Team Regator is going to South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi)! To celebrate the journey down to Austin, The Regator Premium iPhone app will be on sale in the app store at a special SXSWi price of $1.99! If you’re going to be there, contact us on twitter (@regator) or give us a call at 404-949-8171! Cheers!
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Maybe it’s karma–when I was a kid, my grandfather gave me a hat that said, “I’d rather push my Chevy than drive a Ford.” I grew up in a Chevy family and when I was sixteen, I set my sights on a surf green 1957 Chevy Bel Air (similar to the one in the photo but with four doors and bit less shine). I toiled away serving fries at a fast-food joint until I could afford my dream car then worked to restore it with my dad. It’s still in his garage in Missouri. So it makes sense that, all these years later, just when I thought we couldn’t afford SXSW this year, Chevrolet steps up and lends a hand–and provides some adventure, to boot. I wouldn’t whore out my Twitter account for just any corporate behemoth for a free trip to SXSW, after all (or would I?).
How does it work?
On Tuesday, we leave for a roadtrip/scavenger hunt/competition involving 50 unique challenges that we will complete on our way from Atlanta to Austin’s South by Southwest. We’ll be driving the shiny new Equinox that Chevy is providing for the trip (along with video cams, food, hotels, and funding for incidentals) and documenting our ridiculously fun journey with videos, photos, blog posts, and assorted other technological marvels. Oh, and we’ll be wiping the floor with competing with seven other teams from around the country. YOU can help us win. In fact, we can’t do it without you. Keep reading to find out how…
Who is Team Atlanta?
Me (Kimberly Turner): Regator cofounder, adrenaline junkie, animal lover, DJ, writer, adventurer extraordinaire
Scott Lockhart: Regator cofounder, alpaca connoisseur, cricket fanatic, unofficial trashtalker, Australian
Chris Turner: Regator cofounder, beer brewer, king of manual dexterity challenges, wicked smart developer, lover of bacon
Tessa Horehled: Senior strategist at THINK Interactive, Team Chevy ATL Captain, roller derby badass, social media guru (not self-proclaimed)
Linnea Corn McAlvin: Digital media strategist at PHD, brand-new friend of Team Regator and therefore somewhat mysterious but in our brief experience, just about as lovely a person as you are likely to meet anywhere
How can I help make sure you win?
We’re glad you asked. We get points for completing challenges but a lot of our points also come from YOU. We can’t win without you. Kindly follow along with our adventures at our Facebook fan page, on Twitter, and/or at Chevy’s Posterous blog (you’ll see scoring updates and the like here). Then…
1) If you’re on Twitter, the best thing you can do to support us is to retweet like a crazy thing when we post about our challenges. Don’t forget to include “#chevyatl” so that the powers that be can see and count your tweet toward our total. Our total number of followers pales in comparison with North Carolina’s, but we have faith in you guys. Quality over quantity–it’s the Regator motto and it applies here too.
2) If you have a blog and want to support the home team by writing a post about why Atlanta should win, please tag it “#chevyatl” and share it with as many folks as you can without making people hate you.
3) If you’re a relative or friend without a blog or Twitter account, send us warm, happy thoughts and feel free to give us a call with tips, cheers and other jolliness.
4) If you’re AutoTrader, you rock because you’ve already provided us with additional sponsorship support and for that we adore you and shall wear your t-shirts whilst cruising the world in our fine Chevy action.
5) If you’re in Atlanta, come to our Tweetup tomorrow night to see us off. Team North Carolina will be in town by then and will be joining us at The Marlay in Decatur from 6-10. It’d be a real shame if Atlantans were to prank the NC Team in any way while they were there drinking and celebrating our city’s hospitality. A true shame. I certainly hope that doesn’t happen.
Why should I care if you win?
Gee, we’re glad you asked. Cause if you’re in Atlanta and we win, you will not only get a sense of city pride but Chevy’s gonna throw a big ole party for all of us. Epic. Food. Booze. Dancing. Fun. Everything short of fire-eating robots riding elephants. Free. Yes, free. Make it happen.
What exactly are these challenges?
There are 50. If you have any tips or advice to help us accomplish any of these, comment away. This isn’t gonna be short. Ready? Here we go….
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The last week saw another massive earthquake, this time in Chile, creating havoc and a wee tsunami felt across the Pacific rim. The Winter Olympics ended on Sunday and NBC did what it does best and inserted it’s new show “The Marriage Ref” into the middle of the closing ceremony. Stay classy NBC. Questions around whether Tiger Woods’ wife Elin Nordegren will come back to him and when he would come back to professional golf were everywhere this week. The lead up to the Academy Awards was in full swing, with angry producers and Borat being allegedly banned from Hollywood’s night of nights.
