Community

Dear Akoha friends,

We have important news to announce. We’re finally ready to wrap up our open beta testing phase. Since our launch at Techcrunch50 in September 2008, thousands of missions have been played in over 67 countries. From helping a neighbor who had lost their house to a fire, to making a lifetime-lasting friendship from a simple coffee shop invitation, these missions have touched many more thousands around the world.
These missions were a source of inspiration for our team, and your feedback has been invaluable in shaping the future of Akoha. On behalf of the team, we would like to offer you my most heartfelt gratitude.

The New Website
We’re happy to announce a new phase at Akoha. Based on lessons learned during our beta, we redesigned and improved the player experience.

The new Akoha is a fantastic way to add a little more awesome to your life. Our new direction is based on the idea that it’s the special little moments that make life awesome. From the smile of a stranger to a surprise gift, Akoha can turn an ordinary moment into something awesome. The new Akoha will make it easier to have fun, to be spontaneous and to discover new and interesting things to do.

Although we will be officially launching the new Akoha to coincide with SxSW in Austin, Texas, we’ve decided to rollout the website ahead of schedule to give you a chance to try out the improved Akoha experience firsthand. We’re excited to get your feedback!

Going Mobile
A huge component of the new Akoha experience lies in the mobile space. Along with the new website, we are simultaneously launching the Akoha iPhone application. Using your mobile phone, you can now easily capture the moment when completing real-world missions. This vastly improves real-world playability and makes it a breeze to record missions.

Although our initial launch focuses on the iPhone, we are looking into expanding to other mobile environments in the near future.

What happens to my current account?
As of March 9th, 2010, we will reserve all user login information in the new Akoha. You’ll be able to log onto the new website using your same username and password. The current Akoha as you know it will be transferred over to http://historical.akoha.com for a period of three months before being shutdown.

We understand that this may feel like the end of something. Many of you have put a lot of time and effort into your missions. We hope you have felt rewarded by the joy and happiness you have spread, and by the positive reactions from the recipients of your missions. Our intention was never to replace real-world interactions, but to encourage people to go out and play, and you’ve done so admirably. We hope you continue with us on this new stage of the Akoha journey.

SxSW
Co-founder Alex Eberts will be at SXSW starting March 12 to promote the new Akoha - we encourage you to spread the word!


Thank you for your time.
Gratefully,
The Akoha Team

Dear Akoha players,

Thank you for making the past year a wonderful journey. From our beta launch at TechCrunch50 to our visit to TED2009, we’ve been inspired by your stories of playing-it-forward.

We’ve witnessed missions spanning 65 countries including:

Greece, Taiwan, Puerto Rico, Chile, Netherlands, Canada, Malta, South Africa, Norway, Ireland, Indonesia, Senegal, United States, United Kingdom, Singapore, Switzerland, Australia, Brazil, Argentina, Germany, Sweden, New Zealand, Belgium, France, Spain, Italy, Russia, Romania, India, Turkey, Japan.

From missions confirmed in America to Asia, we’ve been humbled by the dedication demonstrated by you and other players who took the idea of “playing-it-forward” to heart and have spread the gift of kindness.

Thank you.

A Look into The Future

Akoha was founded with the goal of making it fun for people to change the world, one small act at a time. Since we launched the beta site at Techcrunch in September 2008 we’ve learned many invaluable lessons through several months of testing with our beta community. There’s no doubt that we have many more lessons to learn in the months ahead but we feel that we’ve made great progress from where we started and everyday we’re a step closer to our goal.

As the new year approaches, there is a renewed sense of excitement at the Akoha offices and we can’t wait to be able to share some amazing new features with you in 2010. With that in mind, we have a major announcement today:

Akoha play is going virtual. After listening to the community for the past year, we’ve come to the conclusion that physical cards make playing Akoha more difficult than necessary. From the cards being forgotten at home, lost in the bottom of a backpack or eaten by the dog, your feedback to us is that mission cards interfere with the primary goal of Akoha: to use the power of play to make the world a better place. While the mission of Akoha will stay the same we are hard at work exploring new ways to make Akoha faster, easier, and more fun to play.

What does this mean to you, the player? You will no longer need to buy a deck in order to play. In fact, we are discontinuing deck sales as of Dec. 3rd. If you have cards on hand, you will still be able to play them; however, we will no longer be accepting orders at the Akoha store after Dec. 3rd. For new players and new missions in beta, you’ll be able to skip the purchase process and simply print out mission cards (or use the Mission ID) to play.

Akoha beta is now open to the public. We hope that by making Akoha open to everyone it will encourage more people to jump in and give it a try resulting in many more acts of kindness around the world. The goal of Akoha has always been to make it fun to have a positive impact on the world, and we believe that this takes us a step in the right direction.

Akoha is evolving. In parallel with Akoha play going completely virtual, we are cranking up the development gears again. Based on your valuable feedback, we are actively working to improve the player experience to make it easier for you to complete missions, create positive experiences with friends, and to share your experience with the rest of your network. Stay tuned as we release some exciting new features in 2010!

What do I do if I bought cards and have not played them yet? For those who have purchased decks, we would like to thank you for your support during our beta phase. We continue to support all physical cards actually in distribution.

