the GARAG3

Urgent Maintenance This post is syndicated from Zopim Blog's blog. Zopim Blog

admin — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 12:04:54 +0000

We’d like to apologize for the downtime some of you experienced the past two days. This is definitely not up to the high standards that you’ve been used to. In order to rectify the situation, we have been making preparations to migrate our service to a much better dedicated server.

Please take note that the service will be suspended at 1230GMT today. The expected period of maintenance is one hour. Thank you for your patience and understanding. If you have any queries, feel free to email us at support@zopim.com. You can also check the status of our upgrade in this blog post.

Updates

1200GMT – Email sent to users. Twiddling thumbs, waiting for 1230GMT
1230GMT – Service stopped. Replicating data on new server.
1330GMT – Almost there.. Its looking good!
1400GMT – Running into some problems, fixing it.. should be up and running soon
1420GMT – Service up and running. We’re still ironing out some kinks. Email us if you spot something amiss

Business Clinic – Corporate Secretariat

jitsion — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 07:48:45 +0000

Central Chambers is currently the legal counsel placed in the incubator to assist the companies here with their legal questions. The importance of a readily available lawyer is undeniable crucial with regards to, consulting on legal documents and issues on corporate governance.

The companies and hackers at Garag3 were invited to a talk this morning hosted by Sara Liew (Dir. Central Chambers for the Corporate Department) covering popular topics on company incorporation, company shares, company agreements & raising capital.

There is quite a fair bit of free legal resources on the web for startups based in the United States. Unfortunately, we cant say the same thing for Singapore or the region.

notes:

Brief summary of legal implications for business in Singapore (provided by SPRING)

Central Chambers is currently the legal counsel placed in the incubator to assist the companies here with their legal questions. The importance of a readily available lawyer is invaluable with regards to, consulting on legal documents and issues of corporate governance.

The companies and hackers at Garag3 were invited to a talk hosted by Sara Liew (Dir. Central Chambers for the Corporate Department) covering popular topics such as company incorporation, company shares, company agreements & raising capital.

There is quite a fair bit of free legal resources on the web for startups based in the United States. Unfortunately, cant say the same thing for regional startups.

David & Kevin from Zumodrive

jitsion — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 10:15:22 +0000

The folks @ Garag3 had a great session with Kevin West and David Zhao, Co-founder of Zumodrive. You can check out Michael Arrington’s blog post reviewing Zumodrive here. ZumoDrive is a Y-combinator startup, which led to good knowledge sharing with the startups and entrepreneurs interested in applying there.

Kevin will be based in Singapore for a while to setup their local office. So there will be many more opportunities for more such meet-ups with Zumodrive in the future. Stay tuned for more info.

Service is back up after earlier downtime This post is syndicated from Zopim Blog's blog. Zopim Blog

roystontay — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 11:15:32 +0000

Earlier today, our hosting provider VPS.net had experienced disk failure on the Storage Area Network (SAN) where we were hosted on, causing our service to go down. Because of that, we also had to take some time to reboot the tables and get the service up. For more information on the failure, you can get it directly from VPS.net here: http://status.vps.net/?p=136.

Please accept our apology for this downtime. We take your business very seriously and we hope to retain your trust in our service. For a start, we have been in making preparations over the last 3 weeks to move to a dedicated server, and it is projected to be set up by next week. With dedicated hosting, we will not be impacted by problems with the SAN.

For customers using our ‘business’ package which has a minimum service level guarantee, rest assured that we will be crediting your account based on the amount of downtime. This will be done within a week.

Fastest Growing Wordpress Live Chat Plugin – Zopim This post is syndicated from Zopim Blog's blog. Zopim Blog

roystontay — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 07:23:45 +0000

Two weeks ago, we released our wordpress plugin without much fanfare so we’d have time to iron out potential kinks / bugs that early adopters could face. It turned out to be a non-concern, because after 2 weeks – 1200 downloads and a couple of positive reviews later – the feedback we got was our plugin was ready for show time! So here’s our official introduction of the Zopim Wordpress Live Chat Plugin:

Wordpress users now have an even more intuitive (if it was possible at all) way of deploying Zopim on their site. Simply download our wordpress plugin! Activating it is dead easy as well. You can either use your existing Zopim account or register for a Zopim account seamlessly without even leaving the wordpress backend.

