Happy New Year to all!

Yes, we're still here, and we admit to being awefully quiet. But think of our silence as a sign of hard work and over-zealous dedication. In fact, we're so psyched about 2012, we can't help but tease you about some our next features.

But first thing's first. We'd like to take some time and explain what has happpened in 2011. In the fewest words possible, I'd describe 2011 as a milestone year - albeit without any releases to the actual product. This can only mean that we've been working hard on what is to come in 2012. We have re-adjuted our targets and have set a roadmap with very specific feature release dates, starting next week. Our main target is to make Listiki the ultimate destination for Lists.

We've been also very busy rebuilding our infrastructure, by moving Listiki to the cloud. Listiki is now powered by Amazon's Web Services, running on a EC2 instance. We made this move firstly because we wanted a very scalable solution, and secondly, as a bootstrapped startup we need to be able to control our costs at any given time and pay only for what we actually use.

So, while 2011 was an uber slow year for us, as far as releases were concerened, 2012 will be quite the oppposite. Starting next week, we will release one of our biggest requests to date. We'll just say that it affects the core of Listiki, but it's not about the Lists. Stay tuned, because it's on its way...

Also, most of the stuff that we have in store for 2012 more or less revolves around the "more engaging & interactive service" concept. It will be an interesting ride...

Stay tuned, follow us on Twitter

We are excited to announce that less than 48 hours ago, Listiki moved to Public Beta.

This milestone is a major step in realizing Listiki's potential. We are aware that there's plenty of work to be done, especially if we want to get rid of that beta label, but pleased that Listiki is now open for all to use.

Our next steps are to keep our ears wide open for any suggestions or bugs you might find, and of course stick to the plan and continue rolling out features.

We'd like to extend a huge thank you to all those private beta testers who were willing to spend hours on a half baked app, to all those who insisted on trying out a less than intuitive interface, and to all those who stuck around and helped us break the first milestone.

How we got here is a very interesting story, which also includes drama, joy, sweat and lots of love. Now, we aren't going to dive into those details just yet, but we will let you know that it was a fun ride, and we expect it to get even better.

Here's an overview of what Listiki is all about: Listiki, at heart, is a deceptively simple concept: collaborative, live, ordered lists that can be generated by anyone. Listiki will harness the power of the real-time web via Twitter & other social networks to add a layer of context and hierarchy to this massive, constant flow of data. It's a tool that delivers order and relevance for any topic.

Listiki aims to take the way you order and rank your interests to the next level. It allows you to create and gather information from the crowds whether it be friends, colleagues or simply those interested in what you’ve posted and vice-versa, making Listiki a truly useful way to share your own lists and gather information from others in a simple, organized fashion, moreover the user experience is truly a great one.

Like a wiki for lists, anyone can add items and reorder them. These changes are then propagated in real time to a master list or the "average ranking" where you can see the items flying around to their new positions.

On anything from "Best restauenats in Manhattan" to "Worst movie endings", users are asked to provide their opinion in a list, generating a valuable (and sometimes simply fun) collection of opinions. Essentially a canvas for building any type of sorted list. Best of all it all happens in real-time.

Listiki quick walk-through video

After a tough, but pretty wonderful 6 months the Listiki gang are pleased to have finally sent out a number of private beta invites to get people involved in Listiki. So far we have received some great comments and we'd just like to say a big thank you to all of you that took the time to have a go and have sent us some valuable feedback. Keep it coming. It is much appreciated!

We are ironing out any remaining bugs and working on improving the UI even more. So far we have made a few changes that really make a difference. We want this to be a great experience for our users and have some cool new features that we are eager to integrate into the next launch. There is so much more to come! We have watched Listiki turn into what is and now realise more than ever that this is an ongoing application that can only grow.

Last week, Alex and I were in Madrid at the Campus Party Europe event which is considered one of the biggest events in Europe for technology, creativity and digital culture. Constantinos, Alex and I were invited to represent Listiki. We were more than happy to. Unfortunately Constantinos could not make the event, however Alex and I did our best to get involved and meet people and share our love for Listiki.

Speaking of events, we are excited as this coming Wednesday, 28th April, Listiki will be presented at the OpenCoffee Demo Day in Athens, Greece. This is our chance to shine and we hope Listiki blows the minds of those who are able to attend. This also gives us the opportunity of meeting our fellow start-ups that were selected along side us: Fashinating, Sportmeets and YouScan and of course the guys from Openfund that are making this event happen. For those of you that won't be there, we'll be posting about it as the event unfolds. Wish us luck!

As unfortunate as this may sound, we tend to look at things optimistically.

We had our servers' setup delayed by a week, and are pushing the private beta back a few more days. But this only means that we have more time to tweak and fiddle with Listiki itself. We have sent out a few beta invites to some of our very close advisors & friends, but we cannot open up the party while still running on the development server.

That said, keep an eye open for the next announcement on when exactly we'll be pushing the invites...

It has been an absolute joy to work on Listiki this past week. No, really. Meetings through Skype with Constantinos, Alex and the guys at the Openfund discussing where we are and what has to be done. It's exciting stuff. This week we came up with a bunch of drafts to explain the intricacies of the technology. Algorithms were tweaked and named.

Discussing technical specs, having fun with the new interface, which looks very slick indeed. A big step from the already existing layout. The new designs are looking pretty awesome. Playing around with colours and design, ohh-ing and ahh-ing as we discover changes here and there that look better and better. We keep changing our minds about the key colours. I think we are pretty certain what we are going to go with for the beta, but it is still early days.

We got the Listiki blog up and running so we keep everyone in the loop as there's still plenty to do. We'll be posting quick bursts to update you on what we're up to. Stay tuned.