, we’ve envisioned much more capability than is currently available in the API.

So here’s a challenge to all of you who want to push Presdo to the next level.  We’d like to learn from you and to understand what you’d like to do in terms of integrating with Presdo.  If we like your ideas, we’ll be supporting you all the way.

To get the juices of innovation flowing, we are running a programming contest around the new API and awarding some great prizes from a company we greatly admire.  We will be announcing the judges shortly.  During the contest, we will also be enhancing the features of Presdo, and updates will be posted to this blog.  These enhancements may stoke your thinking about new potential applications with Presdo, so we encourage you to stay tuned to this blog for such announcements.

We hope that you’ll take us up on these opportunities to do something fantastic with Presdo.  We are really looking forward to it.

Today, we’re very excited to announce the Presdo iPhone 3G Contest. We will be releasing an API to Presdo in a few weeks, and we want to encourage smart and creative developers to help us come up with great ways to integrate Presdo into other tools they currently use.

As prizes, we will be giving away one or more of Apple’s unreleased iPhones 3G in exchange for great integrations.

Contest details will be announced at http://presdo.com/contest, so bookmark this page for details.

We are looking forward to your participation!

–Eric

In the last few weeks, we’ve had many great conversations with people about our company. I even had a great time meeting with the founder of a cool company called Presto.com.

It’s been very interesting to hear people say our name, Presdo, for the first time.

In spite of our desire to come up with a name which can be said the same by everybody around the world, using a made-up name like Presdo always runs the risk of unintended consequences.

So I am here to explain the origin of Presdo, and to settle once and for all how it should be pronounced. And have some fun too!

Presdo comes from the word presto. We like that the original word comes from magic tricks, in the same tradition as abracadabra and voila!. We also like that presto comes from music, which means to play the music “very fast”. These are great themes to be associated with, since our product is meant to be quick and provide a bit of magic to our users.

Oh, one more thing. Since Presdo is all about “do”ing things with other people, we don’t mind that the name mentions do too.

So, Presdo sounds like presto. That’s where the name comes from.

Oh, and it has one other meaning too… in another language besides English.

Feel free to tell us your favorite way to say Presdo!

At Presdo, we live by a few important standards when it comes to the product. “Incredibly cool” and “scary good” are two phrases often heard in the hallway when we ask ourselves if a new feature has lived up to our expectations.

Think about the last “incredibly cool” product you saw, or a “scary good” piece of work you recently heard about. There aren’t too many of them around. And the truth is, despite our trying to achieve this, it is difficult to live up to these demanding expectations every single day.

Yet, rather than talking about the people behind the product, I want to first talk about a group of people who became our early users and then went way beyond what we expected from them. Through their initiative and enthusiasm for Presdo, they gave us real advice, “tough love” feedback, and their encouragement.

On the days when we couldn’t quite achieve “incredibly cool” and “scary good”, they reminded us why it was so important to do so. They kept us honest. What we do here at Presdo is ultimately for our users’ benefit, and we hope that we have at least created something that is “incredibly cool” and “scary good” for them.

I want to thank the following people for their generosity in helping Presdo to become what it is today. You all earned my sincere thanks:

–Eric

We’re delighted by the coverage we received on TechCrunch today. Many thanks to Erick Schonfeld and the TechCrunch team for their posting.

We also received an overwhelming amount of feedback from users who read the post. We just want to let everyone know that we are working through the feedback as quickly as possible and we hope to get back to you as soon as we can.

At the end of the day, it’s all about whether you, our users, find what we’re doing valuable enough to continue to use it, so we hope that you’ll continue to write in after you’ve really used the tool and give us your feedback!

We are totally passionate and committed about making this a great product.

A very warm welcome to you, our Presdo users, to the Presdo blog. We have some great things in store for Presdo, and we very much want you to take part in creating the future with us.

We want this blog to be a place where matters that are worthy to you are discussed, for example, topics concerning our product, the success our customers are having, reasons for important decisions we’ve made, and important industry trends impacting what we do. More on many of these topics in future postings.

Hopefully by now, you’ve tried out Presdo and you are curious about the people behind the product. It is a very small team.

Presdo was started not only to address a need that we all have but also to represent some important ideals about the way people build technology companies. All of us at Presdo use products we love and find indispensable. You and I probably agree on what many of these products are. The products that most excite us offer something refreshing while adding value to our lives. They make us feel good when we use them.

When we began Presdo, we set for ourselves not a modest challenge: can we bring useful and interesting products to market that are even better than the best products we admire? And in doing so, can we build a profitable company that enables us to continue to create value for our customers? These are important goals for us.

In my own experience, it is often difficult for any company–let alone a hungry startup–to stay true to its ideals while pursuing the profit motive, and vice versa. However, I firmly believe that the companies which have the good fortune to do both go on to become leaders in their industry, and as they say, change the world. In our “hungry” state of things today, we can certainly say that we hope to have the chance to do this.

It’s my genuine hope that you will engage us in the worthy discussions we will have here, and in other ways, at the start of our exciting journey. We are delighted that you are here!

–Eric