Dead simple setup process

Once you’ve activated Zopim, our widget would auto-magically appear in your wordpress site. Of course at this point, the widget design would be the default one. The next step would be to style the widget and configure other settings to fit your needs specifically. You can do this effortlessly within the plugin by clicking on “Customize”.

Styling and Customization

Last but not least, remember to set Zopim up to work with your favorite IM network (Gtalk, MSN, Yahoo, AIM).

Set up Instant Messaging (IM)

If you need to make additional changes or get access to advanced features such as Shortcuts, Departments, Chat Transcripts, etc.. you can still log in to our web-based dashboard using the same credentials.

Enough of us talking about it. Why don’t you write in to let us know what you think about this plugin and what can be done to enhance it? You can reach us via Live Chat or support [at] zopim [dot] com!

No more sneaking around. It’s official. This post is syndicated from Gothere Blog's blog. Gothere Blog

KK — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 09:33:00 +0000

The new year is just round the corner and it's about time we stopped sneaking around, pun intended. We would like to thank everyone who sent in their feedback, telling us what you thought about sneak and how we could improve it. After squashing tonnes of bugs and making numerous improvements, we're now ready to unveil sneak as the new gothere.sg.

For those who missed our first post introducing the new gothere.sg, the goal of this redesign is really to make it easier for you to find the things you want, and to improve the experience of browsing and searching for anything in Singapore.

We have since gotten lots of suggestions and feedback, and have made a few improvements to sneak over the past few weeks:

Apart from tweaking our search algorithms and fixing bugs, we've also included a few new things for gothere.sg.

Carpark entrances and rates

Carpark roads in HDB estates have made it into our maps, so you'll be getting more accurate driving directions, down to the entrance of the carpark. More commercial carpark entrances around the island have also been included.

To make things even better, we'll list up to 5 carparks near your destination. You can check the rates and choose which carpark you'd like to park at.

Expressway entrances in directions

Have you ever taken the wrong turn to PIE (Tuas) when you were supposed to head east to PIE (Changi Airport)? We've added expressway entrances into our directions so you won't be making the wrong turn again.

Real-time information in tool tips

When you hover your mouse over the bus stops, carparks, ERP icons and more, you'll get tidbits of real-time information in a tool tip. This is especially useful for carparks and ERP gantries as you'll be seeing the current rates and charges.

Search for bus stops

You can now search for bus stops with their 5-digit bus stop numbers.

Embed and current location

Existing features on gothere.sg which were not present in sneak have been added in as well. You can now get your current location (on Mozilla Firefox) and also share our maps by embedding them on your website.

We love the new gothere.sg and we hope you do as well. The older version is still available for now if you're reluctant to switch.

We'd like to thank each and every one of you who have contributed feedback and suggestions. It has been immensely helpful. That's all folks, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

You asked, we delivered! This post is syndicated from Zopim Blog's blog. Zopim Blog

qingru — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 10:32:45 +0000

We take great satisfaction (and concrete steps) in meeting our users’ expectations! That’s why we are excited to announce that some of the popular feature requests have been rolled out as part of our recent launch release. Here’s a list of some of those features. Do keep your feedback and requests rolling in via the feedback forum (accessible via the “feedback” button on the left).

Pre Chat form
This is useful for businesses who want to know the customer’s name, email and enquiry prior to chatting, and was the feature request with the most number of votes on our feedback forum.
112 votes

IP & User Blocking
Gives a peace of mind for support staff who frequently encounter spammers and abusive users
36 votes

Listen into chat
Administrators can monitor ongoing conversations and ‘listen in’ on the chat, simply by clicking on the conversation.
24 votes

Invisible Chat Bar
Hide Chat bar when all agents are offline. Another relatively popular feature amongst our users.
19 votes

Email Chat Transcript
Customers can now email the chat transcript to themselves!
6 votes

We have upgraded to more secure and reliable servers @ VPS.net, which means a faster loading time users in Europe and North America.

