During the past few weeks we’ve been working very hard (13+ hours / day) to get our private beta out and we’re getting really close! 

Right now we’re in “intimate beta” mode. A few of our friends from Bootup Labs were crazy enough to test Summify on their blogs. Check it out (it should work from an iPhone too):

• http://bmannconsulting.com
• http://bootup.ca
• http://dshan.me/blog
• http://northgeek.com
• http://romanfoot.com

Oh, wait! What’s Summify? Well, Summify is the new ReadFu! Ever since we started pitching ReadFu to people we’ve soon noticed a few issues with that name:

• People find it hard to understand. We were asked quite a few times how exactly do you spell it and it was always funny to say “It’s Read + Fu, like in Kung Fu”.
• It’s deceiving. Our name is composed from a common word and something ambiguous. People get the impression that it’s descriptive (because of “read”) when it’s actually not.
• Kung Fu theming was too edgy. There was no connection between us and Kung Fu.

So we decided to look for a better name. Luckily people around us were very supportive. We received a lot of great suggestions from Patrick, Jamie, Noah, Daniel and others. We eventually picked Summify, which we believe fits perfectly in our pitch.

There is some hassle doing a renaming though:

• Facebook doesn’t allow you to rename your fan page so we have to start over. Please make sure to become of fan of Summify on Facebook so that we can get a proper vanity URL (you have to get 100 Fans to do that).
• We have to move our email and docs to the new domain. Our @summify.com emails don’t work yet but we’ll have them up until next week.
• We have to print a new set of business cards.
• Other small changes that add up

Luckily we hadn’t yet built a brand around ReadFu, our design was still fairly early on and we didn’t have a lot of incoming links. Later on it would have been much harder to do this change.

All in all we’re excited about our new name and we hope you like it too! Summify brings insightful summaries for any link on the web. Doesn’t it sound great?

Make sure to stay tuned, we are sending invites next week and if you’re on the private beta list (big “Sign up” button on the homepage) you’ll get one!