Hello Everyone.

Today, along with our good friends at TED, we are proud to introduce www.charterforcompassion.org  . A site which will collaborativley write a document which will  grant Karen Armstrong’s 2008 TED Prize wish. 

Come join us. Your Kluster account gets you in.

-Ben

kluster on “collaboration now” from on Vimeo.

It’s a pretty well known fact that I play favorites.  

One of those favorites, is Tiffany Markofsky Speyer. 

Tiffany got marrieded this weekend in Miami to the awesomest of duderinos…. Andrew Speyer.

Congratulations, Tiff.  

We read these threads daily, and as much as I’d love us to be able to respond to every feature request, comment, and complaint… we simply cant. We are a team of just a few people grinding away not just to create an exciting, compelling, and monetarily fruitful user experience for our users, but a kick-ass and efficient product for our clients, and well… a business for our investors.

As for what we’ve been up to… we’ve sold the kluster decision making platform into a couple of large companies and are building out custom klusters for them to engage their customers, along with our community(via your very same kluster account), to aid in product development marketing, etc. This is great for us (monetarily) and great for you guys as you’ll be able to interface with huge companies and influence them, as per our original, and never-dying kluster corporate vision. (as explained in my “powered by kluster video”, back in april)

So admittedly, our small team’s focus right now is on getting those up and running . That being said, there is absolutely no excuse to leave namethis dark while we crank through these other things. Personally, I’m pretty happy about where namethis is as a product. more rewards are being put up for grabs through the site than ever, meaning more money up for grabs for you guys… and traffic / participation have been increasing steadily.

On the issue of client moderation/participation in the process…. we’ve resisted it for a long time, mainly my fault: well, fully my fault… 20man/Lacy/You all, have been in support of it from almost day one, and i’ve felt that you guys as a community could figure it out and follow directions / speak as a group, but i’ve realized that that is just part of the picture. To unveil our master plan even more, and not leave any secrets we have two things in the works:

First, We will be relaunching Public Kluster projects by the end of the year: What does this mean? Well, this is basically namethis for anything.. Any project that people would like to reach out and get the community to have a say in/reward cash. (the original kluster.com we launched in February, this time done right with all the lessons we’ve learned)… as part of this we will be including client moderation, along with a bunch of other fun goodies.

Second, we have a confession to make: The dandelions and unicorns we spoke of in the new namethis did not make the namethis relaunch. The Unicorn was our code-name for instant domain name registration/selection and transfers as part of the namethis system. It was literally a day away from completion when our registrar partners systems were not ready, and we had to launch as you guys/we guys were getting antsy and couldnt wait anymore….. shortly thereafter we moved over to building the two custom klusters that are going to be launching for corporate clients in the next 2 weeks. So, the unicorn is alive and well.. .and just needs a little more loving, which it will get very shortly. Domain name projects on namethis, are going to be truly awesome.

There is a three, and a four, and a five… and a four hundred thirty seven.. but again, we are grinding on a daily, nightly, weekend nightly, and a holidayily basis. We hear you all, and love the fact that you are so dedicated. and we assure you the way for all of your comments/dreams to come true is to continue to be as vocal, and as participatory as you are, and stick with this thing.

Lastly, as for the payment issues, we’re on it still, and doing the best we can. I will be honest though, i do not see the $200 limit going away for some more time. (probably, january 2009). i know i said a couple of weeks, well… a couple of weeks ago… and i apologize if you find this misleading, but i thought it would go quicker than it has.  There are only about 30-or-so people effected by the limit currently, and that vs the thousands we pay a monthly basis just make it not worth it for us to dedicate time ti it right now. What makes lifting the limit fully tough right now is we are dealing with international users (we have to withhold taxes dep on country of origins), United States tax compliance) … its complex stuff, and its my day, every day.   That being said, i remain dedicated to finding a solution as quickly and swiftly as possible.  And i will do my very best to update you more often, as I feel that has been my weakness here. 

Hang in there, and keep talking… ’cause we be a listenin’,
Ben

assuming we all don’t kill each other over the course of the next 12 hours, we should be releasing a slightly revamped namethis.

standby.

b

Looks like our payoneer account just got funded… 

Go ahead and give your load requests a shot, hopefully everything is back online & running.

Please report in the comments if your transfers were successful, we have no way of testing this on our end.

Thanks for your patience, awesomeness, and willingness to help me send words of encouragement to Mike Lacy to finish the new namethis feature that is holding up it’s relaunch ;)

Daffodils and Leprechauns, 

Ben

While some of the card load errors a few weeks ago were technical problems… The current issue is a lack of funds in Payoneer’s account.

Don’t be scared, kluster is doing just fine…. Unfortunately, though, our link with Payoneer became broken recently when we moved our bank account from Vermont (where kluster used to be headquartered), to New York (where kluster is now currently doing business).   We thought that we would still be able to wire money from our Vermont account to Payoneer via our online banking, but unfortunately our bank in vermont (TD Banknorth) will not accept neither that, nor my phone authorization to wire money… Which ticked me off beyond belief… So much so that I believe I lectured them about the existence of the internet and their need to embrace it yada, yada yada.

So, I scrambled this morning with our new recruit, Stef (welcome her in the comments)  and went to open a bank account here in NY… Since I cannot wire money from Vermont… We have to wait for the money from vermont to find it’s way down to New York the old fashioned way (a check). Once that happens we can fund our Payoneer account and you guys will all be able to make your withdrawals.

You asked, now you know.  We will be back up and running with this in 48 hours or so.  This is totally sucky, i apologize.

I’ll post again with an update as it comes in.