In early September, we launched Akoha at TechCrunch50 in San Francisco, the technology conference run by the popular blog TechCrunch.  We were lucky enough to share the stage with some amazing startups that launched in 2008 with us.  Three months later, it turns out that TechCrunch launched the second edition of their “Crunchies”, awards given to the best startups of the year.  Straight from the Crunchies website, “The 2008 Crunchies is our second annual competition and award ceremony to recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year.”

It turns out that we’ve been nominated in the “Most likely to make the world a better place” category.  You can vote for us once a day at this URL: http://crunchies2008.techcrunch.com/votes/

It’s the new years!  Don’t forget to play it forward!

Dear Akohans,

We want to thank you for your support since our launch at TechCrunch 50, three months ago. We’ve been working hard to make sure that all orders from the Akoha Store will be shipped before we take a break for the holiday season. As of 22 December, all orders we receive will be processed when we return on 5 January and it’ll be business as usual from that date forward.

If you have any questions, you can check out our FAQ, reach out to us on Twitter (@akoha), or send us an e-mail (support@akoha.com).

Happy holidays and we’ll see you in the new year!

We’ve had a tremendous response to Akoha and our beta list has been growing steadily since we launched the private beta in September. We’ve received loads of requests from people who want to get started with Akoha right away and so we’re happy to announce a new “fast track” program which will allow anyone to join the community by picking up an Akoha Starter Kit directly from our new Akoha store: http://store.akoha.com.

During the beta period we’re subsidizing the price of Starter Kits. The price for a deck is $5 USD which includes shipping to addresses in North America (international shipping is extra). Our goal during the beta is to allow all motivated play-testers to get involved as quickly as possible in order to help us improve the Akoha experience.

If you’re not ready to join the community at this time, you don’t need to do anything else to stay on our invitation list. We’ll send you one, and only one, e-mail to let you know that Akoha is open for anyone to explore.

We appreciate the great feedback we’ve already received from the community and we’ve been working hard behind the scenes to incorporate your ideas into the game. Some recent changes include improvements to the login and card confirmation process, improvements to gameplay, and better leaderboards with lots of other interesting changes coming soon.

We’ve also updated our FAQ with answers to questions you may have regarding the store. Furthermore, you can reach out to us directly by e-mailing Sean our Community Gardener at support@akoha.com or by talking to us on Twitter (@akoha) or by posting in our forums.

We’re looking forward to welcoming you to the Akoha community, so head over to the Akoha Store and get your Starter Kit today!

http://store.akoha.com

Did you know that you can link Akoka missions that you’ve played (or have had confirmed) to the public?  They don’t even need to log in!

Here’s how to do it.  On any mission that you’ve played or that you’re browsing, there is a “Permalink” button.

Click on it.  This will bring you to an Akoha event page.  The URL will look something like this: “http://akoha.com/event/####/”.   You can paste that URL to anyone, and they will be able to see the content of your mission play.

Enjoy!

We just pushed a new site update!  Here are some cool things that you can look forward to seeing:

• New forums have been deployed to http://forums.akoha.com
• We removed the “Akoha” user from the leaderboard (wasn’t fair that it was there!)
• Landing page, home page and confirm card page have been completely redesigned!
• An improperly filled form on the “Edit Profile” page now lets you fix your errors.
• The buttons in the “Find Friends” page now scroll properly in Internet Explorer.
• Google Maps works in Chrome and Safari.
• On the feedback page, Get Satisfaction discussions now show up in IE6 and IE7.
• Comments in Wall with extra long links show up properly.
• The site should be faster.

As always, please don’t hesitate to email support@akoha.com or go to our GetSatisfaction support page at www.getsatisfaction.com/akoha to give us feedback, report bugs, etc.

Thanks!