Also this week, Jay Leno came back and no one cared. Neil Patrick Harris made his first move into serious cinema accepting a role in the upcoming Smurfs motion picture. We found out that for the record, Jon Stewart hates Chatroulette.com. OK Go released a new and deliciously viral music video for their song, “This Too Shall Pass”, featuring the band interacting with an incredible Rube Goldberg machine (think the 70s game Mouse Trap). To top it off, Sarah Palin did stand up on national television, living the phrase, “if you can’t beat them, join them”.
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Team Atlanta will be representing Atlanta in the Chevrolet Social Media Road Trip Challenge to South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) in Austin, TX. Nine teams from around the country will each be driving one of Chevy’s newest products from their home town to the festival. Each team will be given clues, challenges and tasks to perform along the way. The Atlanta team has been finalized and the entire Regator team will be part of it! Yes, all THREE of us!!! The team is as follows:
There will be 50 challenges that we will have to complete along the way, of which 45 will be crowdsourced. If we win, Atlanta will get the mother of all Tweetups sponsors by the folks at Chevrolet! We will be leaving on Tuesday March 9th, so stay tuned to this blog and whatever social media you prefer as we will be keeping you up-to-date with our adventures!
For the record, we have a definite chance of winning. If we don’t win, we are sure to talk the most trash. This has already started…
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The White House focused on health care, an apologetic Tiger Woods got Chris Brown’s support and PETA’s attention, Twitter talked ad platform, Facebook patented the news feed, the Winter Olympics continued to showcase the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, Sarah Palin was unhappy with daughter Bristol’s decision to appear on “The Secret Life of the American Teenager,” Ellen DeGeneres started her judging stint on “American Idol,” former VP Dick Cheney had a heart attack, Scott Brown drew the ire of his party, “Growing Pains” actor Andrew Koenig went missing and was later found dead, Ron Paul won the straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Google Buzz continued to see privacy and legal problems, a farmer invented the Lady Gaga scarecrow while the real thing graced the cover of Cosmo, The L.A. Times announced its Book Prize finalists, and more. Click any trend to see posts and related searches:
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Regator is fortunate enough to be based in Decatur, Georgia, home of some of the most amazing pubs in the Southeast. We like taking walks, we like beer, and we like you. That’s why we’ve decided to combine them all and embark on an epic pub crawl with all of our friends. We really hope you can make it.
This event is NOT about networking, discussing work, or promoting anything. It IS about having a good time with good people and good beer. Simple as that.
We’ll be approaching the pub owners this week to see whether we can get any drink specials happening and we’ll keep you posted. Our best guess at the schedule is as follows but there is definitely potential for time changes and/or substitutions: Twain’s (6-8pm), Brick Store (8-9), Leon’s Full Service (9-10), Mac McGee’s (10-11:30), The Marlay (formerly The Grange, 11:30-?).
We might end up staying a bit longer at The Brick Store and/or Leon’s in particular if things aren’t too crowded. Your best bet is either to join us at Twain’s and stick with us, check Twitter #regcrawl to see where we are, or call 404-939-7181 (that number rings all three of the Regator founders’ phones–one of us is bound to hear it).
The entire walk is only about a mile for the whole night (map) and there’s easy access to Decatur MARTA.
Please RSVP in the comments or on the Facebook invite (but not both) so that we can get some idea of how many to expect.
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As I mentioned last week, while launching this series of weekly posts, accurate trends lists are a great way to quickly keep tabs on the week’s biggest stories.
This week, the Vancouver Olympics got underway, Google Buzz took a beating for its privacy issues, Indiana Senator Evan Bayh retired, Sarah Palin was offended by Family Guy, Kevin Smith was kicked off a Southwest Airlines flight, Former President Clinton had heart surgery, Chinese New Year brought in the Year of the Tiger, Mardi Gras celebrations began in the wake of New Orleans’ Super Bowl win, Alexander McQueen took his own life, a Taliban commander was captured, Steve Jobs’ authorized biography made news, John Mayer put his foot in his mouth–repeatedly, injured American skier Lindsey Vonn brought home some Gold and much more.
Here’s how it all stacked up. Click any trend to see posts and related searches:
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Want to get a quick summary of what’s going on right now? Trends lists are beyond handy for just that…when they work. Unfortunately, good trends are hard to come by. Nary a minute goes by without some bored dude on Twitter saying, “Hey everybody, let’s get #myrandommeaninglesshashtag trending!” followed by a flurry of excited tweets about #myrandommeaninglesshashtag. Google Trends are less nonsensical but rely on search queries. Take a minute to look through your search history. Do you want trends based on that? Doubtful. I certainly don’t, but maybe that’s because my recent search history includes (and I’m not making this up–welcome to my psyche): “sock puppet sifl olly,” “appendicitis symptoms,” “luge lessons,” “german translation,” “deep impact tsunami,” “whirlyball,” “hot chip lyrics,” “computer axe attack,” and “extreme stampede,” among other gems.
