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It’s Tuesday, which means its time to meet the next member of the Zemanta crew for another installment of Meet the Team Tuesdays! This week we will be spending some time with artist, and the creative hand behind our most recent redesign, Leon van Bekel!

Q: How would you explain Zemanta in to your eight-year-old relative?

A: It is like writing a blog post, but with a friend looking over your shoulder, adding their thoughts and helping you draw pictures.

Q: What have you liked most about working at Zemanta? What is your favorite Zemanta moment?

A: The really cool people, and releasing the new awesome widget!
Q: What was one of the first online projects you worked on?

A: It was for local theater weekly promotion page. I did the design and coding, and looking back, it was horrible.

Q: Does everyone in your family ask you to “fix their email”?

A: YES! The whole family all the time!! And I am just a designer!

Q: If you could change one thing online, what would it be?

A: Free internet for all!

Q: If your could be a VC for a day, what startup would you invest in?

A: I would invest in the business I have been working on myself, orsa.si. It is a reproduction marketplace, selling things made from recycled materials with an almost carbon free footprint.

Q: Name three people you know online, that you would like to meet in real life?

A: Benji B and Gilles Peterson from BBC Radio One, and graphic designer John Maeda.

Q: How would you describe yourself in three words?

A: Alternative minded, happy family guy & music addict.

Q: If you had to pick, what other web service would you like to work for?
A: The Behance group

Q: What is the best holiday you’ve ever taken?

A: My last trip to Mali Lošinj, Croatia with just my wife, two kids and an apartment in a private villa with lots of gardens.

Q: Where were you born? Where did you grow up & what was it like there?

A: I was born in Jesenice and grew up in Bled where currently I live today. Every morning I go to my office and enjoy the beautiful view.

Q: What do you do for inspiration?

A: First I feed my subconscious than I wait for it to digest ideas. I take one day and I surf the web, the next day I plan and rethink stuff, and on the third day I do nothing and wait inspiration to come to me!

Thank you for taking time and sharing with us Leon! Stay tuned for next time, when we spend some time with one part of the amazing Marko duo, Marko Samastur!

There is no question that Mozilla is one of the major leaders when it comes to open source and developer friendly technologies. The add-ons community for Firefox is one of the largest sources for innovation on the Web today, with over one billion installs of Firefox add-ons to date. Because of this, Zemanta has always been one of their most active extension providers. And when we heard about the recent announcement of their Jetpack API, of course we were one of the first on board!

Jetpack is a platform that lets you build Firefox extensions with the same skill-set you already know from building on the open Web: Javascript, HTML, and CSS, with jQuery included by default to ease you into it. In short, Jetpack is an API for allowing you to write Firefox add-ons using the web technologies you already know. As with all Mozilla Labs experiments, Jetpack is an open source project and everyone is welcome to participate in its design, development and testing.

Quick and lightweight, the Zemanta Jetpack is a fully functional browser extension that leaves barely a footprint, clocking in at a mere 16kB (17 times smaller then the standard XPI) and less then 100 lines of code! Most importantly, Jetpack will allow new features to be added to your browser without a restart or any compatibility issues, you will always be running the latest build of Zemanta, no matter the version of Firefox you are running!

Giving Jetpack a test spin couldn’t be easier! Simply download the Jetpack package, and install the Zemanta extension. No browser restart necessary! Keep in mind though that we are still in the experimental phases, so somethings might act a bit wonky. You can help us make things run smoother by reporting any bugs or hiccups you come across. And a special shout-out goes to Zemanta’s very own rockstar Matjaz Horvat for taking the lead and building this all together!

We are excited to hear what you think!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Mozilla Jetpack (maplecitywebhosting.com)
• Mozilla Jetpack Contest 0.5: Winner Declared (techie-buzz.com)
• Mozilla Jetpack Gets a Gallery (mashable.com)
• How to: add features to Firefox with Mozilla’s new Jetpack (arstechnica.com)

Zemanta is like a fine automobile. The better you take care of maintenance, the nicer the ride. That’s why we are working like a mechanics around the clock making sure that everything is polished up and in perfect shape! Here’s a few little tune-ups we have made behind the scenes over the last couple weeks that should make your Zemanta road trip as smooth as possible:

- New and improved Wordpress server side plugin 0.6.4, which should fix those broken positioning issues when moving around the Zemanta widget

- A couple of static.zemanta.com fixes, including Wordpress rich objects, better Google Chrome detection, and a few minor Google Maps fixes

- Updated Internet Explorer plug-in, that should squash that little bug where it crashes when antivirus software on Vista is present

- Patched up a few holes and repaired a few issues within the new update for Blogger, including alignment issues and connection problems.

- While troubleshooting the issue in Blogger, we found a fix for a hiccup with the Bookmarklet. Killing two birds with one stone!

-  A few fixes of edge case scenarios and minor speed optimizations, we also added a feature that might help debug API glitches when they happen

- Alpha platform support that we can’t wait to release! Join our fan page on Facebook for a chance to receive a sneak preview

And as always if you hear something rattling, or if Zemanta is chugging along at a snails pace, drop us a line and one of our world class engineer mechanics will take a look under the hood!

Greetings & welcome again to another installment of Meet the Team Tuesdays, a bi-weekly chance to meet the stars of the Zemanta staff. This week we will spend some time with Jure Koren, one of the first members of the Zemanta team, and programmer “Jack of all Trades”.

