We brought on another superb engineer…this time a CMU grad involved in every aspect of campus/student life (literally 14 campus organizations, ranging from a capella groups to student senate to campus advisory committees - oh vey!). Emily Leathers joins us from the East, or rather the Middle East I should say, where she spent a year at the CMU Qatar campus. In fact, when we brought Emily in for an in-house interview, she had the raw nerves of steel to not only sustain a full-day flight, but then undergo our rigorous interview process while on a disorienting 12 hour time change. Pretty amazing in our eyes.

One of the great things about Emily is that she likes to cook and bake…and we like to eat, so it’s a perfect combination. She’s also a fan of the arts and crafts, so hopefully her craftwork will make our office more festive and flavorful (beyond our coveted pirate flag). In summary, Emily is pretty cool, and we’re happy to have her on board!

BitStrips is a new site that just launched at SXSW. Think of it as a YouTube for comic strips. Anyone can go on, create comics using their super simple comic strip creator, and also be part of the community and create member profiles. It’s free, really easy to use, and an excellent distraction from work .

And what would an online community be without the ability to invite and find your friends? Using our Address Book API, BitStrips built a nifty friend invite feature that allows users to find contacts already on the site, or send invites to friends from Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, and Yahoo contact lists. As the BitStrips’ userbase grows and grows, they’re developing a sweet catalog of comics.

We’re happy to help them out with our free and easy to use API. BitStrips even took time out of their busy beta launch to create a comic for us Rapleaf folks!

So checkout BitStrips and create some comics with characters that look less desperate than that guy on the left!

We brought Dan in as an intern, and boy was that a steal. He set the bar for all future interns. Customer service…check. Recruiting…check. Product…check. Marketing…check. But what blew us away was his tenacity and ability to adapt and pick up business development…which wasn’t even part of his internship. He knew what he wanted and he went after it. As an intern, he not only sourced but helped closed some pretty decent sized deals - a rainmaker in the making. And now we’re blessed to have him on our business development team as a full-time member and early employee of Rapleaf. We were fortunate enough to manage Dan (or rather he managed us) and we are all blessed to have him on our team. Congratulations Dan. Hurry up and graduate and help us blaze this trail!

Rapleaf Address Book API users benefit from the easy to use functionality of our API. It’s a simple API call to integrate into any site, and since Rapleaf maintains an up-to-date code on the importer, you don’t need to spend time building your own importers or doing code maintenance.

Mimi Sun has built a PHP Client Library for the API, making the Address Book API even easier to integrate into your site.  You can see a demo, sample code, and download the full kit here.

The Address Book API allows for a user to import their email contact list (from Gmail, Yahoo!, AOL, and Hotmail) into any site. Our API is used on dozens of sites and applications, and is a way for users to invite friends to a site, share content with people in their address book, and import their social relationships.    

Thanks to Mimi for helping make this available. If there are any questions about working with this client library, please email developer@rapleaf.com.