Amazee’s 2008 in review
December 30, 2008
2008 is coming to an end, time for a review!
January: The little Amazee team moves from the living room office at Rennweg to a proper office at Technopark Zurich. We’ve made it to Zurich’s Tech hub!
February: Amazee launches the first private test version of amazee.com. Dania attends the Lift conference in Geneva where she gets to meet Melissa Adey – our first offshore trainee! Dania and Greg visit Barcamp Hannover and make some wonderful acquaintances. Among them Dirk Kirchberg, Tobias Glawe and Nicole Maennl, and last but not least Malte Spielberger who in the course of the year moves to Zurich to study information science and spend some time with us as Tech trainee.
March: Markus Tressl starts as Head Technology. What a relieve… we’ve got a real techie on board!
April: Malte starts his traineeship with Amazee. Dania and Gregory visit the Silicon Valley where they get to meet and talk to some web celebs such as Robert Scoble, Tim Bonnemann, Tara Hunt, Loic Le Meur and lots of other inspiring and connected people like Birgit Coleman from Swissnex, the TCG crew or Workity’s Holger and Lars. Our key learning: If you want to stay at the surface of San Francisco’s Web world there’s no ways round networking, networking and another round of drinks and networking!
May: Amazee launches its first, rough public beta version (actually our alpha). Amazee wins the support of the Federal Innovation Agency CTI. Christoph Heidelberger is being assigned as coach. Dania gives her first successful presentation introducing Amazee at the Next08 in Hamburg and Amazee proudly hosts Zurich’s first Web Monday at Technopark Zurich.
June: Dania and Greg win two tickets for the Supernova in San Francisco; a really good web conference with some great acquaintances, above all San Diego’s BJ Cook! Alexandra leaves the team to finish her communication studies.
July: With the persistent support of Christoph Heidelberger Amazee passes the CTI coaching acceptance in Switzerland’s capital Berne. Markus visits Portland’s Open Source Conference and Dania goes to present Amazee at the Techcrunch Pitch in London. Julie Koenig joins as our first community angel :)
August: Daniel Truninger and Mathias Moeller join Amazee for a traineeship. Markus and Dania visit the Drupalcon in Szeged. But most important: Amazee and developing partners are working hard to prepare the big launch of Amazee’s Beta version scheduled for 17 September.
September: The three winners of the first Amazee 10’000 Euro contest are: Studieren ohne Grenzen, Pressenger, Arm aber Sexy! Dania and Greg spend a few weeks in New York and San Francisco to get some media attention for the launch of Amazee’s Beta version. Amazee wins another ticket – this time for O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 conference in New York. We get some nice coverage from Techcrunch, CNet and Mashable and the support of some other well-read blogs. Dania gives another presentation at London’s Social Networking conference. Nice, attention and user registrations are picking up :) We get to meet Peter Deitz and Amazee joins Social Actions as the 30th community member. Our second community Angel Carmen joins the team.
October: After some years with laut.de, Mathias starts with Amazee. Following a presentation at Web 2.0 Kongress in Hamburg, Dania and Greg go to Berlin for the Webweek and meet up with their colleagues Dominik (Wuala), Myke (Doodle) and Patrick Liechti (Sun Startup), Mike Butcher (Techcrunch UK), Janetti (Tech Web) and Fabrice (Read Write Web France), Tobias and Kai (Barcamp Berlin) and the boys from Berlin Blase. Events include Barcamp Berlin, Europe’s Web 2.0 expo, Latecrunch as well Amazee’s first official meet-up :) Amazee gets another two great chances to present itself: the Pitch Camp and Startup Ignite at Web 2.0 Expo. The achievement of the month: Amazee wins the Glocalist Magazine as media partner for Amazee’s sustainable project of the month. And last but not least Luci finishes his studies and starts on a fulltime base!
November: Our favourite trainee Daniel returns after the Swiss army acknowledges that he will serve the nation best when he spends all his energy working for Amazee. Dania goes to visit the Vision Summit in Berlin and Luci spends some time in our Amazee rep office at Montgomery street in San Francisco. Carmen, our second community angel leaves Amazee.
December: Kate Adams and Melissa Adey publicize their Whitepaper on Social Collaboration. The Amazee team spends some days in the Swiss Alps to consolidate the learnings, market analyses and all user feedbacks to set the strategic direction for 2009.
My conclusion for 2008: First, Amazee has evolved into a passionate and ambitious team of 7 people! Together with our partners epoint and netnode we have created one of the leading Drupal platforms that is hosting some great projects and internet leaders. And Amazee has evolved into a well-known brand when it comes to social collaboration. Our first year has brought a wealth of experiences and user feedbacks allowing our team to take on 2009 to reduce Amazee to its essence and turn it into the most intuitive project promotion and collaboration platform available.
My outlook for 2009: By the end of the next year Amazee will be one of the world’s first media to help individuals and organizations discover great movements and initiators and leaders win likeminded supporters and sponsors. And we will boost remarkable and successful movements like never before!