Q: What got you into computers?

A: It was my Commodore 64 that shipped with a book titled “Machine Code Programming for the Commodore 64″. I’ve also learned English from that same book, which later ended up giving me an edge when I got to computers.

Q: What was one of the first online projects you worked on?

A: The first was KiSS, a student internet service provider. I later went onto working at Vidra, a Slovenian Linux news site with Marko Samastur, which didn’t really fly but it provided me with much needed experience.

Q: How would you explain Zemanta in three sentences to your eight-year-old relative?

A: Zemanta reads what you’re writing and then thinks about what’s most important. Then it takes each of the important thing and tells you about the newest and most interesting things it can remember about each of them, so you can use them to impress your human readers.

Q:  If you had to pick, what other web service would you like to work for?

A: I’m very much concerned with the privacy of the Internet’s infrastructure, so I’d probably try to work for the companies that empower people to escape their governments and spouses. I think people don’t think enough about trust and privacy and what it all means.

Q: Does everyone in your family ask you to “fix their email”?

A: I have two younger brothers and the older is also a computer freak. He does that for the family now.

Q: What online meme makes you LOL?

A: Požigalec. It’s a local thing, but nevertheless amazing.

Q: How would you describe yourself in three words?

A: There are two answers to this question. The sarcastic one is always “beautiful, intelligent, modest” and the real one is “young, foolish, cowardly”.

Q: If you could be a superhero, what would you want your superpowers to be? Who would be your sidekick?

A: The superpower of auto quicksave/quickload would be the best! And I’d always rely on my good friend, Mrs. Tachyon, from Terry Pratchett’s “Johnny and the Bomb“.

Q: What are the top 2 items on your to-do list?

A: Stop saying “yes” & stop working night shifts; which presumably follows.

Q: What makes you feel lucky?

A: My google t-shirt

Thank you for your story Jure! Visit next week, when we take a moment to get to know Zemanta’s designer, and the creative eye behind our recent redesign Leon Van Bakel!

photo attribution doxieone via flickr

The new decade is for new beginnings and new experiences. You can make New Years resolutions every year, but starting a fresh new decade is a different kind of clean slate. Its a chance to start new healthier habits, learn new skills, and try something that you have always talked about wanting to do.

Being in the technology industry, I am surrounded by brilliant people. Programmers, engineers and designers who all have technical skills that I have always admired, but have been too scared or intimidated to experience myself. I have used every excuse in the book “But it looks so hard!” & “I suck at math!” & “Its way too over my head”.

Until I started to realize how much I was holding myself back. Its not written anywhere that I can’t program computer apps, and its not like these amazing engineers woke up one day and knew how to code in Ruby without even cracking a book. Everyone has to start somewhere, and that somewhere is having the desire to start something new, and stop making excuses.

And now, as we wrap up our first full week of 2010, I encourage you to take a moment to sit down and think about what you want this new decade to be. Is this the year that you finally learn how to cook? How about taking a college class in a topic that you have always been interested in? Shoot for the stars and decide that this is the decade that you will be on Broadway! Or heck, you can start out small by just making a pact to blog everyday, or try to call your grandma once a week.

What about you? How are you going to improve in 2010? If you’re not sure where to begin, check out 101 in 365 and find some inspiration from their Explore page. Personally, in 2010 I have decided that I will program an Android app. I have no idea what it will do (I’m pretty sure that it might probably involve a certain sexy API) But I do know that I am no longer going to let any excuses stand in my way.

Share your stories in the comments and can we start this together!

Later Gators!

xoxo
Tilly McLain

Related articles by Zemanta

• Where Do You Want to Be In a Year? (devlicio.us)
• Achieve Your New Year Goals With Lifetick (geardiary.com)

Hello! And welcome again to Meet the Team Tuesdays! This week we have the pleasure to get to know Vice President of Business Development, and first member of the Zemanta U.S. team, Jim Hirshfield!

Jim in Ljubljana

Q: Was it the fame? The glory? What attracted you to working for Zemanta

A: Great idea and really smart team building a useful service. And I love the reaction when people see the service in action for the first time.

Q: What have you liked most about working at Zemanta? What is your favorite Zemanta moment?

A: Brainstorming with the team in Ljubljana. I don’t get to see the rest of the guys too often, being that I’m based in New York. So it’s a treat to meet face to face. And Ljubljana is beautiful.

Q: Everyone has to start somewhere! What was your first job?

A: I delivered newspapers in my neighborhood. I was the key person in a mission critical, time sensitive content delivery network. Things have changed a little bit since then.

Q: What got you into computers?

A: A fascination with punch cards. When I was in elementary school we took a field trip to the Computer Science department at Yale University. They took us on a tour of their data center and we ran some processes by punching cards and running them through the card reader. A couple years later I took a summer course in computer programming on a DEC – I forget the model, but it was a “compact unit”, about the size of a fridge with a teletype and punch tape. I’m not as old as it sounds…I just got a very early start. I think my software programming skills peaked a few years after Engineering school.

Q: Mac or PC? Android or iPhone?

A: MacBook Pro, BlackBerry, & Moleskine.

Q: Name 3 things you never leave the house without

A: Footwear, mobile phone, and a positive attitude.

Thank you Jim! Check by next time, when Meet the Team Tuesdays sits down and interviews Zemanta’s engineering jack of all trades, Jure Koren!