Back from another Team Workshop
July 30, 2010
This week, we held another Amazee Team Workshop deep in the heart of the Swiss Alps. I have written on the benefits of such a getaway from the office before, and all of what I claimed a year ago still holds true today.
What exactly we did I can’t yet say, since it affects quite a bit of what will happen on and with Amazee in the future, but it is surely going to be an exciting second half of 2010 for all of us involved, and we are very happy to have you along for the ride. Stay tuned for some major announcements over the next weeks!
For now, here are some pictures from the Workshop, more to be found – as usual – in our flickr account.
Once again the Swiss writing press took notice of Amazee. This time the Swiss IT Magazine, the official publication of “Swiss ICT“, ran a case study about the KPMG Growth Generator in a feature on content management and web 2.0 in coporations. Since KPMG’s Growth Generator is built on our customized solutions we got our fair share of mentions.
Release 2.2.1 Cachazee
July 22, 2010
Today the Amazee Tech Team got up early and deployed a fresh version of Amazee.com.
The code name suggests it: It is all about caching and better performance. The core developers of Amazee.com spent the last three weeks only on speed improvements. We did this, because some users had a very slow response time when executing specific actions and in general Amazee.com wasn’t really fast.
So we figured out which technology would be the best to implement more caching. It came out that Memcached fits best in our case, also because we have already used it for some other small caches.
We implemented different caches onto the Amazee platform, like caching the recommendations (which you can now refresh!) and group admins. These caches saves the HTML produced and does not require any repeated MySQL requests.
There where also some changes in the server infrastructure, which helps the web server to request the different php files.
Beside the performance improvements we also introduced more hovers: The group members are now also in line with the new design and got the same hover like the users in the side bar. With this hover you can see more information about this user, group admins can use the hover to access the member roles edit section.
In the same step we removed the pager in the overview and replaced it with a “More” Button, which you may know from Twitter or Facebook. The Web changes and so do we, in the past users didn’t like too much scrolling, but now users dig it. With this “More” button you can see more information without a page load, and can return to the first items easily.
We hope that you enjoy the new performance of Amazee, if you encounter any problems or if you have a question, don’t hesitate to leave a comment or send a message to support@amazee.com.
Cheers
Michael
Old Spice rules the Social Web
July 15, 2010
Quite frankly, we don’t know whether to thank Old Spice or be mad at them. Their latest viral ad campaign has triggered a lot of laughter, yet at the same time seriously staunched productivity levels at the office over the past two days. No, seriously. We stand in awe before what the company’s PR team is currently pulling off.
It all started a couple of months ago when a TV advertisement starring former football player and very manly man Isaiah Mustafa went viral. The general over-the-top humor and weirdness of it garnered a lot of attention in many blogs, all around the World. Subsequently, Old Spice came out with a second and third ad featuring Mustafa, aka Old Spice man.
The humor of the ads derive from its crass exaggerations and overly stressed manliness of its protagonist (by being so exaggerated the clips skillfully circumnavigate the shallows of sexism). Yesterday, Old Spice decided to turn up the heat. A small team of PR superheroes were locked in a room with Mustafa and his by now iconic towel and started to churn out video response after video response to mentions of the campaign on Twitter, Facebook, or Youtube.
Most of them are absolutely hilarious, and they are directed at famous Internet personalities (or, as above to other companies like The HuffPo) as well as lesser-known individuals who happened to talk about the Old Spice man. For all the glorious details please read the article over at ReadWriteWeb. We give gigantic kudos for a very well-played online advertising campaign, leave you to Old Spice’s Youtube channel and are off applying Old Spice products, enhancing our general manliness. Monocle smile!
We have a winner!
July 12, 2010
The Atizo-Amazee contest, in which we were giving away a consultancy by the Open Innovation platform Atizo, has ended this past Saturday night at 6 p.m. and we can announce a winner! In the end, the group “Waisenhaus in Voi/Kenya” by Lisa Brandt has won by a good margin. The group’s goal is to build an orphanage in a small town in Kenya.
It is interesting to note, however, that both voting crowds had different favorites: While Lisa’s group was clearly in the lead on Amazee, Atizo’s users seemed to prefer the group “Wissenswerte – Animationsclips zur politischen Bildung” by Jan Künzl.
Lisa’s group is now entitled to 5’500 Swiss Francs worth in consultancy by the brains of the Open Innovation platform Atizo. Together they will try to boost the group and help Lisa reach her goal. Congratulations to the winning group and thanks to everybody for participating!
Hiltl at CreativeMornings Zurich
July 9, 2010
Yet again Swiss Miss, Tina Roth Eisenberg, rallied the creative minds of Zurich for the second installment of her successful CreativeMornings on Swiss soil. After last year’s event at Freitag’s it was Hiltls turn to host and present in the Hiltl World Cup Lounge at the Landesmuseum.
Rolf Hiltl, running the restaurant in the fourth generation, provided an overview of the history, concept and values of the leading vegetarian restaurant in Switzerland. The interesting part from a social media perspective was how Hiltl utilizes the new channels to get immediate feedback from his customers. Further he reminded the audience that in every complaint there is at least a grain of salt to learn from, even if they’re as weird as: “you should add meat to your menu”.
It was announced that Zurich will be the second city in which CreativeMornings will be held on a more frequent base. So stay tuned. Thank you to all the sponsors and Tina for organizing this event.
Summer has hit the office!
July 8, 2010
The team is munching away on some classic Swiss children’s ice-cream. Enjoy the summer while it lasts!
Coalition of the Willing
July 6, 2010
Clearly, most of the groups on Amazee are about making the World a better place. We know that the larger part of our users put great amounts of time into their goals, not for themselves, but for the greater good. In that sense, the users of Amazee form a truly benevolent Coalition of the Willing.
Very recently I stumbled upon this video, which investigates the possibilities on how to bring change in the face of looming catastrophes. Some of the points are:
The makers of the film then continue to argue that the Internet is basically custom-built for such a swarm offensive and suggest that a three-platform model needs to be implemented in order to get the offensive under way. The first one would be a “green knowledge trust”, the second an “open innovation center”, like a green-innovation only version of what our friends of Atizo are doing.
The third part of the model would be what they call a “catalyst system”, and this is where it gets really interesting: What the film-makers are talking about is exactly what Amazee represents. I literally sat in front of my computer when watching the short for the first time and said: “Hey, that’s us!”.
So, if you are interested in the Coalition film guys’ perspective and want to see how we fit into the picture, take the fifteen minutes of your time. It’s the best you’ll see today.
(Via Nerdcore.)
