You might have noticed that, except for a few occasional tweets and direct communication with some of you, we've been in radio silent mode since July 2009. We regret that it took so long but we had to make this decision for legal and financial reasons which I'm not able to disclose here. Our goal was to have everything sorted out by September 2009 but, unfortunately, things took much longer than expected, putting everything on hold until now.

Nevertheless, we managed to make everything to keep tarpipe running during that period while figuring out how to solve our problems and continue what we proposed at the beginning of this journey. In the meantime we learned some lessons that I believe are worth sharing here:

• Creating a company: unless you have obvious reasons, never create a company on a different country. Everything becomes endlessly more difficult: you either need to go there whenever you have to deal with legal stuff or pay someone to do it for you;
• Raising capital: if you don't have anyone on the team dedicated to this task, get someone quickly or get out of the game while you can. Raising capital is a full time job that requires a lot of attention, negotiation, communication skills and also some luck. As a bonus, if you're not near the VC, you'll need to travel a lot;
• Focusing on the original plan: sometimes things change during the development of a product. Markets change a lot for a simple reason: companies are constantly testing products on real people. Don't try to follow every move your competitors make as it will quickly drain your resources and make you loose your focus. Trust your guts and follow your original idea;
• Marketing at conferences: while conferences are a great way to market your products, you should be aware that everybody else is also there trying to get as many eye balls as possible. Going to conferences without any marketing preparation won't get you any substantial leads;
• Surviving without any income: you only feel the true taste of entrepreneurship when things go awry and you find yourself juggling your bills at the end of every month. The worst possible time to fall into this situation is during the summer. Always try to have a cash backup and calculate in advance so that you don't get trapped while everybody else is having fun at the beach.

I'm happy to say that, despite having spent very difficult times, we're again at the wheel. A positive aspect of this hiatus is that a lot has happened on the social media landscape and some new technologies make our initial vision more tangible now. Our full attention goes to further develop tarpipe while embracing those technologies.

We thank everyone of you for your continued support without which we certainly couldn't get this far. The show must go on!

Do you have your own blog? Keep reading because this might be interesting.

Since the release of the share with tarpipe bookmarklet we've been working on a way to give your blog readers the ability to share what they're reading on the spot. We first launched a widget that can be added to any Web page simply by copying and pasting a line of JavaScript code. Here's the widget being used at echoes:

After some initial testing we decided to make it easier for you by launching an easy to install WordPress.org plugin: the Share now! widget. You can easily install it with a couple of clicks and the widget will automatically appear at the bottom of every post.

The widget look and feel is similar to the bookmarklet, letting you type your thoughts, choose any destinations and click on the "share" button when you're done.

As always, please keep sending your suggestions!

We're honored to see tarpipe among TechCrunch's chosen list of the Best Web Applications or Services. The Europas are best described by TechCrunch:

These awards will recognise and celebrate the most compelling technology startups, Internet and mobile innovations of the past year (Summer 08 - Summer 09), with the tech community invited to have a say in which finalists should be recognised.

The winners will be chosen by an advisory board from the most voted nominees, so please take a moment to vote for your favorite application. Thank you for using tarpipe and helping us deliver a great application.

[warning: technical information ahead]

We've created a connector that lets you easily extend any workflow by connecting to an external REST endpoint. The REST connector is compatible with the Yahoo! Pipes Web Service Module — the only difference is that we only process with a single entry instead of a feed of entries.

The connector POSTs a JSON encoded list of properties to a service URL and expects a JSON or RSS formatted response. Here's an example JSON response:

{
  "items" : [
  {
    "title" : "My title",
    "link" : "http://example.com",
    "description" : "My Description"
  }
  ]
}

The compatibility means that you can use any existing Web Service that already worked with Yahoo! Pipes. OpenCalais offers a service with those characteristics and we decided to give it a try with our new REST connector.

This example workflow uses the REST connector to talk directly to the Calais Yahoo! Pipes Web Service. The OpenCalais URL (including the API key) is specified using the TextInput connector.

Creating your own external Web service is also very easy. All you have to do is wait for a POST, process the incoming JSON information and output a JSON formatted response. Here's an example written in PHP:

<?php
//
// Obtain the input from the POST "data" field
//
$input = json_decode($_POST['data']);
 
if ($input) {
    //
    // As an example, the output is copied from the input
    //
    $output = array();
    $output['title'] = $input->items[0]->title;
    $output['link'] = $input->items[0]->link;
    $output['description'] = $input->items[0]->description;
 
    //
    // Output JSON encoded response
    //
    echo json_encode(array('items' => array($output)));
}
?>

We hope this new REST connector will create new possibilities and expand what you can already do with your workflow. Please let us know how you'll use it with your Web services.

We've been recently invited by Cisco to participate with a solution at the Cisco Expo Portugal and we thought it would be interesting to let visitors share pictures of the event on the Web and also on the screens that were available at the venue. This idea is completely aligned with Cisco's "The Human Network" concept, letting people collaborate easily through the use of technology.

To make it all work we created a specific workflow accepting pictures sent to a custom e-mail address. Pictures were then published on the Web and presented on the screens at the venue almost immediately.