The Amazee Blog

This is a blog entry by Ana, who is part of our science team.

Andreas Ladner of the IDHEAP institute presenting.

“Amazee science” is on tour again. This time I’m visiting the third International eParticipation Conference ePart2010 in Lausanne. Host of the great event is the Swiss Graduate School of Public Administration IDHEAP.

The conference is dedicated to topics like e-participation and e-democracy for e-participation researchers and practitioners. The program looks very promising and I really had some difficulties to decide which presentations to see. During the sessions I visited so far, a lot of interesting discussions evolved about online deliberation, the visualization of arguments and also a lot of promising new projects were presented.

During yesterdays last session I presented Amazee science’s latest results on the topic “Impact of Web 2.0 on e-Participation”. I was a bit nervous to speak in front of an international research community but everything went well and the audience gave some very good inputs.

In the evening we all went for the social dinner at the Olympic Museum where the Mayor of Lausanne held a little speech and the most outstanding papers were awarded.

This post was written by Mathias Möller | No Comments »

Rise and shine, early birds! Michael and I kicked off September with yet another early visit to the Social Media Gipfel, the Zurich meetup of Marketing and Social Media experts. For the fifth installment, it was all about Monitoring.

Oriana Chiandusso of the Swiss Federal Mail’s bank Postfinance and Markus Maurer of medical supplier Ypsomed gave some insights into how they go about their daily business.

Oriana applies the pro tool Buzz by Meltwater for checking out what people are saying about Postfinance on the Web. However, currently, she is only listening and not (yet) engaging in a conversation with Postfinance customers. Buzz itself looks interesting, but comes at a hefty price of 10,000 (Swiss Francs, I suppose, about 9,840 USD) per licence per year, so it is probably out of a boot-strapped Start-Up’s league.

It seemed that there is no grand strategy behind what Oriana is doing and she seems to put quite a lot of time into setting up the monitoring mechanisms and into the monitoring itself. It was especially interesting to note that even the biggest of Swiss institutions don’t have a masterplan when it comes to the basic proceedings of Social Media business. However, we are of the opinion that merely listening can not be the ultima ratio, after all Marketing is a conversation about your product.

Markus goes even more basic: He mainly uses Google Alerts and Hoosuite for Social Media Monitoring on his company Ypsomed and product-related topics. Since this is basically how we do it here at Amazee (and I’ve done before with other companies), there was nothing much new here. But it seemed to strike a nerve with some of the other attendees (which only speaks for the diversity of the crowd).

The next Social Media Gipfel meeting will take place on November 3rd, you can sign up a couple of weeks ahead of the date on their own site. To ensure you are not missing out on anything, follow @smgzh on Twitter. And thanks again for Marcel and Peter for organizing! – Also, you can see the rest of Michael’s pictures in his flickr account.

This post was written by Mathias Möller | No Comments »

Here’s a fine short video about current media usage patterns in Switzerland. It is in German, but the gist is: It is the same as everywhere else. New (online Social) Media is on the rise, Switzerland is a Facebook nation: If all Swiss Facebook users would form a Canton (the Swiss administrative unit below the federal state), Facebook would be the biggest one. Also, in the middle of the movie you get a glimpse of this hilarious piece of Swiss Youtube classic (which you’ll probably only understand if you know Swiss German. Anyway …).

(Via Thom Nagy.)

This post was written by Mathias Möller | No Comments »

As you may know, Amazee is built on Drupal, and if Drupal has created something other CMS don’t have, then it is a really awesome community.

Because of this there are the DrupalCons, where people can meet, discuss, learn about Drupal and so on. Right now the DrupalCon is taking place at Copenhagen, Denmark, so of course I need to be there!

After the first official sessions day I can only say: I’m impressed, the roughly 1,000 participants are great, the sessions very interesting and the parties in the evening awesome. The food today was mediocre, but there is always space for improvement! :)

As it is connected to me, when I’m attending an event, my camera is also with me, so I did some shots:

Group photo at the opening Keynote

Ryan Szrama, creator of Ubercart

Dries Buytaert

Playing the Drupal card game during breaks

The DrupalCon will take two more days, stay tuned for updates!

This post was written by Michael Schmid | No Comments »

Tonight we gathered for another UX Chuchi down at Zurich’s lively Langstrasse. This time it was our friends from Gbanga to suffer the heat of merciless UX nagging and ego massaging (at least we didn’t go wild this time). Below a little impression. Summary in a nutshell: Great game, but still much too much of everything.

This post was written by Gregory Gerhardt | Comments Off

As usual the Amazee Tech Team got up early and released a brand new version of Amazee.com this morning!

With this Release the code name is a bit harder to guess: Streamazee means streamlining of the design.
After the last design release in March 2010 there were still some elements in the old design or even two different designs for the same type of element. Because of this the Tech Team got into a huddle for two days and discussed all day how to streamline all the different design issues. The results of this is a design guide, which defines all different parts of the design of Amazee.com. With this design guide in mind we searched  the whole platform for design issues for two more days and fixed them.

This means, after the clean up of the code we also cleaned up the design and this gives us space for more innovations, which will definitely come in the next months!

Here’s a short roundup of what we have changed and added to the platform:

- All checkboxes, radio buttons and drop down fields got the same style as on the blue pages;
- The Amazee rating has been removed, because it was rarely used, made the platform slow;
- The new Twitter Tweet button, with which you can directly tweet your group of choice;
- Mouseover highlighting for Tabs;
- Hover informations for user short views in Wall, Discussion, Compliments and Hall of Fame;
- Removed some old pagers;
- Removed the old help message hovers, and added a new with the same design as the hover informations;
- Thickbox heights are now automatically adapted to the content;
- and and and …

I hope that you enjoy the streamlined design of Amazee, if you encounter any problems or if you find something which is not streamlined, don’t hesitate to leave a comment or send a message to support@amazee.com.

This post was written by Michael Schmid | 1 Comment »

Yesterday Switzerland’s UX Book Club united on sunny Turbinenplatz to share thoughts on our latest read: Search Patterns by Peter Morville and Jeffery Callender. It’s a short yet comprehensive guide into the gigantomanic subject of information retrieval and gives a good overview of the basic principles of search design: Autocomplete, autosuggest, federated search, faceted navigation, personalization, you name it. Even if you shouldn’t be working in product development – Search Patterns is worth a read and a good eye-opener for one of the most disruptive innovations of our times – that obviously goes way beyond Google. If you’re in a hurry: chapter 3 and 4 will do. If you’re looking for inspiration, do the rest too.

This post was written by Gregory Gerhardt | 1 Comment »

Last night the 16th Web Monday Zurich took place at the local.ch offices overlooking Zurich’s Bellevue square. Well over eighty attendees had signed up for the event, during which the host local.ch and the Zurich-based Cloud Computing firm Cloudsigma did presentations on their respective businesses.

While local.ch’s CEO Alfonso gave some insights on the future business prospects of the official provider of phonebooks in Switzerland (it’s not all, but mostly online, with a heavy focus on mobile devices and services), Patrick of CloudSigma held a crisp talk on their business model and products (Cloud Computing obviously still is one of the buzzwords in the Web Scene in 2010).

The evening was, as usual, kicked off and rounded off with a good deal of networking, catching up and gossiping about the latest from the Zurich and Swiss Web Scene. If you’d like to attend, present at or host the next Web Monday Zurich, feel free to join the group on Amazee or get in touch with Dania (who is admin of said group). And, as usual, our Michael took some pictures at the event.

This post was written by Mathias Möller | Comments Off