We are getting excited as more items are being crossed off our to-do list.

- Brian and I met a programmer, Jeff Katz, who has had experience with many programming languages and could contribute to our development. We are working out a deal to get Jeff on our team to help with development and future Facebook/OpenSocial applications.

- We are now seeking a graphic designer to join our team full time. We’ve realized a one man show (i.e. me) cannot handle our graphic design demand so I am putting the word out there for anyone who may be interested. If you want more information, please email performster@gmail.com.

Alex Danvers from the DoG Street Journal (The College of William and Mary’s paper) took some time to talk to us about the launch of Performster.com. You can read it here:

http://www.dogstreetjournal.com/story/3851

This article goes more in depth on our referral program. Chris Manitius will lead this effort to spread the word on the performster.com site. Hope you enjoy the article.

Performster Demos Russian Jugglers and Card Tricks
Performster is featured in another article by Whitney Rhodes from the Broadside. We would like to thank everyone at GMU and Whitney from the Broadside for the continued support and interest.

I mentioned a while back that we were invited to present the Performster business to attendees of a George Mason Information, Technology & Engineering event. Well, Yesterday Mike and I had a booth set up at the event with four laptops where students could demo a contest and give us their thoughts, feelings, and feedback. We had a lot of fun and met a bunch of students who had great ideas! The faculty and staff were more than helpful and supportive and we couldn’t have asked for a better event. Our favorite Broadside Reporter, Whitney Rhodes, was also there and test-drove our system. Look out for a new Broadside article in the near future!

In other news, Chris, our newest team member who is a Performster Evangelist/Talent Agent/Representative has been actively working to build buzz around the launch of Performster. He partnered up with a Home Brew show at William & Mary and all of the performers will be featured on Performster at the launch! Additionally, we are actively working on a program for all of those aspiring talent agents out there - In essence, you will be rewarded if you refer talent and participants to Performster.com. Shoot Chris an email at Chris@corp.performster.com if you are interested in this or have any questions.

On September 6th, the Performster team will be at George Mason University (my Alma Mater) for the IT&E welcome back party. Students, faculty, and alumni will be getting together to network and have a good time, and we’ve been invited to present Performster to the group. This will be a fun opportunity for us to get feedback from the new students and our old professors.

Our plan is to set up an interactive table where students can ‘take the site for a spin’ in a beta test. Since these are Computer Science students, we know they’ll enjoy testing out the functionalities, digging into the code, and trying to break the site. We’ll then give them the opportunity to give us feedback on what they like and don’t like.

Some of the topics I think I’d be able to ‘give back’ to the students by sharing my experiences on would be:

• Dealing with outsourcing - lessons learned the hard way

• Starting a Business

• What to do with a good idea