Open Beta has graciously asked me to talk about the launch of Keynot.es. Open Beta is a showcase of innovative ideas and technology companies from Oklahoma, and this year it’s heading down to Austin as an official SXSW party.

This will actually be our third year to take part. At Open Beta 4, we were part of the Startup Weekend competition that started the project. A few months later, at Open Beta 5, we let everyone in attendance into our “VIP Pass” private beta. In February we launched Keynot.es to the public and this time we’re back to give everyone an update and share a few lessons we have learned along the way.

If you’ll be in Austin on Monday, let us know on Twitter.

We’re very happy to announce the launch of a project we started working on almost a year ago. Keynotes makes it easy for attendees, speakers and conferences to find each other.

After we started our beta review at OpenBeta 5 in October, we’ve had a lot of great feedback and a chance to talk to people as excited about Keynotes as we are. A big thank you goes out to our amazing beta users who have already been adding their favorite conferences and following their friends.

Keynotes is still very young and we have some amazing features on our roadmap. First up are tools for speakers. After that, it’s up to you. We want to hear your ideas about how to make Keynotes the best place to find information about conferences. We are all ears at keynotes@brightb.it and @keynotesapp.

Ready to get started? Check it out, and don’t forget to sign up to get conference updates and take advantage of all of our features.

We just sent out our biggest round of invites yet, which nearly tripled our previous member count. We are starting to get some coverage and it’s exciting to see such great support for the project.

Keynotes now lets you follow your favorite conferences, speakers and friends so you always know what’s going on. We’ll be rolling out a few more things before we have our big public release, but I’m glad to finally let everyone else see what we’ve been having so much fun with in alpha testing.

Next up is our big launch, and after that we are focusing on speakers. This would include some profile changes, as well as giving conferences a nice area to showcase who is speaking, and of course a way to find your favorite speakers so that you can follow them and see where they are going to be. Have an idea for what you would like to see? Leave a comment here on the blog, email us at info@keynot.es or message us on Twitter.

It’s been a few weeks since our private launch at OpenBeta and I’d like to thank everyone for taking a part in making sure that Keynotes is ready for its wide release.

Bug Fixes:

• Blank emails were being sent when there were no matches. -Thanks Mike
• Topics weren’t able to be updated after registration. 
• Conference URL’s now show up like they should
• Datepicker added to conference post page to make things easier
• The blog feed doesn’t show blank posts if Tumblr is down, which is a lot these days

Really there haven’t been too many issues with our 1.0 release, and we have been able to concentrate on a couple of features that we are really excited about that we think will make the public launch a lot more fun.

Thanks again for all of your help getting Keynotes ready. The public launch should happen sometime before the end of the year, so stay tuned!

Welcome to the official Keynotes blog, where we will be posting news, making announcements and all that good stuff. We will be sending out those Backstage Pass invites soon, so if you haven’t grabbed one already do that now.