The Amazee Blog

Archive for 2009

Amazee’s second year has been an exciting one, and while things have cooled down a bit, the Amazee team is already heating up for a promising year to come:

Beginning of January we are going to release Amazee’s very first Customized Solution, based on Amazee’s technology framework. The platform (believe me, it is stunning!) has been built in close collaboration with our client and will no doubt become a leading benchmark on the intersection between Web 2.0 and Corporate Social Responsibility.

In February we will release another Customized Solution and a strongly revamped Amazee. We’ve collected lots of user feedback, drafted wireframes and done loads of usability tests: The result will be a more explorative start page, a much easier project set-up and editing process, and more goodies we’re currently working on with our colleagues from FHNW. If you would like to get a sneak-preview and contribute to the last fine-tunings don’t miss the UX Chuchi on 2 February in Europe’s tech hub Zurich!

Besides all the innovation and development work, we’ll be travelling the road, promoting Amazee as one of the leading enablers and think-tanks for eParticiation. And last but not least we’ll engage on Amazee more than ever: For example in Switzerland’s  StartupCamp, Web Monday Zurich, UX Chuchi, Marketing Chuchi, Business Chuchi, Politforelle, UX Book Club, Give Swiss Tech a Name, Zurich Web Café and the Amazee works for you project. Don’t miss them and all the new projects to come. For any news, stay tuned to this blog or follow us on Twitter.

2010 will be a good one! We wish you lots of success.

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This is a great publicity idea by Mother London. Fake a Spam mail and give away 10,000 US Dollars to somebody who is answering. But the best thing, and truly in the spirit of Christmas, is the way the receiving respondent reacts. He does the right thing, but watch for yourselves.

The Amazee team wishes you happy holidays!

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Okay, the headline is a big exaggerated, of course a conference like the current United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP15 as it is also known, must be held, but I seriously am of the opinion that a conference like this will not save the World.

It is perfectly clear that over the next years and decades drastic measures have to be taken in order to avert a climatic catastrophe that will probably change the way we (and all other beings, for that matter) live on this planet forever. No serious scientist will argue against this.

Yet politicians from all over the Globe are just messing about. Back in their respective home countries everybody stressed the importance of COP15 and then shows up basically empty-handed in the Danish capital. It doesn’t surprise me, however.

Over the years, I have become somewhat of a passionate pessimist about these kinds of conferences. They either end with no agreement at all or with an agreement that does not have any effect whatsoever except that it shows that everybody was able to agree on playing it safe.

The problem with a conference on something like climate change, human rights or any social or ecological matter, in general, will hardly ever yield any tangible results since there is nothing like a strong international union to stand up for the cause.

When talking to Greg about Copenhagen briefly, he quoted his father who says: “Countries know no friends, they only know interests.” Nicely put, and it’s probably not even something one with a decent sense for the realities of this World can argue against.

However, what the nations’ leaders fail to see at COP15 that it is in the genuine interest of humankind to get both feet on the ground, and that it is about high time to do so. Because saving the planet is not in the interest of one single nation, but rather in everybody’s interest.

Therefore, I say: no nation, no government, no politician will or can ever stop climate change, not Germany’s Angela Merkel, not the Chinese regime, not President Obama. And I don’t even want them to. I wouldn’t mind if they did find an agreement, but on the other hand, I am certain that it does not depend on them.

All around the World the most encouraging signs of the will to clean out this mess we are diving into head-on are not coming from national institutions, but rather from regional ones, cities, states, local initiatives. Not although, but exactly because the administrators here wield power over smaller entities, they are able to generate change.

And this is exactly what we need to see. Big entities are practically immovable, the smaller ones are where the action is at. And the smallest entity in the hierarchy is the single person. In my eyes, we shall not look to our governments to take responsibility for us.

We need to get active ourselves. Relying on the World’s leaders only makes things worse, because we are denying our part in this: We are responsible for climate change and each and every single one of us needs change now. Start today! If they can’t do it, we will have to. If we can’t, then noone can.

This is why I believe that Copenhagen is not important.

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In this very good, short and funny presentation, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian talks about the power of Social Media, using a story about naming a humpback whale to illustrate.

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Last night we held another round of the Marketing Chuchi, one of the almost famous startup events where we grill one of our own by scrutinizing the routines and helping them tighten the screws. This time it was Oona‘s turn to burn.

She got a lot of steam, but she could very well take it. As a representative of Wuala, the online storage service, she has experienced a lot of change at her workplace over the last months because of Wuala’s merger with LaCie, the French hard drive manufacturer.

As a matter of fact, it resulted in very little change for the Marketing part, the main difference being that they now have to attend more business fairs. Some of the major changes were a redesign of the Wuala logo (which Oona said had reminded American customers of Arabic language!) to represent a more serious side towards more professional customers.