^ Today's trends. Choose your weapon.
Fortunately, there is another option. From day one, Regator has had trends lists for every one of our 500+ topics and the Hot List on the homepage is a fantastic way to get a quick glimpse at the day’s top stories. We’ll be putting even more of a focus on our trends in the future because, thanks to the carefully curated content they are based on, they are accurate, timely, fun, and far more useful than most. We think there’s real value there. You can stop by Regator to check out real-time trends on any of our topics any time you want, but one thing the current iteration of the site doesn’t do is give a list of trends going back for the past seven days. That’s why I’ll be doing a weekly trends list starting with this, the trends for February 4-11, 2010. Click any trend to see posts and related searches.
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Like this very intense owl, we here at Team Regator are facing forward but want to take a moment to glance back at where we’ve been. It won’t be as creepy as when owly here does it. Here’s a recap of some highlights from the last twelve months and a sneak peek at what you can expect from Regator in the year to come.
January ‘09 – At this point, Reg is just a baby gator and the site is all of five months old (not counting the nine months of development). We spent the previous year developing, then throwing a wicked launch party at Paste magazine’s offices, doing a minor redesign, and winning third place in the social news category of Mashable’s Open Web Awards but were really just finding our footing. Regator was, for those who might not know, founded by three folks in a house in Georgia with no outside funding (that remains true to this day) and the idea that it would be a very small site dedicated to real estate professionals…yes, really. We hadn’t launched a startup before but we had complementary skills plus a lot of enthusiasm and good ideas. None of us could’ve predicted that we’d have the kind of year we had in 2009. We continue to learn more about this crazy startup life every day and we want to thank every one of you for coming along for the ride.
February ‘09 – Behind-the-scenes work continues. There’s plenty of coffee, Red Bull, late-night strategy meetings, and early-morning updates before running off to day jobs. Cofounder Kimberly Turner works her last month as a journalist before devoting herself to Regator full-time.
March ‘09 – Team Regator attends SXSW for the first time–learning from panels, meeting fantastic 
new friends, and, of course, spreading the word. We have a Regator flash party for Scott’s birthday with the help of fellow Atlantan Download Squad’s Grant Robertson and his motley crew of troublemakers. Just a bit of the coverage from SXSW:
Regator crawls the blog trash to find blog treasure
SXSW Video: Regator – Curated Blog Aggregator
April ‘09 - Traffic continues to grow throughout the year as Regator gets great word-of-mouth and received press from top bloggers, newspapers such as The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The Australian, and respected names such as AdAge and PC World.
May ‘09 – Regator cohosts Mashable’s first ever Atlanta event, the Mashable/Regator Mixer aka Mashlanta. More than 400 attendees from across the Southeast turn up to the Trolley Barn in Inman Park to network, enjoy the weather, meet the Mashable and Regator crews, talk social media, eat, and–of course–take advantage of the open bar. In a word? Epic.
June ‘09 - Kimberly and Scott represent Regator at Internet Week NYC, sponsoring Mashable’s NextUp NYC. Chris starts learning how to build iPhone apps.
July ‘09 - Work commences in earnest on the first Regator iPhone app. Traffic continues to grow.
August ‘09 – Team Regator celebrates its one year anniversary, along with local blogger Dave Kell of inDecatur, who had been writing an average of 6.8 posts per day every day for two years. On the 25th, we release the free version of Regator for iPhone. A bit of the press:
Regator comes to iPhone (Download Squad)
Regator Launch Their New iPhone Application (Crenk)
The Blogosphere in Your Pocket: Regator Comes to the iPhone (ReadWriteWeb)
Regator’s New iPhone App Puts The Best of Blogosphere In Your Pocket (Touch Reviews)
Regator for iPhone: The Web’s Trending Topics in Your Pocket (Mashable)
Regator provides news aggregation for the more blog-minded (TUAW)
Regator’s iPhone app is all sorts of win (The Inquisitr)
Regator Launches iPhone App – Makes Finding The Best Of The Blogosphere Easier Than Ever (TechNation Australia)
iPhone app hunts down Web’s best blog posts (Webware)
September ‘09 – Quietly work. Quietly work. Quietly work.
