NZfusion.com

I just thought I would log on and wish everyone a happy new years! And let everyone know we are all still here in 2008. Still busy building!

Christmas is quickly approaching us, and we are busy putting together a questionnaire to gather feedback on what we are doing and what we should think about doing.

Our sharethestars project is coming along very nicely, but we’d like to get some research data around peoples giving habits. Which will help us understand what type of people are most interested in the idea and why they are interested. We started the project as a way to advertise charity organisations, helping charities collect donations, and helping people publicise their involvement with charities. we have realised that Kiwi’s give so much more than just money, helping charities by donating time, collecting on the streets and the day to day running of charities.

This indicates that some market research would be really useful, helping us to understand how our initial product launch should work. And we can always amend it a little later, based on community feedback!

Another side project we have been playing with is whizzoo. Our catch phrase for whizzoo is: “What is it?”, because with our web hosting plan we could choose a free domain name, we chose whizzoo.com, but we had no idea what a whizzoo should do. We set up a simple interface that recorded user input and allowed users to vote on their own input and others, making the site self-regulating. It turns out that this is a reasonably popular application in its own right, it isn’t in the same league as Twitter, but it has struck us that the concept is rather similar - the difference being content voting.

So stay tuned, we expect to release our questionnaire early next week and we are expecting some sort of prize!

So we’re currently in the process of developing a website that will benefit charities. We’ve got our concept and design pretty well fleshed out and in terms of implementation, the next thing we’re doing is creating the php pages that will be the core of our site.

While development is going relatively smoothly, we figured it’s never to early to get out there and test our idea with the community. Test early and test often they say… so this week we’ll be out there talking to Charities to see what they think of our idea and what else they’d like to see. Will be very interesting to see what sort of feedback we get!

We’re also in the process of putting together an online survey that will give us an idea of what people’s experiences are like with donating, online payment and fundraising. It strikes us that we all have somewhat biaised views and similar experiences at NZfusion, so we thought the best way to get information from a wider pool of people is to ask for it! Please leave a comment below if you’d like to be notified when this survey is ready or sign up to the nzfusion.com mailing list.

There is a good chance there will also be a prize involved…

Hi all,

We are deep in production mode, thinking outside the box (and outside the galaxy infact ;-) for our implementation of a site to positively affect the way charities fundraise for money.  We came to the conclusion that it isn’t just about the money.  It’s about the support and the community that people like you provide to help charities reach for the stars!

And people like you deserve an exciting place to do your good deeds.   While we’re working away, we were hoping you could help by telling us: “Are there any things you can think of which would make your job as a fundraiser or a charity so much easier?”

December 17th 2007, is the bloggers day of kindness, the idea is that bloggers (that is those of us that write a blog) do something good and write about that. It is all a little “blowing ones horn”, but when people don’t write about good things, then the only news is bad news. And we seem to get enough of that these days!

So over the next month, we at NZfusion will be thinking of small acts that we can do between now and the 17th of December to do good. And hopefully we’ll get out there, embarrass ourselves a little, take a few photographs and tell the world we aren’t bad people.

Hopefully we will have our first project in some sort of testing arena by then and we will be able to concentrate on being nice to people (the act of kindness doesn’t need to be massive - just kind).

Let us know if you have any good ideas!

While the unveiling of our main project draws ever closer, we thought we’d try a cool experiment on the side.  And it’s cool because we want YOU, the anonymous reader who is brimming with potential and clever ideas, to be a part of it!  A few weeks ago, we came across a great word - Whizzoo, for which the .com domain was available.  (Infact, kiwiwebguy on http://sharemynz.co.nz/ told us about it, and told us we could run with it.  So, we did!)

Now, the million dollar question: What exactly IS a Whizzoo?  What does it do?  We don’t know yet, and we want you to come to www.whizzoo.com and tell us.  We are thinking to unleash the collaborative power of the internet and… build a social tool that is socially designed!  You can also vote for ideas that are already there by clicking the little ‘plus’ button next to each suggestion.

Looking forward to your suggestions and we will announce the greatest idea … when you have put it there.

Well the NZfusion site has been up for a couple of weeks now and we just wanted to say a big thank you to everyone that provided suggestions for improvement - we’ll be sure to build them into the next release.

At the moment we’re focussed on our first official project and I have to say we’re making fantastic progress. We’re in the design phase and can’t give away too much detail just yet, however I can tell you that charities and other fantastic causes will be very keen to hear about what we’re doing. It’s also closely aligned to NZfusion’s goal of reaching out to others…

This all sounds pretty vague, I know, so I promise we’ll have more juicy updates for you soon. In the meantime, if you haven’t already subscribed to the NZfusion mailing list you should get onboard now to ensure you don’t miss any of our upcoming press releases!

Yes, thats right! I have spent a little time working on a cool Ajax-PHP-MySql email register. This way we should be able to keep track of who is interested in getting the juicey details on what it is that we are doing before the rest of the world does… perhaps even before some of our direcotrs find out!

It has taken a little of playing around with to get just right … PHP and MySql was easy enough, all we are doing is loading an email addres into a table… but I had a little to learn around using jQuery and this is what I ended up with:

 /*
 * Function is run when the DOM is ready.
 */
$(function() {
	$("#emailform").validate({
		event: "keyup",
		errorLabelContainer: $("#messageBox"),
		wrapper: "li",
		rules: {
			email: {
				required: true,
                //rangeLenght Option [minLenght,maxLenght]
				rangeLength:[6,50],
				//It is an E-Mail address
				email: true
			}
		},
		messages: {
			email:
                        'Please enter a valid email address'
		}
	});
});

/*
 * The submit function for our AJAX form
 */
function submitEmail(){
	$.ajax({
		url: 'register_ajax.php',
		type: 'POST',
		data: { email: $('#email').val() },
		dataType: 'html',
		timeout: 1000,
		error: function(msg){
			$('#sign_up').html('Sorry, there was a ' +
                             msg.status + ' error saving your email: ' +
                             msg.responseXML);
		},
		success: function(html){
			$('#sign_up').html(html);
		}
	});
}

It is just remarkable how much is acheived with so little javascript code! The form is sent using Ajax supplied by jquery and is validated by the jquery validation plugin.

James studied Computer Science at Otago University and since then has been in Wellington building applications that help people manage, search and view information.

He believes that you can be technologically informed without avoiding the gym and you should have tools that help you communicate easily without missing Sunday afternoon at the beach.

In parallel life to software development, James has been rowing and coaching and is still passionate about health.

Belle is a 3D Animator and Graphic Artist with a passion to channel the talent of the world into something positive. She likes people and creativity, and believes cooperation is the key to making a sustainable world. She says ‘no’ to plastic bags!

Belle holds a BA/BSc majoring in Chinese and Computer Science from Auckland University, and a Diploma of 3D Animation (with Distinction) from Media Design School. She competed in Beijing against national winners from 43 other countries at the 2004 China Bridge International Chinese Competition organised by the Chinese Government.

Her 3D student reel “Ticket to Ride” was a finalist at the Crowbar Awards in Singapore.