The Amazee Blog

Archive for February, 2010

Last Friday Amazee launched its second customized platform, Intergeneration.ch. The President of the Swiss National Council Pascale Bruderer Wyss is the patron of the new platform that aims to connect generations. Or in her own words:

“Wherever young and old meet, the enormous potential within our society is especially evident. It is wonderful that so many towns, organisations and even individual people have recognised this fact, and devote their time – mostly in a voluntary capacity – to this issue. As a result, there are many fascinating projects going on in Switzerland that encourage communication between the generations and provide all sorts of opportunities for exchanging ideas.

On this site you will be able to discover the inter-generation projects that are on offer in your area, and how you can get actively involved. But that’s not all; you will also be able to learn about projects all around the country, assess their value, exchange ideas about them with other people, make new acquaintances and launch new ideas together.”

If you’re interested, found out more on Intergeneration.ch!

On Friday we announced the platform at a press conference in the Bundeshaus in Berne. It was an interesting and a nice experience to sit on the podium with some great women! :)

Above you see Pascale Bruderer Wyss, President of the Swiss National Council and Annemarie Huber-Hotz, President of Schweizerische Gemeinnützige Gesellschaft, who is the owner of the new platform.

Here the entire podium…

… and here is Monika Blau, Project Responsible at Schweizerische Gemeinnützige Gesellschaft next to me.

Thanks a lot to everybody involved! We are very happy and proud that Amazee is part of this positive project platform for Switzerland. Thanks also to Sandro Huber for the pics!

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Here’s a sweet little video from Obama’s Road to Recovery propaganda headquarters to send you into the weekend. It shows that politics and numbers actually can look good!

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The people at TED continue to amaze me again and again by bringing the most interesting talks as well as the most high-profile speakers to my Feed reader. In this particular TED talk (can’t be embedded properly, somehow), David Cameron, the leader of Great Britain’s Conservative Party, talks about how the future of governance will look like, in his eyes. Basically, he says that governance has, globally, gone from communal to centralistic and will evolve into a citizen-based governance. Since this topic very much touches what we at Amazee have been cooperating upon with the Lausanne-based IDHEAP institute over the course of the last months, I deem this a quite interesting talk. He makes some valid points, and it is surely exciting to see that politicians are beginning to see the importance of seriously putting the citizen first.

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As most of our blog readers will know, Amazee is working on a major redesign (startpage, dashboard, project setup). Yesterday night we presented the first prototype to our UX Chuchi colleagues. And if you’ve been at an UX Chuchi before, you’ll know: the feedback round was toughly instructive and after three hours of sweatshop style scrutinization we had a bag full of condensed change requests. A big thank you to all collaborators – again I’m amazed how much value the UX Chuchi has brought to our product development – bit of a UX Gucci indeed (quotation Rupert). Find some pics over here

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It’s only lunchtime and we’re already a bit excited! Tonight we’re going to see another installment of the UX Chuchi and it’s Amazee who’s going to get grilled. We’ll be presenting the draft of our new startpage, dashboard and a rough version of our new project setup process. Join us if you’re in or round Zurich! More infos over here.

[pic by blyzz]

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Alright, back from Basel we are! Saturday saw a great second StartupCamp Switzerland with almost 150 participants and great opportunities to exchange knowledge and network! I don’t even know where to start, so I’ll keep it short and give my impressions.

First of all I’d like to express my gratitude towards those who organized the event – even though one of them, Dania, usually sits right across from me. All of the organizational committee have done an outstanding job once again. This is a kind of Camp where nothing is missing: There was food, drink, Internet, and even heating!

As far as the conference itself is concerned, I was once more struck by the grand array of different subjects in the 20 sessions. Although five sessions in one day are much to take in, it didn’t seem to be too much. The sessions I visited were all very interesting, most presenters seemed to come well prepared. This seems to be a general notion as I have only read one or two Tweets all Saturday that were criticizing the quality of a session – fair enough!

It was good to see people again and catch up and of course to see new hot ideas. This year’s stars were undoubtedly My Swiss Chocolate, two very nice Gentlemen who will come out of closed Beta with their homemade chocolate soon! I can tell you, I have done some thorough Beta testing!

So, with Poken being the brow-raiser last year, will this be a recurring theme? Each StartupCamp bears a star company? It’ll be exciting to see who it might be next year. Speaking of which: If there will be another StartupCamp Switzerland I can’t say, and the organizers probably haven’t talked about it yet. But I can hardly imagine there will not be one.

If you’d like to keep discussing, you can do so via Twitter – make sure you use the #scs10 tag! For pictures of the Camp and the Apéro afterwards in a literally obscure wine cellar, check out this flickr pool! If you are on flickr, feel free to drop your pics there. Thumbs up to Michael and Corsin for their great shots! (Oh, and don’t miss this arty shot by @knowLED!)

Here’s a surely incomplete collection of blog posts about and presentations from the Camp: My Swiss Chocolate (in German), Swiss Startups (also in German) and here’s Corsin’s entry. He has also compiled the Startups present in a nice list (nice because Amazee is on top, of course!)

Daniel of La Table D’Hôte – being the gourmet he is – has interviewed Sven of My Swiss Chocolate, you can find the little clip here. This one’s in Swiss German. Toni, Dorian and Patrice of Memonic have uploaded their presentation “22 random hints for startups” here. And there’s even an audiofile of this here.

If you are interested in picking up leads to interesting UX readings, Roland has compiled them in his Posterous niche. If you have anything to add to this list, feel free to drop a link in the comments! And please also tell us about your experiences!

–Edit:–
Sorry, Jan, how could I forget your blog entry at Startwerk? This one’s in German also!

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Tomorrow all of the Amazee team will be at Basel’s StartupCamp Switzerland! After last year’s first installment of the unconference-style meetup of Upstart businessmen and -women was such a huge success, the organizers (among them our own Dania) decided to set up for a second time.

And rightfully so, people still seem to be very much interested in sharing their experiences or hearing about those of others. The 160 available seats at the StartupCamp, which is organized via Amazee, are almost all taken. For all the information on the Camp, please refer to the project (where you can also sign up, if you like to attend last minute).

Of course a Camp is all about participation, so if you have would like to present your history, case, or experiences, do not hesitate to step up to the plate and secure your spot on the grid tomorrow morning! Oh, and remember to save some time for the evening get-together in a wine cellar nearby!

We are very much looking forward to a day of exciting exchange and insightful workshops. If you’d like to meet us, just ask for us at the reception desk or page us via Twitter: We are @gregster (Gregory), @DaniaGerhardt, @LucasBally, @Mmmatze (Mathias), @schnitzel86 (Michael), @pastizzi (Daniel) and @marcuniq (Marco).

You can also search for #scs10 (please use it in your Tweets, also!) which will give you all the interestingness of the twitteriffic Campiverse (if you speak that one out loud it sounds like “can’t be worse” but I assure you it is going to be great)!

See you tomorrow!

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This just serves as a quick reading recommendation. You should check out these “Amazing Stats on Social Media“. Some truly amazing mind-blowing numbers. And also some insights we didn’t know before: “The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females.” Who would’ve thought, my mother is not going anywhere near Social Networks!

Our German friends Blogpiloten have a video of a presentation of Clay Shirky (“Here Comes Everybody”) at New York’s Web2.0 Expo. It seems to be a bit older, but Clay Shirky is always good to watch. Have a good start into this week!

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