When we started building Tapestry last fall, our goal was to create a quiet place to read and be swept away by beautiful, great short stories—no interruptions; simply an enjoyable, immersive reading experience.

Touch devices and Tapestry stories evoke emotions in a way other media cannot. It’s a medium that celebrates some of the most important aspects of storytelling: succinctness, pacing, and creativity.

That’s why we love Tapestry. Our ever-growing collection of stories allows you to experience storytelling with greater intimacy and more impact than a blog post or a tweet. Like listening to a story around a campfire, you’ll find yourself hanging on every pause and inflection in anticipation of the next reveal.

With all this in mind, we developed and are excited to announce Tapestry 2.0.

Since our initial launch last November, thousands of stories have been added to the Tapestry library. With this major update, we’ve made it easier to discover and read more of these amazing stories. The best Tapestry stories are accessible in the app, either by search, categories, or tags.   

The stories you have written—public, published or still in process—are available within the app for you to view. Your reading history, both on the web and in the app, is also available. These new features, plus search, make it easier to find your stories and stories you’ve heard about, like that Italics story by Robin Sloan.   

And lastly we have refreshed the branding and design. We kept it clean and simple to stay out of the way of the stories, while also connecting a bit more with our sister companies here at betaworks.

In addition to the updates to the app, today we’re introducing new stories from new artists, authors, and publishers. Quirk Books introduces William Shakespeare’s Star Wars on Tapestry, and Jean-Christophe Castelli, Associate Producer of Life of Pi, goes behind the scenes of the film in Fearful Symmetry. We’ve also collaborated with a few great brands to experiment with our new storytelling medium too.

The outcome? We couldn’t be more excited to share Tapestry 2.0 with you.

-Jana

“The way you change and help music, is by trying to invent new ways to play” -Miles Davis

Over the past few months, we’ve built and acquired six new products that we’re incredibly excited about:  Giphy, Instapaper, Dots, Telecast, Blend, and Poncho.

The next step of building is to transform these products into companies - a step that requires uniquely talented designers and engineers.  This phase is one of the best times to join a startup — there’s already a clear product-market fit with initial funding and you’ll be one of the first on the team so you can have a major impact on the company.

Joining an early stage company at betaworks has a few unique advantages:

1. All betaworks companies have funding clarity.  For anyone that’s been part of a small team trying to fundraise in the past, you’ll know how distracting it can be for everyone involved.  Obviously startups are most productive when they’re building, not endlessly pitching partners, so we have created a platform that ensures our startups and teams can focus on building.
   
   
2. Our studio is filled with creative entrepreneurs, not employees.  With 50-60 people in our studio at any one time, you’ll notice something that I’ve never seen before - you could tap anyone on the shoulder and get an interesting story.  The interests and hobbies of the folks at betaworks are as impressive as their engineering skills - they’re illustrators, musicians, comedians, art collectors, world travellers, or whiskey connoisseurs.  They are also perfectionists.  People who love what they do, people who craft their work and take pride in what they are building and what others around them create.
   
   
3. Nothing lasts forever, and we get that.  We’re fully aware that the challenges a company reaches at different inflection points are more interesting to some than others, and we don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.  You might be more interested in creating a product for the first million users than the next ten million, or the other way around.  Either way, we get it and the designers and engineers that join our studio companies have unparalleled options when it comes to joining a new company, or starting their own.
   
   
4. New York.  There’s something special happening here with tech startups in NYC and it’s unlike anywhere else in the world.  If you don’t currently live in the city, joining a betaworks company is a great excuse to move out here and be part of a fast-emerging startup scene.

Whether you’re actively or passively looking for the next big thing, consider joining our talent network, signing up for Openbeta or reaching out to us directly to ask about a betaworks company.

- paul

Check out the announcement and download the update.

With great organic growth since it launched nearly a month ago, Dots now has over 3 million downloads and about 250 million games played.  We’ve released an update to Dots today that adds native support for iPad and a fun new multiplayer mode.

- paul