Weekly Review: Short stories
Around Flattr
SXSW has just started in Austin, Texas, and Flattr’s joining up with Thingiverse, Readability and Demotix to talk about rewarding creators and crowdfunding online on 12th March. The team has many things in store to promote Flattr at the event, which we will discuss in a separate post next week along with a follow up on the program.
The Huffington Post has recently started a new series called Social Startups. Flattr — being a social start-up — already got its place in it. Next to their introduction of Flattr you can also find several new companies that have just entered the social scene.
The power of community
Flattr has friends everywhere, but Germany is definitely home to our biggest userbase at the moment. A new group was created on Facebook, called Deutsche Flattr Freunde. They’re discussing topics like “Ergebnisse der Diplomarbeit über die Social Micropayment Platform Flattr” (if you understand it, this group is for you) or how to translate Flattr’s ‘Thing’ into German.
As announced on the Flattr blog, translation of the site has started, and is going very well. Many of those friends mentioned above offered their help to localize the Flattr site to various languages. While I’ve started to create the Hungarian site, I realized how hard it is to think about a website in any other form than English. If you’re adventurous enough to try your language skills, have a look on the project here: http://crowdin.net/project/flattr
Now music is the food of love! Flattr is spreading in the music industry and enables you to show your love to your favourite artists on libre.fm. (More on this later on FlattrChattr; until then: Kultur-Flattrate) There are discussions about this topic on the Flattr forum; if you’d like to contribute or you’re simply interested, join the conversations: Add Flattr to your music player or Include Flattr link in podcast RSS
Let’s go to Egypt
There is another story where Flattr users (along with others) helped, this time with a significant amount of money. Richard Gutjahr went to Cairo on 30th January to deliver news on his own cost. At the end, the generous donations covered his spending, and even brought a bit extra. He published all of his expenses and income: It doesn’t surprise me, but I did find it interesting that the cost of data-roaming was more than anything else.
Comic(s)
One more awesome “initiative”: Johnny Haeusler could buy a space shuttle. He only needs approximately 115,2 million Flattr clicks to achieve this. He already has 14!
It was comic, but Flattr goes well with comics. Here you can read, why: Epic Fail.
And to finish, here is something even funnier: Flattr infographic
Sorry…and have a good weekend!
