This past month has been really crazy at eRepublik with all the team working round the clock to optimize V1. I wanted to update you all though to let you know about our recent trip to FOWA as it was pretty rewarding.
We were really thrilled to be selected by Mike from TechCrunch UK and Ryan from Carsonified and FOWA for their European Start Up pitch competition. We were chosen with five other finalists who posted a 60 second pitch online. In a previous blog post, on my personal blog, I go over the unusual circumstances of how I posted ours from my hospital bed.
We were thrilled to participate, especially because the panel of judges was exceptional, including: Jason Calacanis, Mike Butcher, Ryan Carson and Brent Hoberman. As soon as we found out that Brent was on the judging panel we contacted Ryan and offered to retire from the competition, luckily for us, Ryan solved that issue by removing Brent´s vote for our specific case. (Disclosure: Brent is a friend and angel investor in eRepublik).
Having to pitch in 60 seconds a company that you and your team have been working on non stop for the past 18 months in front of hundreds of people from the industry and a very smart group of judges is super nerve wracking. But it’s an experience I really recommend, the great training and exposure from participating as well as the questions and feedback we got from the judging panel have proven extremely useful. Of course winning the competition was also quite a nice feeling and didn’t hurt for all the stuff we are doing behind the scenes :o)
You can see the video here, you can use the timeline shortcut if you just want to see the eRepublik part.
Alexis
An article about Erepublik in one of the most read newspapers in Spain, El Pais was published these days. An interesting fact is that you can find quotes in the article from active users of Erepublik such as Meiko, the ex-president of eSpain and MGR the Commander of the eSpanish Army. Read the article here.
A little late posting this due to intensive road show in San Francisco and the valley. Being profiled on techcrunch US the week end before the start of our trip to San Francisco and the Valley was great since TechCrunch is probably the most followed web2.0 business blog. You can see the article here.
Erepublik was profiled today in a full page article in Publico, you can see the article here
Not sure the title that translates as “The opportunity to be rich and powerful, at least in the internet” captures correctly what Erepublik is about.
Still the article is pretty good and the journalist really knew her stuff, although some facts are not entirely correct (there are thousands of newspapers in Erepublik not just 500 and a lot more than 100 political parties).
There is also an interesting side article that unfortunately is only in the paper version where the journalists goes over some of the differences between World of Warcraft and Erepublik.
Thanks to a contact from Nadia Boussouar from Ballou PR to Jemima Kiss, we were profiled today in Jemima´s Elevator pitch series for the Guardian (the top newspaper in the UK) you can read the article here.
Civilization is one of our favourite games and was an inspiration for Erepublik.com so we wanted to share this interview of Sid by Gamers Global with you:
www.gamersglobal.com
Sid we have a VIP invite to Erepublik waiting for you ;o)
Yesterday we gave to the Citizens that used all their invitations 3 more invitations to send to friends. Also we invited 400 new Citizens from the waiting list to start their lives in Erepublik.
If you are still waiting to get in and don’t have a friend that can send you an invite, pacience we will let you in over the next few days. If you’d like to get in please go to www.erepublik.com and register for an invitation or ask a friend who has available invites.
We also made a few improvements to the erepublik beta:
Easier to hire
And the good news on hiring new citizens is that we have just made it easier to do so, a manager can now “Propose a job” to another Citizen from the same country right from the Citizen’s profile page (the link is under the profile photo).
New Header
We made some small modifications to the header to make it easier for citizens to check their wellness level and the new Alerts received. Some of you might have seen broken designs on your browser, this is due to the cache - the solution is to refresh the page (F5) and everything will be OK.
Adviser
We have also made a small change to our adviser Plato, replacing the several daily tasks tips with a single one that takes you to a separate daily tasks page. There you can see tips on the main things you can and should do today to develop your citizen and country. This new format considerably reduces the queries to our database but we are not sure it’s the ideal solution so we will be tweaking that one and feedback is welcome.
Other way to get GOLD
Some presidents such as Aliatar in Spain or Alexis Bonte in France (disclosure: Alexis is one of the co-founders of Erepublik) have decided to put some of their country GOLD reserves in the local money exchange at lower costs that the actual value of gold vs the local currency. They have done this to help local entrepreneurs mainly (tip this is also good for exporters). An interesting initiative none the less and it will be interesting to see what will be the economic impact of that. In any case the initiative seems to have found interest in Spain where the 100 GOLD where taken up within a few minutes
Also erepublik was in the news again, in:
» France on “journal du net”
» Romania on “Business”
