ripple Zaishu drives MINI International

Tuesday, July 24th, 2007

Well…we’ve made it. ripple has been featured in MINI International. The official magazine of MINI cars….the coolest of the cool in compact transport. We are pretty pleased, particularly as the mag has a print run of 400 000 copies in 6 different languages. SIX! That’s more than one hand’s worth of fingers!

We are also pretty stoked as the kind folk at MINI International are donating some of the proceeds from their Zaishu sales to ripple! What’s a Zaishu. Well it looks kind of like this…

Check out the summary of ripple here. Can’t see it? Look closer…there we are in the bottom left hand corner!

Posted in Press | 1 Comment »

ripple 2.0

Wednesday, July 4th, 2007

Another thing we’ve been frantically working away at (in the hours after 11 PM when we finish our real jobs) is our ideas for ripple 2.0.

We have a bunch of really exciting ideas for improving the ripple site. Most are top secret but some of our priorities are:
- Offering people a ripple identity so that they can track what they’ve contributed and how many other ripplers they’ve brought to the site
- Improving our facebook, blog and myspace applications/widgets so that they track contributions and potentially even serve ads themselves
- Creating a community space where people can colloborate on ways to improve ripple and spread the word
-Taking up the offer of some of our international ripplers into translate the site to French, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish and Italian.

We’d like to ask the ripple community (there are thousands of you now after all) for some help on 2.0 things to make ripple 2.0 happen.

Ideas

You’re a clever bunch…you care about ripple….what are your big ideas for how we can improve, innovate and make an even bigger difference? Send us an email or leave us a comment but we’d love to hear from you.

The Money

We paid for ripple 1.0 out of our own back pockets and with the contribution of a lot of love from Evolution7.

Given ripple sends 100% of our revenue straight to the charities we are going to have fundraise or seek sponsorship to build ripple 2.0. If you know of anyone or an organisation that might like to fund our second phase of development…let us know!

ripple out

Posted in News | 11 Comments »

Searching for a solution – ripple search 2.0

Wednesday, July 4th, 2007

So…now it is sorted we thought we would go into a bit more detail about our search saga.

ripple search originally ran into trouble as Google felt that directing the co-oop search revenue to charity provided an incentive for people to click on the adsense ads. We disagree of course, but unfortunately we haven’t had a lot of luck getting through to Larry and Sergey to change the official Google policy. Maybe we don’t shop at the same supermarkets……

In all seriousness the folks at Google Sydney have been really helpful. We’ve worked with them over the last two weeks to come up with a solution that fits their TOS but allows people to use ripple search to make a difference.

The solution that we have agreed to with Google generates revenue by a sponsored link underneath the search bar on the main page. We will also be rolling out a new toolbar that generates revenue through a sponsored link in the toolbar over the next week. At that point (sorry) we’ll have to ask everyone to re-install their toolbars to make ripple toolbar searches generate revenue.

The main drawback of our new system is that Google will not let us place a sponsored link on the results page. Therefore repeat searches from the results page do not generate revenue. However, once the toolbar is operational people will be able to make repeat searches from there. We hope that ripplers will find that just as convenient.

We’re all volunteers so things don’t always move as fast as they can but we think we’ve found a clever solution which will let people keep searching with Google and fighting poverty…at the same time. Awesome.

Feedback on the new system is very welcome. Love your work ripplers.

Posted in News, Search | No Comments »

Mirror, mirror on the wall

Monday, July 2nd, 2007

A big thankyou to the Mirror Ball 07 organisers, who this year, have decided to support ripple as their official charity! ripple will put this money towards the next version of of the site, which will have heaps of new features.

This will be a great night, and any ripplers in Melbourne should go along and support. More details soon!

Posted in Events, News | 2 Comments »

ripple search

Sunday, July 1st, 2007

Just a short post to confirm that ripple search is now fully functional again and each search generates revenue to help fight poverty!

Posted in News, Search | 2 Comments »