The overall findings of the evening were that Wuala will have to be aware that there is a difference between privacy and security, which it needs to exude in order to appear more serious. Which one of these two would be more important to the user, we couldn’t agree on, however.

Find all the pictures of last night’s Chuchi at flickr.

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I am sitting in the auditorium of the Museum of Natural History in Geneva as I’m writing this. Today sees the first installment of a TED conference in Switzerland. TED X Geneva is one of a string of independently organized conferences which comprise what one would expect from a real TED conference: (mostly) fresh and inspiring talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design. All of the speakers are somehow related to some Swiss scene, business or institution.

In my eyes, the conference is well-balanced, some techie stuff (which still was interesting for the clueless guy that I am), and some ideas from the “social” sector (sustainability, humanity, that sort of stuff). On the Tech side, I was especially awed by Jan-Mathieu Donnier and his presentation about his business: 360° 3D video imagery (please check out his Streetview site, an alternative take on Google’s project). Pretty mindboggling input, just like the gesture-based computer interface Frederic Kaplan introduced. Quite complementary was the talk by François Bugnion about the birth of the Red Cross and the Geneva Convention.

My favorite talk so far, however, was Louis Palmer‘s tale of his trip around the Globe in the Solar Taxi. He talked about the reaction to his voyage in different countries: China was very welcoming and interested in solar energy while Australia didn’t really seem to bother. And in Japan he wasn’t even allowed on the road: Swiss license plates are obviously not compatible with Japanese traffic rules. But his trip around the World was a huge success and now he is putting together a global race – for solar-powered vehicles, of course. I filmed the talk, you can watch it here. The visual side isn’t so high-quality, but the sound is good.

These are just some of the talks held here today, the live presentations are rounded off with all-time faves from the TED archives like this classic Hans Rosling presentation (be sure to watch it till the end, it’s well worth it). My intermediate conclusion: TED X Geneva is well-organized and well-executed, with a lot of interesting people attending. A lot of output will be coming from it (judging from the sheer mass of Tweets during the conference) and I would really like to see another TED X session being held in Zurich.

The day after: The rest of the story after I have slept it over. The afternoon in Geneva went down in similar fashion with more talks on sport and its rehabilitatory power for refugees, matter and anti-matter (of which I understood only about half (probably the matter part)), motorbike travels through Asia and TED itself. Last up was Xavier Rosset who talked about his 300 days alone on a remote island in the Tonga archipelago. And this talked summed up pretty well what TED is all about: Without the people surrounding us, we are nothing. Life is about interaction, not about sheer survival.

One of the really cool things about this TED conference was meeting all the different people, everybody with a very distinct background, often completely different from my own. Talking to these people with their goals and ideas can be quite inspiring, since they offer new scopes and angles on things.

So, what can be improved? All in all, I though TED X Geneva was pretty well organized. For the next conference, however, I would include less videos (max. two), or maybe TED should offer videos which have not yet been shown on the TED site to conference organizers. Also, some of the talks were limited in quality by the visual presentation. Either it was completely missing where there should’ve been some illustration or it was all bullet points and little visuals. And some talks could’ve been shorter for what the speakers had to say. Apart from that, chapeau to Yves Bennaïm and his team of organizers.

What are your thoughts on TED X Geneva? What are you taking out of it? What did you like especially, what could you do without?

During the afternoon, Peter Hogenkamp of Blogwerk announced that there will be a TED X Conference in Zurich on March, 2nd, 2010 (see also in the commentaries). Put a big red X into your calendars!

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Computers don’t surrender. According to Frank Schirrmacher’s latest publication “Payback” our media society is in the middle of a techno-social transformation. Algorithms are increasingly powering our information hunt, at the same time crippling our capability to solve problems independently. The digital information bombardment is eroding our ability to concentrate and reflect. We are busy being converted into pancake people that are continuously scanning their social media accounts and less and less planning – reacting to immediate stimuli only. To cut a long story short: The pace of our media society is overcharging us; but not enough – the external brain, i.e. the web cloud that we all feed and live on, is rewiring our internal brain. As both brains are here to stay the question is how we will maintain our human skills as we embed ourselves in technology. “Payback” is worth the money and time but in most parts reads like a German interpretation of Nichals Carr’s publications, e.g. Is Google making us stupid? or The Shallows.

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‘Tis the season for being merry, joyful and overeating. But of course this is also the season for doing good, for thinking of others and donating for the good cause. I’ll leave it up to you to judge if Amnesty International has made a good decision in letting pixel poster art stars eBoy design a poster for them. In their iconic style, the collective has conceived an urban scene that comprises all the horrors of our modern world. A pixelated Guernica, if you will. While the style transcends the unique cool of eBoy, the haunting awkwardness meets the eye only at second glance. The poster, of course, can be bought with four Euros of every purchase going directly towards the work of AI. Would you hang it up in your living room?
(Via Nerdcore.)

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