As Akohans, we love the idea that everyone can be an agent of change. We also know that people don’t need Akoha to be Akohan

As a company we are working to create a fun platform that provides a structure for players to be inspired to complete acts of kindness, a social and viral mechanism for those acts to spread throughout the world and a business that can support a variety of people and organizations goals for spreading their acts of change.

But the principles behind Akoha are beliefs that don’t require someone to play our game.

1) We believe that everyone has within them the ability to make a difference in the world.
2) We know that spreading kindness is fun, should be documented & celebrated by sharing those stories with friends.
3) We believe that we can aggregate many small acts to improve the world to create something greater than the sum of its parts. Together we can use technology to bring together other like minded agents of change and empower them to band together to be capable of tackling even the largest issues facing our world. We sometimes refer to this as the “Wikipedia of World Improvement” — where everyone can participate and together we can accomplish more then anyone of us could alone.

So when we see stories like this we smile - because everyone can be Akohan. No cards needed

Over a great dinner with some Akohans last night in SF, we talked about a few short-term, mid-term and long-term ‘quick fixes’ that could help them be more effective at playing missions and getting missions confirmed.  One little, but oh-so-useful, issue that came up (which has been echoed by many of you in the past) is “the carrying case”.  Akohans, you want a case to put your cards in.  This falls squarely on my shoulders — and the little bit of research that I’ve done has shown that there are many business card cases, but few ‘playing card’ sized ones that would be easy to carry in a bag.  Sooooo… I’m going to do something that I always feel embarrassed about doing and ask for help:

Have you ever seen a card-case that you think would be ideal for carrying Akoha cards?  This is something that’s ideally not too big (easy to carry in a purse, or pocket) and that will protect the cards from the regular wear and tear that happens when they’re totted around for an extended period of time amidst wallets and other magical items found in pockets and purses.

If you haven’t seen one first hand, what about on the Internet?  Is there a case that looks affordable, comfortable (no jagged edges or spikes!) and useful on a website somewhere in the world?  We’d be happy to give business to someone that can keep up with the demand — even better if they’re a burgeoning independent artist!

Want to help us crowd-source this even more?  You could ask on Yahoo! answer, Mahalo or any other Answers site that you’re affiliated with.

Thanks for reading this, thanks for helping.  Something small like this might help people bring cards around more often, which in turn will get people thinking more about kindness, which in turn will raise the amount of missions played.

Feel free to use comments, email me (sean at akoha dot com) or catch us on Twitter — whatever you’re most comfortable with.  I’ll synthesize the answers once we get enough.

I (Sean Power, community gardener for Akoha) will be in San Francisco this week to spend some time at Web 2.0 Expo and meet Akoha players and play some missions in the area.  I’ll be organizing a get together, but I’m still in the process of putting it together.  Expect to see an announcement coming up shortly, including some out-of-town blog posts this week.

Wherever you are, let’s get some Akoha missions played this week!  Keep up with the RSS feed, check out the Community feed and follow us on Twitter for inspiration, questions and guidance.

We’re proud to announce a pretty substantial update to the Akoha site.  Quite a few things have changed, so make sure you take a few seconds to look around.  Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

• A Mission Map shows Akoha missions all over the world.
• Home, profile, and My Missions pages have been redesigned.
• Playing and confirming cards is easier than ever.
• The community challenge is highlighted on the bottom of every page (play those missions!  Let’s get a school built!)
• Prettier notifications, for when you’ve done a good thing.
• Show country names, instead of two-letter abbreviations.
• Commenting on a story gives karma points to the person who wrote the story.

We’re still working on site performance!  The site isn’t as fast as we want it to be, but that’ll change in the next release.

You might have alot of questions.  You probably have strong opinions about the new design.  Please tell us.  That’s what the beta is for :).

You can still read about us on the Akoha blog by subscribing to the RSS feed, or reach us by following the official Akoha Twitter account.  We’re also listening on GetSatisfaction and you can email us using the address “support at akoha dot com”.

Dr. David Hanson presented at TED2009 some of the research and prototypes of robots that are capable of recognizing human expressions. This is some groundbreaking work in the area of robotics & facial recognition.

The Hanson Robotics team setup their Einstein example and this is a video of it mirroring some of the expressions I was making for it.

The robot is capable of tracking different people in it’s view, maintaining eye contact, some basic voice recognition and mirroring of the expressions of the people it has focused on.

Very cool stuff.