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.

hello again klusterers.  Don’t worry, we’re listening. 

Our fancy math machines were trained to notice suspected ”pile on’s” and suppress the value of investments in those ideas… Now, we still are pretty confident that it is doing its job.. but we saw an idea pop up in the comments      and we decided to give it a shot real quick.    For the next 3 to 5 days name this submissions will be blind during the investment period, with the namer only to be reviled when the project has ended. 

If this yields better results, and happier comments… then we will consider keeping it.

It is important to understand that we should not mind seeing the same person win over and over, as long as the ideas are supported by a large and diverse group of people.   Good ideas are good ideas, the name behind them does not matter… which is why this blind submission idea is a great experiment for us.

Happy naming, keep on-top of us in the comments.

As for all of the other issues brought up lately (domains, payments, leprechauns etc), we are on them all and expect to have a major roll out with all new versions of kluster and namethis within the next week or so.

Every student in my high school public speaking class could have given a better speech than McCain,

Ben

PS:  anyone who helps us convince mike lacy to vote obama gets 10 million watts. 

Hello everyone.

Sorry for the delay in making this post… I’ve spent the last few days reading and digesting all of your comments, and thinking strongly about your request for lifting the monthly payment limits.

Unfortunately, though, after looking at the data… it is not something we are ready to do.  Although the first card loads last month worked seamlessly for many, we had failures/errors on about 36% on last months load requests, which kept Twentyman busy debugging our communications with payoneer, etc.   I am not ready to take this out of test mode until we are seeing this working much more smoothly.  

For what it’s worth, I want nothing more then to lift this payment limit.. It is extremely valuable to us as an organization to have core evangelists, and ironically, those are the few that are being hurt by the payment limit… which pains me. 

While we are happy with our progress so far, we TRULY appreciate you hanging in there with us as we really perfect the complex logistics associated with paying thousands of people and interfacing between 4 parties (banks, card processors, kluster front end, and our accounting platform) .    

In the words of our great president… “it’s hard work, we’re workinn’ hard”

You guys rock, hang in there.  we’re on it. 

b

Wow, this whole payment thing has been a really pain… we apologize for the delay guys, and appreciate your patience.

Well, i’m pleased to report…. that we just compiled the last in our vigorous implementation tests (a sushi lunch, paid for on our kluster card).    :)

If you have met all of the criteria I laid out in my prior post, you should start to see the load card dialog.

That being said, while we should be good to go… this is kind of scary territory for us… So, we are limiting draws to $200/30 day period.   This is in an effort to watch things meticulously and make sure that everything is working properly for just a few weeks…. after that, we will lift the limiter.   We know this may suck for some, but there are only about 30 or so of you who have earned above $200 so far, so i’m sure you’ll understand and hang in there.   Now, we didn’t pick the $200 number out of nowhere… we know you all are gunna run and blow this money tomorrow.

Oh, and don’t forget… you’ll get a nice hefty watt bump for your patience (2 watts/dollar left in your account after each load)

Keep in mind, if your run into errors and stuff… stay calm, drop us a note… and we’ll get on it.

A very special Thank You to a Sir Michael Twentyman for toiling with this code for the past few weeks, we know its been a tough on one for yah.

Thanks Everyone– Spend your cash well… you deserve it  (well, most of you… some of those original content knewsroom articles really sucked).

Love,

Ben

PS:  All of you wondering what we are up to…. we’ve been under the influence.

In Tuva, these delicacies are eaten with fermented milk.

Afterward, they distill it but they only distill out 75% water.  Alot of that dreck is left behind.

You kind of have leftover milk.   And then they call it araka

I’m waiting for logistics push back.

Make a branch…  and you’ll be all set.  Or a fork, your call.  

Git to your Yak milk.  Are you opposed to a sword?  Yeah me too.

Back to work, boys.

Comments must continue the theme, lets go community, get on it. 

Sorry guys, we’ve pulled the plug on knewsroom.

When we started kluster labs we called it a “lab” for a reason: each property we launch within it would simply be an experiment. we would celebrate the failure of labs projects just as much as we would the success.

There are two primary reasons behind the decision we’ve made:

What we want kluster to be: We built kluster so that groups could influence a company’s decisions and get paid for doing so. knewsroom did not fit that model, and we have a list of labs candidates that do, that we would rather spend the time building (including namethis improvements). As you all know, we are a small team and we need to make sure we focus our resources on projects that will grow the business and community the fastest .

Cost: It cost a substantial amount to run the knewsroom. With little-to-no ad revenue coming in, it was simply making us lose more and more money on a daily basis. We could have kept dropping rewards for participation, but that’s would be no fun… and does nothing to prove the model we were trying to prove. If knewsroom was going to stick, it needed to be able to pay its contributors substantially… something we could only stomach doing out of our pre-funding, startup pocket for so long.

This decision came after our board meeting on Wednesday, during which our board of directors (myself, Bo Peabody, Lee Bouyea, and Kevin Owens) set a clear direction for the company, its milestones, and criteria for investments in lab projects.

At 6am today, beloved community-directed news publication, knewsroom, was pronounced dead at the age of 37 days. The coroner’s report rules out early suspicions of foul play, citing starvation as the cause of death.

Knewsroom is survived by younger sibling, namethis, and parent, kluster-currently expecting an addition to the family in early July. Meanwhile, knewsies continue their digital vigil, mourning the loss of a promising idea. No formal service will be held.

I know there are some loyal knewsroom supporters out there, and we thank you… but trust us, there will be more exciting stuff coming. Labs will be simple, and most importantly… provide a way for participants to earn substantial amounts of cash without kluster having to lay it out.