So start thinking of all your projects and movements you want to start on Amazee in 2009. There are only 366 days left ;)
A massive piece of collaborative art (Ten Thousand Cents)
December 18, 2008
Just stumbled upon this piece of fine art…
- take a $100 bill
- devide it in 10’000 pieces
- share the pieces via Amazon’s mechanical turk
- give every artist 1 cent for repainting the piece
- put everything back together
Quite impressive!
New whitepaper on Social Collaboration!
December 12, 2008
Imagine the year 2019.
Ever thought how you and I will use the Web for social change and innovation? The last few years have brought a wealth of trendsetting books: Wikinomics, Here comes everybody, The wisdom of the crowds, We-think, Causewired, Crowdsourcing and other inspiring publications. All of them highlight a specific aspect of a bigger phenomenon we like to call Social Collaboration. Or in other words: Digitally enhanced public collaboration.
Today we‘re happy to promote the shortest and freshest paper on this movement!
Social Collaboration: Joining forces on the digital frontier
by Kate Adams and Melissa Adey (UK)
(Click the link to download a free pdf version, it’s CC-licensed)
Want to know why we already know about it? Because the paper has evolved from one of Amazee’s projects :)
blood, all over
December 12, 2008
This year our scarce Christmas budget didn’t go to an innkeeper, Amazee decided to reserve the money for 2009 and donate some blood instead. And this is how the story went…
First the forms: Have you ever had any sex with… since 1977, Have you ever earned your money in the … industry? How many partners…. when did you… last time….
Lucas Lucas Bally: "Ma’am, but I would really like to donate some blood."
Nurse: "We appreciate your will Mr. Bally but your Malaria background is a bit dodgy…"
Lucas Bally: But that’s ten years back, and today I’m a successful Manager."
Nurse: "Hey Manager, I said your medical history sucks, goodbye"
Nurse: Nurse: Mr. Möller, do you feel healthy?
Mathias Möller: Yes, well enough to get here; some fever, and bit of a staccato cough.
Nurse: Mr. Möller, we don’t think that this will help the beneficiary
Mathias Möller: C’mon let’s get over it. I didn’t come here just to go home again.
Nurse: Sorry Mr Möller, the door is to my left. We’ll be happy take you in 2009.
Nurse: Welcome Mr. Gerhardt, congratulations on passing the first level. It’s just going to hurt a bit. Unfortunately there have been less donations than we expected. We compensate by taking more blood, today about seven liters.
Gregory Gerhardt: Thanks, Ma’am, if you leave me 1 liter I should manage to get back home by tram.
Nurse Nurse 1: Do you think he’s still alive?
Nurse 2: Looks like, but let’s wait for another minute with the organ extraction.
Nurse: Nurse: Welcome Sir. Amazingly white your shirt. You will not believe how many T-shirts we can dye with half a liter of blood.
Kai: No problem, as long as you don’t touch my Iphone.
Dania: Survived the second stage, my battle history you find on the bar code label.
Today is Human Rights Day
December 10, 2008
Today marks the 60th anniversary of the announcement of the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights. Celebrate and fight for it. Start today!
A one man trek for charity
December 9, 2008
Here’s a good idea: If you want to attract attention to a cause, buy an old moped and ride half-way around the world on it. Whilst collecting money for said cause. Hamburg native Florian Rolke does just that on what sounds like an amazing journey from northern Germany all the way to South Africa.
The thing is, he is not on the road with a fancy motorcycle or Jeep, but with a 30 year old East-German-built Simson Schwalbe. Quite a reliable ride, as he says, let’s hope it carries him all the way. So far he has been through Germany, the Czech Republik, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Serbia, Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Egypt. Currently he is in Sudan.
Travelling at 60 kph (that’s roughly 37mph), he gets to meet all kind of people along the way. Everybody has been very supportive and interested, he tells the world in a communiqué from the roadside. No wonder: With his journey, he is collecting money for an AIDS project in Uganda. The relief organisation Plan stands behind this project.
So, if you want to support him and Plan or just want to see how the travels are going, head to his Slow Way Down homepage (mainly in German). And if you are a musician and want to write Florian (or his Schwalbe, or the people of Uganda, for that matter) a song, you can enter the Slow Way Down contest at youbloom!
(Image by Michael von Bismarck.)
Amazee’s integral approach
December 7, 2008
Real Amazeeans not only have to be able to work hard wherever they are …
They must also know how to cook, (onions make our ceo cry …)
how to enjoy excellent food,
how to survive blizzards in the Swiss mountains and
of course how to fly a plane:
Winter flight from Amazee on Vimeo.
Scott Cobb talks Amazee
December 3, 2008
Amazee user Scott Cobb appeared on US radio station KPFT in Houston, Texas on Monday (December 1st) talking about one of his projects on Amazee and the Amazee Bucket contest.
The interview is quite long and we hope Scott can reach out to thousands of new members for his cause.
Well done Scott, and thank you very much for spreading the word!