This Holiday Season

Finally, if you had planned on gifting Akoha decks this holiday season, our team offers these suggestions for the holiday season:

1. Donate children’s books (http://roomtoread.org)

2. Donate a tree (http://www.treesforlife.org/)

3. Make a micro-loan (http://kiva.org)

4. Endow a scholarship (http://educationgeneration.org/)

Greetings!

We’ve had our noses to the grindstone for the past few months and we’re happy to announce some important changes to the site. Along with tons of minor bug fixes, we’ve implemented many of the most requested enhancements. Here’s a list of what’s different.

Comments & Inline Editing

From now on, you have up to 15 minutes to review and edit comments you’ve just posted to someone’s wall, to a played, or to a confirmed mission.

Updated Edit Profile page

On your Edit Profile page, you can now specify which e-mail notifications you want and at what frequency.

Recently Played Missions

The Recently Played Missions section on your Profile page has been streamlined. It now lists detailed information related to your recent game play including status, hops, and people involved.

My Missions Page

The My Missions page now shows your missions in list view as well as grid view. Many of you asked for easier way to search for missions and we heard you. Missions are now searchable by title, confirmation code, or by username.

RSS Feeds

Angle brackets or other special HTML characters no longer break e-mail notifications or RSS feeds so you can now add us to your newsreaders without fail.

If you’re eager to give us feedback on the changes, email us at support[at]akoha[dot]com!

We’re very pleased to announce that we’ve completely sold-out of our initial print run of VIP Starter Decks. Many thanks to all our players for making the first edition of the VIP Starter Kit such a success.

Based on feedback from the community we’ve taken this opportunity to improve the original VIP Starter Deck.

Along with being much shinier and easier to read we’ve added more of your favourite missions (”Thanks Someone”, “Make Someone Smile” and “Give Someone a Surprise Gift” and removed a couple of missions that weren’t getting as much love (”Send Drinks to a Couple in Love” and “Give a Compact Florescent Bulb”).

From now on, all orders for Starter Decks at the Akoha Store will be for the newly revised version.

If you run into any problems or would like to share your opinions we’d love to hear from you - just send us an email at “support at akoha dot com”.

I’m very pleased to welcome some new Akohans to our team.

We’re constantly looking for great people who share our vision to help build Akoha. In the past couple of weeks, we had two great friends of the company make the jump to Team Akoha.

I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Erik Wright for a decade since he first joined my last startup in 1999. Since then, Erik has worked for a number of Canada’s leading startups, ran a team of developers at my previous company Radialpoint, started his own company, and worked throughout Canada and in Silicon Valley as a coder and engineering manager. We’re really happy to have him join Akoha as our Geek Ringleader.

• Erik Wright

  Geek Ringleader

  Erik joined his first Internet startup at the tender age of 15 and hasn’t looked back. Over the years, he has developed a passion for good software development matched only by his desperate need for an after-lunch espresso. Along the way, for reasons that remain obscure, he has earned the nickname “Doctor”. In his next life, Erik would like to wear the polka dot jersey.

  Find Erik on LinkedIn, via Twitter, or in the mountains.

  

We’re also pleased to welcome Mark Macleod as our Chief Money Guy. Mark is famously known around Canada as StartupCFO. Mark is a veteran of a number of startups, has been instrumental in building and growing venture-backed technology companies. Mark has deep understanding of web business models, startup metrics and business analytics. Since the first public preview of Akoha, which he wrote about the opportunities and challenges Akoha faces as a company, Mark has been one of the advisers I’ve turned to. Mark mentioned working with Akoha on his blog recently and we’re lucky to have him join us.

• Mark Macleod

  Chief Money Guy (CFO)

  Hailing from the Isles of Scotland, Mark’s frugal nature makes him genetically programmed to be a CFO. Since 1998, Mark has been leading finance for venture-backed technology startups. His previous adventures include Silanis Technology (AIM: SNS), Hexago, Terrascale Technologies (bought by Rackable Systems - NASDAQ: RACK) and Mobivox. Currently, he is CFO for Tungle and Akoha. He also advises several other web startups.

  When not chasing term sheets, closing deals or digging into operating stats, Mark likes to pop on his headphones and rock out. A former nightclub DJ (aren’t all CFOs?) Mark’s modeling prowess is enhanced by loud beats.

  Mark combines his dual passions of writing and startups on his StartupCFO blog. He also hosts a social network for tech CFOs and entrepreneurs. You can find him on Twitter.

  Mark is a Chartered Accountant and holds an MBA from McGill. He has also perfected the art of staring coldly over his glasses when people ask to spend money.

  

You can meet the entire group of Akohans on the Akoha Team page.

We also have a number of team members who have left Akoha recently and joined our group of Akoha Alumni.

Sean Power, who worked with our community of Akoha players as Community Gardener, has a new book on Watching Websites being published by O’Reilly Publishing. With a growing career as an author and speaker, Sean is joining our illustrious group of alumni. We wish him success for his new book.

Todd Brown has been watching the Akoha piggy bank as our El Luchador Financiero. In addition to making sure our vendors and team get paid, he was kept busy counting our nickles and dimes, and putting them in nice spreadsheets. Todd is about to go traveling in East Asia where he’ll be spreading the Akoha spirit. He’s part of our advance team for opportunities on the beaches of Thailand. Enjoy your travels, Todd!

Also joining our alumni is Rosalie Zegarelli, who left Akoha late last year to focus on the most important Akoha mission she created: being a mother. Rosalie came by the office to introduce her new baby to us and got more karma points than Akoha currently can track