October ‘09 – Team Regator heads to Vegas for BlogWorld, where we set up our first conference exhibit space and proceeded to demo and pitch our hearts out. We are thrilled with the level of interest in what we are doing and with the response from users and bloggers alike.
Six @ Six – 6 Tools We Found at Blog World 2009 (BulletProof Blog)
November ‘09 - There are times when we think we might be decent enough at this whole startup thing…then we make a genius decision like the one we made in November, when we launched the premium version of our iPhone app just days before Thanksgiving. 
While everyone was traveling home to see family and stuffing their faces with mashed potatoes, we decide to release our first for-profit product. Oops. We break into the top twenty news apps and get rave reviews from users but because our media coverage happened whilst everyone was in a turkey coma, we don’t stay there for as long as we’d hoped. Let this be a lesson. Fortunately, our guardian angels at Apple help us remedy that later (see January ‘10). The new app adds lots of functionality and personalization options. Some of the press:
Regator Brings the Best Niche Blogs to Your Phone (ReadWriteWeb)
12 Days of iPhone Apps – Day 1: Regator Premium (MyTechOpinion)
Regator Premium – Web’s Best Blogs in Review – All the same great content, none of the calories (TouchMyApps)
Regator Tracks Blogosphere Social Mentions (Crenk)
Regator Pro iPhone App To Launch “Any Day” (TheNextWeb)
December ‘09 - With the redesign finalized after months of focus groups, changes, and countless arguments–errr, I mean “discussions,” Chris spends the month coding the new site. Kimberly and Scott are, um, in Australia. Two years of working endless hours sans pay deserves a little beach time, no? Sorry, Chris. Regator was recognized in a few year-end lists, notably:
20 Fantastic Free iPhone Apps for Parents
Top 100 Web Products of 2009
Top Tools for Tracking Topics on the Web
10 Web Tech Innovations That Have Improved Our Lives (mentioned within RSS feeds category)
Top 10 RSS & Syndication Technologies of 2009 (honorable mention)
Top 20 Free iPhone Apps You Can’t Live Without
My 10 favorite iPhone apps of 2009 (iPhone Atlas on CNET)
January ‘10 – Apple selects Regator Premium for its What’s Hot list on the App Store’s front page then includes the app in its “App Store Spotlight” email, helping the app dig its way out of the mountain of news apps and back into the top ten. Sales increase about 3500% on the first day of the app’s What’s Hot residency.
The rest of 2010 – You’ll see a lot from Regator.com this year, starting with the aforementioned relaunch/redesign, which presents our tools in a much more intuitive way, encourages sign-ups, avoids hiding all our coolest features until after users sign up (told you we are still learning), and adds some pretty fun new ways to interact with our data. It’s built now. We’re playing with it, bug testing, and tweaking design. You should be able to give it a try in the near future. Shortly after the initial relaunch, we’ll be adding in some incredibly nifty social stuff (don’t worry, we’re not going to become a social network; Facebook has that covered) and a few other fun bits to increase engagement with the site.
We’ll be releasing an API so that developers, bloggers, and other companies can take advantage of the huge archive of hand-curated blog posts we have accumulated. Good things will come of this.
We’ll be updating the iPhone app very shortly to increase the font size. You guys have asked for it, we’re listening. Later, we’ll add some other improvements. We do hear and note your requests for apps on other platforms as well. I can’t tell you if/when that will happen, but we’re watching the market and making decisions on how best to use our limited resources to bring Regator to the world.
The most important thing for you, as a user, to know is that we really care about what you have to say. If you have a suggestion that will help us improve what we do, let us know. We want to make the best, most useful products we can and we need your feedback to do that. We’re very easy to find:
Follow us at http://twitter.com/regator
Become a Facebook fan at http://facebook.com/regator
Email us at info @ the name of our website. (Suck that, spambots!)
Call us at 404-939-7181 (yes, the founders actually answer).
Do keep in touch. Thanks for a great ‘09.
-Team Regator
* Owl photo – Creative Commons, Flickr, ~Saw-whet Owl – Facing Backwards~ by ~Sage~
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Team Regator is thrilled to announce that the Regator Premium iPhone application has been selected by Apple for inclusion on the App Store’s “What’s Hot” list. Eight weeks after its release, Regator Premium has once again shot into the Top 20 Paid News Applications in the US and is climbing. See it on the App Store’s homepage.
Regator Premium, priced at $2.99, includes all the features our free app but also gives users the ability to personalize their experience by saving their favorite blogs, topics, and posts for fast, easy access. In addition, this premium version supports in-app video viewing and adds popular Regator.com features such as the Blog Monitor and Related Posts.
Both the light and premium versions allow users to:
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