Scredit Crunch

Today’s the last day I’m working as a Community Manager at Scred so I decided to take that chance to:

- Thank Scred for an amazing opportunity of working at a start-up over the summer: a job so cool, only the Summer of Startups programme can compete with that.

-Reflect on just how much I’ve learned: from tech lingo to marketing techniques and even some Finnish expressions – thank you for your patience, Tuomas and Kristoffer! You’ve been the coolest bosses one can get.

- Hope that my work has had a positive impact on both Scred and Fläbät (the latter being my favourite ticketing system ever!).

- Mourn about my old Acer laptop that suffered a coffee spill on my first month at work but lived on, alas with a different owner now.

- Embrace all feedback, criticism and comments you, members of the community, our clients and friends, have regarding my internship. Be open and honest – I don’t hold grudges. Not for long anyway.

- Preemptively answer any questions you have on what’s it like to work at a tech start-up as a non-tech female – pretty freaking great!

- Accept that this will be the least read post on this blog because it’s oh-so-sentimental.

Thank you for making this summer amazing, helping and supporting me and for reading this post!

Yours,

Anna.

P.S. I <3 Senna Dog.

Young, foreign and struggling with IRC – what exactly am I doing at Scred? Certainly not coding. That bit is already brilliantly covered here. What I am working on has less to do with computers and technology and more with people and their needs.

I’m Anna, Scred’s summer intern responsible for marketing and community management. I am a Sociology and Communications student at the University of Helsinki, a competitive debater and founder of an Entrepreneurship Society at my Uni. I’ve been active in student organizations ever since I entered the university and with time I realized that skills I acquired recruiting members, arranging events and doing annual action plans can prove to be useful elsewhere. What I lack in computer science skills I make up for in ‘people’s skills’ and that’s what I will be concentrating on at Scred.

Finding easy and smart ways to share expenses and track group’s cash flow over time is tricky, boring and time-consuming. The worst thing is, the problem repeats itself next time you arrange a gig with your band or go on a road trip with your friends. None of that is true, of course, if you have a Scred account!

The service is up-and-running; it’s got a steady customer base and is gaining popularity. As a community manager for this summer my big goal is to increase the number of dedicated users through stronger customer relations. I want to improve Scred’s visibility and tailor the service to your group’s needs. 80% listening, 20% talking. The end-result would be a website that is more intuitive for the user, a service that solves the problem better and more efficiently than before and a brand that you trust and love more than ever.

Ambitious? For sure. Realistic? You betcha!

It is now easier than ever to pay back debts and negative balances inside Scred. No fiddling around with bank account details and then manually creating transactions inside Scred. You can now do this with just a few clicks and the use of PayPal.

At the top of every pool you can see your balance. If you have a negative balance you can click on the ‘Settle’ button that appears. This will lead you to a page with a suggestion for how you could clear your debt. Now, by clicking the ‘Pay’ button by each person, you can easily pay that sum of money. The payment will be automatically tracked by Scred which will then update your balance. Dead simple.

This feature requires that the users have configured a PayPal account in their profile. Any payment details will only be shared with people in the same pool as you.

Other changes in this release (Beneath The Surface):

• Added Select All option on Scredding page for larger pools. Small pools have all members selected by default.
• Updated look of Scredding. Some Webkit specific detailing.
• Significant new core accounting model which will later offer more advanced types of transactions for pools.

We are still working on a more substantial major launch which will appear later, but a few more smaller updates may appear along the way.

Log into Scred to start using the new features.

Kristoffer, one of Scred’s founders, will be talking about alternative economies and peer-funding in relation to Scred at this year’s Pixelache festival (a large event on digital cultures). Feel free to come by and check it out!

A while ago we mentioned how the “YouTube for comics”, MahShelf, had set up a MiniCorp claiming to draw a comic on some topic for the grand total of 1 euro. This was an offer too good to resist and today they delivered. Here is the result:

For 1 euro, that was a bargain and of course it’s great to support anyone wanting to be creative. We reckon every startup should have commissioned their own comic!

Not happy with that challenge, Memphis, one of the main coders behind MahShelf, has launched a new challenge to the world, where he claims to be able to code pretty much anything inside a single Tweet. This certainly gets us curious…

We got some funny stories and in the end it was a bit more difficult to decide the winners than we imagined. Even more stories would have been welcome. The odds to win weren’t exactly bad!

Ticket number 1 goes to Finnish MEP Jyrki J J Kasvi. Crashing the Berkeley university server sounds like fun! It’s also a good story about how the world has changed in a very short time.

Ticker number 2 goes to Kalmisto. I can relate to this story: when I was about 8 or 9 I decided to type in a long program listing from Your Sinclair magazine. It was quite literally pages of HEX data statements and I believe it took me two days of sweat and tears, and it still wasn’t working and I wasn’t getting the cool game that it was supposed to be. I double checked every single hex, and still it wouldn’t work. Next month’s Your Sinclair revealed that the listing had been an April Fools joke…

Here are the two stories again:

(Jyrki)

It happened about 14 years ago when our son was born. I had taken my Canon Ion, one of the first digital cameras on the market to the hospital and took pictures of the wrinkly one. Then I transferred those images from Ion’s analog disks(!!!) to my computer and emailed them to my friends studying in UC Berkeley without compressing or downsizing them.

While those pictures were tiny by today’s standards they were big enough to crash the UC Berkeley mail server. Next morning my friends got a very frustrated call from the university computing department asking them to download those ### pictures and clear the disk space for proper use. Later, this incident was used in UC Berkeley as an example, how not to use email.

Of course, nowadays we know better than to send digital pictures as email attachments.

(Kalma)

I had a great digital adventure when I first got my Atari 800XL as a kid and received this huge Basic programming manual. There was this text about registries and stuff which was an example of how to get a colourful banana being drawn into the screen. The example had this capital letter text (translated from FINNISH to ENGLISH here): DRAW A BANANA OUT OF DATA MEANING “YELLOW”. and since every code examples in the book were in capital letters I thought this ‘code’ would actually give me a picture of a banana. It didn’t, no matter what I tried so I got frustrated and stopped and started playing Donkey Kong and Ms.Pacman. It was my first programming frustration ever, and it’s a dear and a most valued memory these days. I ALMOST CRIED BACK THEN!!1 ;___; DD’:

Congratulations to the winners! You can fetch your tickets from the Scred office: Cable Factory, door E, 5th floor.