Sneak peek update: Switch directions, Close map info window This post is syndicated from Gothere Blog's blog. Gothere Blog

junhan — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 13:14:00 +0000

Hi everyone, we're listening to your feedback! We have just added buttons for switching directions, and closing the info window on the map. Switch directions

Close info window

We hope your experience on sneak.gothere.sg is now a little more complete with these updates. =]

Hello, Google! This post is syndicated from Gothere Blog's blog. Gothere Blog

dominic — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 08:47:00 +0000

Google announced real time traffic and public transport routing for Singapore yesterday. Google is a big, scary, but-not-evil monster and they are here to eat us for lunch. :P

Now that we have gotten that out of the way, it's actually an exciting time for Gothere. We have been expecting this launch for some time. With Google here, we can finally check out how we fare in the face of the giant. We feel that Google's introduction will be a net positive for Gothere and the industry as a whole. As they bring more attention to the industry, it will be easier for Gothere as a small startup to reach out and work together with the bigger players. Also, there will now be plenty of people who will be inclined to try out the different map and directions websites because of the amount of media attention they will bring. We are working diligently on a number of initiatives that we are confident will make Gothere even more helpful for our users. We are listening to you with big ears. Whether it's something that we are doing right, or something that's awfully wrong, we are always willing to listen. It's the only way we can make something that's always relevant to the people who matters - you.

As Mr Lee mentioned about Singapore, we have to make changes constantly to remain relevant and useful to the world. Rest assured that we are not staying put, we will always be evolving to make things better and easier for you. You can probably say that Google is like your favourite coffee chain where you know you can definitely get a cafe latte in any of its stores, whether you're in sunny San Francisco or bustling Beijing. But nothing beats that cup of kopi-o siu dai from the nearby kopitiam uncle who knows you best.

[Iconic photo of Kopitiam Uncle from Liyin] Location-based services is where the action is at the moment, and we're really happy to be in the thick of things pushing the industry forward! In all, we think that this is great news for Singaporean commuters, who will now have more choices in finding directions and locating places!

Spread the love, spread the word! This post is syndicated from Zopim Blog's blog. Zopim Blog

qingru — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:46:17 +0000

Save Money with Zopim Credits

To all fans out there, thanks for using Zopim and for referring friends to Zopim. We are deeply appreciative, and we want to reward you with Zopim Credits as a token of appreciation. No we don’t print money, but we can offer Zopim Credits to offset what you have to pay for the service.

It is important to us that you refer your friends – not only are you helping us grow, you are also telling us that you believe in our value. And that keeps us going. So, help spread the love!

Refer friends to Zopim directly

Introduce Zopim directly to your friends – send emails / tweet / blog about us / send a message to space, and remember to include your referral link so we know you introduced someone.

If your friend signs up for the following packages, you earn the following Zopim Credits:

Lite (US$0.10), Solo (US$4.00), Solo Plus (US$5.00), Team (US$10.00), Business (US$20.00)

If you have 5 friends who sign up for Business, you earn a (wow!) decent $100 in Zopim Credits

We also know that you are indirectly referring customers to us when you use our service (and your visitors click on the link that points to Zopim). You didn’t exactly recommend us to that customer, but we just want an excuse to reward you anyway. If you’re happy, we’re happy US$0.05 for a lite package signed up, US$1.00 for all the other paid packages.

How do I use my credits?

Whenever you pay for your packages on Zopim, we will automatically use your credits to offset the amount payable. Yes, Zopim Credits translate to REAL MONEY saved! You can check how much credits you have anytime by logging in to your account management page. This will also show up in your invoice as “account credits”.