knowable.org is a social business that connects makers all over the world. This blog is dedicated to document the process of building it.
Make sure to join our Community on Facebook and Twitter – and get in touch with us! Or just dance with us on Spotify
For a Maker every object has it’s own story. The way it was made, the materials used or the attention that went into the finishing details often show people that the object in front of them is not something that was artificially made and constructed by soulless machines, but instead touched by human hands. As consumers we value these human touches highly - and the rise of platforms like Kickstarter or Etsy on which you can support or buy handmade things are just one proof of that.
But in our digital world we often forget that websites or apps are made by and for humans. Often it feels like you are filling out unattractive forms - and worse, that the words you are writing won’t ever be seen by any human at all and exists for machines only.
To make a long story short: There are a lot of websites out there that feel cold and hollow. Websites that don’t have personality.
As a user you might be able to navigate through them and get the job done, but you won’t feel any connection.
But at knowable.org we want this connection. We want to be not only a fully functional web app, but also be a place where you can feel like you are at your favorite hackerspace or workbench - only virtually.
There are lots of things happening in the moment and it’s really hard to put them in a single blog post, but in order to give you an overview we’ll try anyways.
So brace yourself for a sweet list of things (and some pictures) after the “read more” link.
Great news today! While we are in the midst of coding and preparing our Alpha Version, we got word from the Enorm Magazine that we have won their Social Business Angel competition. As you can imagine we are extremely happy about this!
Thanks to all the Enorm subscribers who voted for us in the final phase of the competition, we can now use additional funds to speed up the development and distribution of knowable.org.
If you want to know a bit more, make sure to pick up the current issue of the magazine.
Ok, things are heating up. And right before the weekend we come with big news: You can now officially sign up for being one of the very first knowable.org users! We are looking very forward to launch our closed alpha-version in just a couple of weeks - so if you want to be a part of that big step for all of us here, just leave us your email on our sign up page and you will receive an early invite pretty soon. We are so looking forward to finally hear what you got to say to what has been cooking in our labs for the last months, so this is quite a big day for us.
We decided to take down our homepage and further info, so make sure to check by our facebook page, twitter - and of course this blog more often as we will be keeping you posted on what is happening in our labs right here (..and I also heard, Emanuel might give you some peeks to what he is rigging up there)
For now, we invite you to join us and celebrate this next big step for knowable.org. Talking about celebrating: we compiled a little spotify-playlist for our team. If you’re in the mood for some nice tunes while hacking your bike, tinkering in your garage or doing your garden just check this out!
A few weeks ago we entered the Social Business Competition from Enorm, a german magazine focused on sustainable businesses. Today we received the great news that we made it into the final round!
For the coming weeks all the subscribers of the magazine have the chance to vote for us (or any other of the five finalists…) on the magazine’s website.
We are really happy about this development – and appreciate every vote you make for us!
Since a few weeks our office is buzzing with energy. Not only because we organized the SenseCamp and started building our advisory board, but mainly because the actual development of knowable.org has begun.
We are extremely happy that Ansgar Schürmann has joined knowable.org as a developer and is ready to kick things code-wise (You can learn more about him on our About page). This means that we are now on track to release the first version of knowable.org in the second quarter of 2012!
Furthermore we are going to change some things around here. During the coming weeks I’ll start sharing our current status in the process along with some of our new design ideas and sketches. Your feedback and input is – as always – very much appreciated. Soon we’ll also start to collect the names of people who are interested in joining our first release as Beta-Testers. Also, as we are nearing this phase expect things to change website-wise.
It’s an exciting time right now – and I’m really happy that we can share all these developments with you!
