Monday, April 27, 2009

Colnect wins Startup2.0 competition!!! nonick 2009, Bilbao, Spain

An astounding surprise, Colnect has won Statrup2.0 competition held as a part of the nonick conference in Bilbao, Spain.

Startup2.0 featured ~160 companies from all over Europe, of which 11 companies made it to the finals. All members of the jury unanimously voted for Colnect! The greatness of the achievement is even more vivid in the light of the grave difference between Colnect and most other contenders. Colnect has never received any funding and has been run solely by its single founder, Amir Wald, also writing this post.

Second place went to Genoom from Spain, a social networking platform designed to build private family networks. Third place went to Twidox from Germany, a free, user generated library of ‘quality’ documents that allows individuals and organizations to easily publish, distribute, share, and discover them.

Official announcements are found here and here.

Colnect's new promotional video, created for the competition, was met with spontaneous ovation from the crowd. Here it is:


Colnect's founder, Amir Wald, receiving the award:


More personal notes about the event will soon be published. Thanks to everyone organizing, participating and supporting Colnect.

Friday, April 17, 2009

Colnect got the the finals on Startup 2.0 2009

Colnect was chosen as one of the finalists to compete on Startup 2.0 competition to be held 24-25/April in Bilbao, Spain.

This year, 157 start ups participated, of which 11 were chosen to present in Bilbao. Three of those will win by a jury's decision. Though I believe Colnect is an extremely unique, interesting and useful project, its lack of any external funding may make it a little rough of the edges and so I'm lowering my expectations (though not my enthusiasm) in advance. Not many stay awestruck and drooling when seeing the intelligent special girl walking on the beach, most reserve their saliva for the fit hottie in bikini ;)

From their site: "
Startup2.0 is a competition of European web 2.0 sites whose objectives are to promote and reward the European startups (either created or willing to do so in the future) that work in the field of 2.0 technologies."

UPDATE: The finalists announced here

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Paypal + Unicode - part 2

A previous post here was showing problems occurring by PayPal's inability to receive UTF-8 encoding. Although I still consider it a major PayPal fault, it may be possible to override this bug by setting your site's encoding on your PayPal account. When you find the 'Edit Profile' link under 'Account' tab when logged in, there should be a link to change your language encoding. It's not very noticeable but it's there. I haven't tested it and prefer not to use non-English alphabet in the value part of the input.



Good luck :)

Invalid URL Requests From Legitimate Bots

In a former post I've mentioned that I have no idea how come invalid URLs for which no link on the site (nor sitemap) exists are being tried by legitimate bots such as GoogleBot.

Now I have a partial answer for the non existing URLs presented in the post. Some time ago, a twitter account for Colnect editors has been opened @ColnectEdits. It automatically twits about edits done on Colnect's catalogs so that other collectors may track it.



An interesting thing that you can see in the attached picture is the the links generated by the tweets are shown as http://colnect.com/en/phone... but actually do link to the correct full URLs, such as http://colnect.com/en/phonecards/item/id/9212. So it seems that the web crawlers read both as legitimate URLs and try to fetch them. Since it seems GoogleBot does not want to learn that /en/phone returns 404 from Colnect, I am now forced to add these as legitimate URLs to my site to avoid seeing more 404s in my logs. Oh well...

Phone cards catalog: biggest, most extensive, free

Happy to announce that Colnect's phone cards catalog, the world's most-extensive phone cards catalogs, has now over 150,000 phone cards listed in it.

Colnect's catalog is an endeavor of many collectors from around the world who constantly improve it.

Using Colnect's catalog, collectors from around the world can easily manage their personal collection on Colnect and find swap buddies from around the world.

Special thanks goes to all the contributors, editors and translators of Colnect.

Happy collecting :)

Monday, April 13, 2009

PayPal + Unicode ==> No Payment

So you got your PayPal merchant account for your awesome website and have created a nice button to allow members to receive the amazing premium paid services you've made for them. You create the button code using the wizard supplied on PayPal's site to ensure nothing goes wrong. Oh, your site is multilingual? Yes, so please create another button for every language. No, we cover only some of those on your site. PayPal hasn't enough resources to translate itself to all popular languages. It's probably not making as much money as Colnect that can afford to be translated to 35 languages.

So the button is on the site and you test it. It works. Hurray! That wasn't too hard. But hey, are you going to test each option on the button in each language? Yes, you should but it seems fine and PayPal is a serious website. Right? WRONG!

A member who tries to pay money is faced with this beautiful message: "PayPal cannot process this transaction because of a problem with the seller's website. Please contact the seller directly to resolve this problem."



Though you might expect PayPal to alert you when such an event happens that is obviously your fault, it never happens. You may keep wondering how much business you've lost due to this fuck up. Well, you made the mistake so you suffer the consequences. Right? WRONG!

The problem is that PayPal's server has some problem with unicode encoding. You have used the Euro sign and dared send it to their server. Your site has a problem. You have a problem. Don't you know that Euro signs are bad? The wizard that generated your code thought of letting you know it but than decided you should learn it the hard way. The hard way would be to go through technical support with a person who obviously doesn't know very much about all the relevant Internet technologies and tells you it's your fault again. It's your page header, it's your CSS (WTF?!?!), it's your bad browser cookies.

You finally create another button without the Euro sign and find out that it wasn't you after all. It was them. It is them. PayPal screwed it up. But it's your fault, you chose to use their services...



The author of this post is not affiliated with PayPal or any other similar service. The story is true. I keep being amazed at how unprofessional PayPal is. Your comments welcomed.

PayPal Opinion

The reason I'm not going to write "PayPal sucks" is probably because they seem to be somewhat better than the competition when it comes to receiving payments from around the world in a secure way. I do plan on trying MoneyBookers as well and it seems that other competitors either take hefty fees (WorldPay want 200GBP set-up fee...) and/or are limited in currencies and countries of availability.

So here's are some of the problems of PayPal for my website for collectors:

* Fees. Though almost anywhere on their site they publish the fees to be up to 3.4%, a closer examination reveals 3.9% for "cross-border" transactions (I'm sure the guy who made that bs up got a great bonus afterwards) plus a good 2.5% spread on currency conversion. So we're getting to 6.3% WITHOUT mentioning the fee per transaction and withdrawl fee.

* Support. My worst support experiences ever. Customer support first reply was always automated and faintly related to the question. Subsequent replies were never helpful. Technical support was lacking technical knowledge and misdirected me more than helping.

* Site Usability. They could have done a much better job at that. Navigation is horrible and sessions often expire. Many times I got sporadic server errors.

For the finishing paragraph I'll write the good things: setup was relatively painless and PayPal is popular and thus consumers feel secure using it.

Link and Search

Did you like reading it? Stay in the loop via RSS. Thanks :)