The Amazee Blog

Archive for November, 2009

Whenever pressing social issues are at hand, musicians aren’t too far away. Superhuman entertainers like Bob Geldof or Bono of U2 have long posed as the music business’ clean conscience. Not everybody, however, does the job as well, but they do it anyway. Because there can be no harm in doing something good, right? The Grist website has compiled a quite funny Top Ten of the most gruesome “Heal The World” moments. And the number one spot with all its nerdy goofing around isn’t even half bad.

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Maybe you have noticed it, Amazee is faster, only a bit, but it is:

So what we have done is locale-caching. This means that all localization strings are now saved on the RAM. With this change every page you load is about 0,5 – 1 second faster!

But what you also can see, there still is a lot of work to do. We know Amazee is not the fastest website on the planet but we are working hard on speed improvements.
As our CTO said in our last Newsletter: “We’ve only just loaded up the turbo a tiny little bit …”

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In 40 years from now (2050) 85% of the world’s 9 billion human beings will be living in developing countries, 70% in cities, and you and I will probably get really old. To share and discuss the “Grand Design” for all the evolving sustainability challenges, Germany’s Nachhaltigkeitsrat invited the public to its 9th annual conference that took place yesterday in the bcc in Berlin. Next to the the big shots like Angela Merkel, some MPs, renowned scientists and CEOs that added a good load of prestige to the already very professional event, there also was a wealth of micro-entrepreneurs that were invited to present their innovations boosting sustainability in one or the other way (“Mission Sustainability”).

Here some interesting bits and bites… Björn Stigson (president of the WBCSD) presented a SWOT Analysis of Germany’s Sustainability Strategy. The analysis resulted from an official peer review on Germany’s policies for sustainable development: Strengths: “Sustainability” has deep roots in the German culture (excluding most immigrants  as Pekka Haavisto stated), there is a national sustainability strategy, Germany has lots of institutional competences and a strong technology base; Weaknesses: Germany lacks the concrete vision and the ability to speed up change (Where’s the roadmap for 2050?), there’s no long term energy plan and a weak coordination between ministries, the federal government, the Länder, businesses and NGOs; Opportunities: There’s a global demand for sustainable products and a strong position to start contributing; Threats: Increased global pressure; dependency on imports of energy and other key materials, major demographic challenges (ageing population).

From my colleague Thomas Haberland I learned that the average African consumes 10 kg of natural resources per day. The average  European 45 kg, and the average North American 90 kg… – and yes, lots of other facts that are not in line with a sustainable development. So much for the top-down view on our little earth.

Looking at the bottom-up side I had to to smile about this wonderful and simple service helping to better harness existing natural resources; mostly apples: Mundraub.org is a platform (built on WordPress and Google Maps) that allows its users to mark public (or legally and freely accessible) trees where fruits can be picked. Less windfall can indeed be one of million little steps to a sustainable society (part of the mundraub team: Justin Buckley, Katharina Frosch and Mirco Meyer)

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Epoint’s Vasi (not in the picture because of physical separation), Amazee’s Michi (in the picture because sitting here in our office) and me (not in the picture because of being the photographer) have been quite busy lately making your good Amazee experience an even better Amazee experience.

Here’s what we relased today on Amazee.com:

• Registration and login have been redesigned. The biggest improvement for you: The browser built in password managers should now work with Amazee and therefore make your login much easier. Furthermore the registration process has been significantly simplified: No more Captcha, no more double password entry, less annoyance.
• Archiving projects: From now on you can not only archive, but also unarchive projects. So, let’s say, you achieved your fundraising goal, then archived your project, and later decided to have another round of fundraising: Just click on “Unarchive” and your project is active again. BTW: Who knows a good German term for “unarchive”?
• Then we also fixed some bugs (we hope you never noticed them …so we won’t tell you about them ;-) )
• … and we are now finally able to sync our newsletter tool automatically with our Amazee DB.

We’re looking forward to your feedback! Just comment on this blog entry and/or write us an email to support(*AT*)amazee(*DOT*)com

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Here we go, some impressions from yesterday’s wonderful UX Book Club Meeting. I guess I haven’t laughed as much in the last few weeks as in these 3 hours of our UX self-help group meet-up. Not because of Josh Porter’s book Designing for the Social Web (recommended, follow @bokardo), but much more because of Pascal’s lively visualizations of the goal-conflicts between Coders and UX Designers. Wonderful! Conclusion of the evening: The experience is the product.

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Yesterday I had the pleasure to present Amazee and IDHEAP’s research on eParticipation and eDemocracy at Switzerland’s 3rd eGovernment Symposium in Berne (yes, Amazee has a science arm!). The perfectly organized event featured a wealth of interesting people and eGovernment initiatives. But it also exposed why Switzerland is lagging behind when it comes to the development of a cutting-edge eDemocracy ecosystem: Swiss Federalism (“Kantönligeist”), strong focus on eAdministration and (still) little innovation in the area of eParticipation as well as a very limited integration of Switzerland’s Web 2.0 entrepreneurs (I had the strong feeling that Matthias Stürmer from Liip, Ana Maria Moreira and I were the only three participants representing the dynamic social media and open-source world). However, the awareness for most of the shortcomings were there (freely translating Mark Muller, cantonal councilor of Geneva’s french statement: “It’s time for Switzerland to get the Turbo going”. Amazee agrees – and is looking forward to help make Switzerland the number one. One of the cool things to look forward to is definitely the roll out of the SuisseID by May 2010 (allowing for online authentication = verified identity).

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Amazee, as you know, is all about Social Collaboration. But we not only help you get your projects off the ground, we also run our own little ideas by the Amazee crowd. I, for example, am currently looking for a space which serves as a Webster hangout in Zurich. In my private blog Merely Thinking I wrote a little something I later called a manifesto on Twitter. Here’s a translation of it, to give you a general idea.

Zurich needs its own Web Café. Not just another Internet Café where the young meet to chat or housewifes print the Internet, no, I am talking about a hangout, a place to go, a, um, hub for the city’s Web scene. During the last 15 months that I was working with Amazee, I have found out that most of the people working in the Web business like to network. The problem: The scene is lacking a much needed informal framework for this. Of course we have great, noteworthy events like the Web Monday, the Web Tuesday, the Chuchis, and so on. But I am of the opinion, that the scene should have a place at which you can meet and interact any time. Away from your work, out of the office. At best, this would be a place where you like to be. Like a café. Like the Oberholz in Berlin (minus the pretentiousness which it exudes).

Therefore I have started a search, together with some supporters. At Amazee I have set up a project which collects ideas and helps coordinate the finding of an ideal venue. I have already checked out two Cafés, unfortunately, I found them both not suited (one was Sphères close to Technopark, the other one Café Z just behind Albisriederplatz). I will investigate into further joints with a bunch of colleagues. I would really be happy if as many people as possible contributed to this search. Such a Webster hangout is supposed to attract many different people alike, whether they work on the Internet or are online out of private reasons and fascination.

You will find a very basic, but surely incomplete list of requirements for a Web Café for Zurich in said Amazee project. I have also taken into account the possibility of opening up a new venue, but this would in my eyes require more passionate and devoted contributors. Independently a handful of activists are running a different project: They are evaluating the possibility of opening up a so-called Beta House in Zurich. If you’d like to get involved with this great idea, too, you might want to start with this poll (in German).

If you are on Twitter and would like to get searching, the hash tag here is #webcafezh.

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… some impressions from yesterday’s UX Chuchi. The biddy on the grill: Memonic

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