Official Cosmotourist Blog

In den letzten Wochen haben wir unter all denen, die unsere Seite mit Cosmostories bereichert haben, Fluggutscheine im Wert von 50 Euro verlost. Jetzt freuen wir uns, den beiden Gewinnern gratulieren zu können:

Gaiax und marcus77 !

Mit airberlin fliegen diese beiden neuen Abenteuern entgegen, von denen wir hoffentlich in vielen weiteren Cosmostories lesen werden. Gaiax: “Wo ich doch grundsätzlich NIE Glück habe!” Nie, Gaiax? Hier der Gegenbeweis! Viel Spaß auf Deinem Flug nach Helsinki, Kopenhagen, Rom oder Barcelona. Manche Entscheidungen fallen aber auch schwer…

Bei dieser Gelegenheit wollen wir der ganzen Community ganz herzlich für all die witzigen, lebhaften, persönlichen und informativen Reiseerinnerungen danken. Wir finden, die Cosmostories haben sich als Feature bestens bewährt, es macht Spaß sie zu lesen und sie scheinen zu guten Ideen anzuspornen.
Zum Beweis einige Beispiele: “Berliner Friedhöfe - deutsche Geschichte mal anders herum” von Morena, “Hamburg für Verliebte“, “Moin Quiddje” und “Entspannung für Freaks” von Amily (!), “Wintersportzirkus in Ruka/Kuusamo” von MinttuKaakao… nur immer weiter so!

Wer Lust hat, sich die gesammelten Werke anzusehen: Auf der Startseite auf “neueste Cosmostories” klicken und dann ganz unten auf “mehr“.

Viel Spaß beim Lesen wünscht

Euer Cosmotourist-Team

I’ve just met with one of the guys of the startup LAMP1701 here at the web 2.0 expo in berlin and they really have some exciting stuff going on, at least if you are interested in operating small to large web applications. Although I have agreed on not disclosing everything I have been shown, I think a few things should be OK … or?

Their main goal seems to be to increase end-to-end transparency and visibility of your web app(s) both on the operating level, ie. where are things going wrong in the software, but also on the business level.

I#ve been shown some large companies, you know them all, and their feedback on their first product mod_top is just impressive.

Now that I have also played around with mod_top a bit I can say that after only running it for about 5min we have already identified and fixed two performance bottle-necks on Cosmotourist!

Keep up the good work and let us know as soon as you have some more tools to play with!

See our press release:

In time for the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin the leisure and travel community Cosmotourist announces its valuable investors.

Cosmotourist has successfully completed its first round of financing and is now in the position to continue with the development of its internet presence www.cosmotourist.de and www.cosmotourist.com .

Among the investors are Jochen Meyer Managing Director of MediaBEAM, Dr. Ralph Werner former Managing Director of mobile.de and founder of Adshopping (www.adshopping.de ) and René Seifert media expert and owner of Level 360 in Bangalore (India).

“We are very excited by the fact that we have managed to get professionals from such diverse backgrounds on board. They will not only help us financially but will also contribute to the growth of Cosmotourist with their many years of experience and network contacts” states Fred Krauss, Managing Director of Cosmotourist at the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin.

The financial funds will be put towards further product development as well as increasing membership and marketing.

Hier unsere Pressemitteilung aus Deutsch:

Zur Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin gibt die Freizeit- und Reisecommunits Cosmotourist den Einstieg erfahrener Businessangels bekannt

Cosmotourist schließt seine Erstrundenfinanzierung erfolgreich ab und sichert damit den weiteren Ausbau seines Internetangebots unter www.cosmotourist.de und www.cosmotourist.com .

Mit von der Partie sind u.a., Jochen Meyer, Geschäftsführer von MediaBEAM, Dr. Ralph Werner, ehemaliger Geschäftsführer von mobile.de und Gründer von Adshopping (www.adshopping.de) und René Seifert, Medienexperte und Eigentümer von Level 360 in Bangalore (Indien).

„Wir freuen uns sehr, dass wir Brancheninsider mit einem solchen Erfahrungsspektrum mit an Bord holen konnten. Sie werden uns nicht nur finanziell einen großen Schritt weiterbringen, sondern auch mit ihrer langjährigen Erfahrung und ihrem Brachennetzwerk zur Seite stehen”, so Fred Kraus, Geschäftsführer von Cosmotourist auf der Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin.

Die Mittel dieser Finanzierungsrunde werden für eine verstärkte Produktentwicklung und für den Mitglieder- und Reichweitenaufbau eingesetzt.

Web 2.0 Expo, presented by O’Reilly, is really keeping me busy these days. Having come to Berlin on Sunday night, the first day was spent having some workshops. Most interesting ones where definitely Cal Henderson’s (Flickr) Scalable Web Architectures and Kathey Sierra’s Creating Passionate Users talk. The presentation and entertainment by Kathy was better though

Today we had several quite interesting sessions. First of all Werner Vogel (CTO Amazon) announcing the availability of Amazon S3 Europe which should have quite a big impact on distributed storage for small to medium companies in Europe. Until now S3 with Amazon’s datacenters in the US was quite useless, due to latency, for us here.

Another interesting session was Google’s Patrick Chanezon presenting OpenSocial to a huge audience here in Berlin. Without having counted everyone, my feeling would be that this talk was one of the best visited ones. Unfortunately the talk didn’t really give any more insight into OpenSocial than what is already publicly known and can be seen in the Google code documentation.

If I find some time tomorrow I’ll try to write up some of the notes I have taken. There are just loads added to my notebook every day

During the early stage of our project we decided to outsource to companies outside of Europe. We just did not have enough money to finance German developers – we thought.

We were shocked when we did a benchmark mid this year against a German outsourcing company. Even though the cost per labour was much higher, the productivity, and the quality was so much better, that the overall development cost were equal.

Fred intensivley looked after our service provider and monitored also the quality of code and discussed the issues in detail. But our complaints were not taken seriously.

After the quality of our outsourcing company decreased even further and the code they delivered and which we reviewed was really messy (not scalable, difficult to maintain etc.), we decided to stop outsourcing outside the western hemisphere and to work entirely with the German Company. We looked on all topics, which did not work and proposed to the old company a decrease the still outstanding payment. We only transferred parts of the outstanding sum. We already had agreed on decreases for not delivered parts or quality issues several times before, but always without the consequence that the co-operation would stop.

Now, including the cease of our Partnership: Endless discussions with our old service provider and unfortunately without the will to compromise at all. We even were threatened: “…If by the end of this week I am not getting any feedback and finalization on payments then we are launching another methods for getting back the money and harming your business.”

We still fight for an agreement and hope that we will seperate in good faith without getting our business harmed.

Our advice for start-ups: Never outsource to companies outside your own country.
News on this will follow…