Is Green Travel More Expensive?

There has been a small flurry of blog posts on green travel sites recently about the costs of green travel. It seems that in general you do not pay more to exercise an eco transport decision.

We'd like to point out that Rideshare as a transport option can actually be CHEAPER for both parties engaging - the driver can offset part of their fuel cost and the rider often gets a quality ride at less than a budget bus ticket.

Cool new Kiwi transport!

Check it out - born in Christchurch, New Zealand and now looking to take on the world...!!!

http://www.yikebike.com

People!

Hmmm, so we are are now confronting the web developer dilemma - how do you get people to come to your wonderful site? We're working on that one. But if you do come and signup and list - we thank you! And would love your feedback. If you have ideas how we can get everybody in NZ and the EU to visit Cooreea we'd also like to hear from you very soon :-)

Cooreea goes live in Europe!

We are very, very happy to announce the birth of Cooreea outside of New Zealand. After a long journey and some last minute buggy bugs Cooreea Europe is now live. Gasp.

We are still working hard behind the scenes and would be over the moon to receive feedback from anybody, anywhere which would help us make Cooreea better.

Cooreea moving house to a new smoking fast server

With our impending launch in Europe tonight we moved Cooreea to its new digital home in London and a smoking fast server, users may have noticed a twenty minute downtime.

With the wonders of modern virtual servers and excellent help from the Rimu Team moving Cooreea between server centres was seamless and a joy :-)

We are very close now...multi language, multi country, multi currency...

Cooreea Version-0.7 live

We are just updating to our latest version, Cooreea 0.7, after some ticket solving over the last few weeks.

This version brings some user interface improvements and many small bug fixes along with the ability to display your cellphone number to other users if you choose (making the whole negotiating process easier).

All going well our next version will be the first one we release for use in Europe...gulp...lots to do this month...

We are still here!

We are still here, we have just been a bit busy - Stefan setting up home with his new son, Gwilym working on GetReal for Wanaka Wastebusters and Merle growing life.

Hopefully we will be back on the Cooreea trail in the next few weeks. We can see now that getting a critical mass of listings to make it truly useful in New Zealand is a harder task than we imagined and we are reorganising :-).

Back on deck

Stefan is back after his baby holiday and we are all ready to start coding again. The next few releases will be tidy up releases, making it easier for people to see the potential Cooreea has.

We really like hearing from people with problems or bugs so please let us know if you have any personal gripes with the Cooreea system, site speed, accessibility ... anything ... and we'll do our best to fix them asap. You can email us at: bugs@cooreea.co.nz

Congratulations to Stefan - our technical master - he's a dad! :)

We'd just like to send a bundle of love and congratulations to our fabulous technical master Stefan and his wife Nicola and congratulate them to their newest member of the family.. welcome little Ben! :) xx It's a special time and we will put a wee break in on the technical development of the site until they have had a decent time to adore their little boy without any worries about anything else.
Merle & Gwilym

Road tripping...

We are in the middle of a quick whip around the South Island spreading the Cooreea word and getting some nice swims in on the way: this morning we had a great one at Taylors Mistake, followed by a coffee at C4.

If you are looking for a ride north from Christchurch or Kaikoura today, or heading south from that way next week - list it soon and we'll keep an eye on the map

Mo magic in the user interface...

We've been ticking off tickets like you wouldn't believe and following hot on the heels of 0.5 we have, you guessed it, 0.6!

This release brings our mapping Routebuilder into all its planned glory. To accompany the waypoints from last week we now have live result updates which link to the relevant info box on the map.

We have also made user profiles more obvious, fixed some issues in our datepicker on the forms and done some house cleaning.

Now it is off round the South Island in the van (with the new recycled ski slat bed furniture) for Gwilym and Merle to rustle up some Cooreea interest for a few weeks and (almost) Stefans baby pause :-)

Waypoints!

Whoop, whoop. We have just livened our 0.5 release which incorporates a major change to to the way we handle waypoints for Journeys. This means you can add points along your route to ensure it is accurate. Especially useful for going from Wanaka to Christchurch via the West Coast.

This is our first update for 2009 and gets us well on the way towards the key functionality we have mapped out for our 1.0 release. Happy New Year!

Summer is here!

The team at Cooreea is wishing everyone out there a great summer, Christmas, festivals, travelling time and a fantastic start into the New Year! We hope that you all drive save and enjoy sharing some transport on your trips up and down the country and do tell us your stories - we'd love to hear of your adventures :) Gwilym, Stefan and Merle

..please, tell me what you think :)

Now that Gwilym and I are back on kiwi soil - loving the summer heat - we're also back into the development of ever better ways to use the cooreea system.

Here is where I require your help. If there is anything that you are having trouble with, you're missing on the site or that works particularly well for you - I would love to hear about it. In order to make this site something that everyone can enjoy and use, we need your feedback :)

Simply email me on merle@cooreea.co.nz and I will try to reply personally to everyone who takes their time and has questions and wish you all happy and safe travels this summer!

Version 0.4 released

This is our last release before Gwilym and Merle head back to the Pacific. We have been working hard to bring some great new functionality...including...

• # We have split up Ride Requests and Consignments to make it easier and quicker to make listings, makes more sense too...
• # We re-templated to squeeze more map in on the front page
• # New latest listings bubbles :-)
• # We have a ShareThis button - whoa - wicked. Please use it.

Drawing a new roadmap

We spent three days of last week having our last 'work camp' in Europe before Merle and Gwilym head back to New Zealand.

Between getting up at 3am to see Obama triumph, and bobbing for apples we gathered from the local tree at our last dinner, we packed in a lot of work to draw up our new development road map for the next six months.

So, new features are coming, even a whole new application of sorts to tackle recurring rides. We are also going to move our European site launch forward and many other small design and bug fixes are coming up.

Things are happening :-)

Cooreea - perfect for odd shaped things purchased on Trademe!

One of the uses we always imagined for Cooreea is if, as I did last year, you purchase an odd shaped item like a bicycle on Trademe and want it transported down the country.

There are numerous cars travelling the roads everyday and I for one would much rather send my bike or surfboard with somebody who is used to transporting and caring for such things.

There are numerous odd freight items, garden equipment, chainsaws, tools of all kinds and we look forward to seeing what imaginative uses Cooreea is put to.

Version 0.3 live

Hopefully we will be getting another release in next week but we are going to have a small work camp to decide what major feature directions to work on, so might be a bit too busy.

So I have logged in but I can't see more details??

A few people have asked what is up with this, well you can see more details if you enter a listing that shows matches. Basically the best way to see the potential of Cooreea is to list some Consignments and Journeys and see what happens.

Rest easy, we are bringing some more features to the live version soon which makes this all a bit easier to navigate through, and more fun.

Doing good is way better than doing less bad

Part of the reason we have got so excited about Cooreea is that we like working on projects which are actively making the world a better place.

But what is a 'good' project? For many designers the ideas portrayed in 'Cradle to Cradle', a book by William McDonough and Michael Braungart printed in 2002 define this and are as attractive as they are frustrating, in that very few people can influence the entire supply chain and are thwarted in their attempts to make better products.

We are aiming to make Cooreea a 'good' in every way we can. Our aim now is to increase transport efficiency and in the future to allow people to make greener choices when choosing transport options.

If you have time to listen to McDonough give the pocket version of 'Cradle to Cradle' there is an excellent recent lecture available by podcast or download here:

The difference between private and commercial users

We have been asked by a couple of people what the difference is in Cooreea between a commercial and a private transport provider. We currently do not clearly indicate what sort of users people are as our initial intention was to bring commercial users in at a later date.

We are currently working as quickly as possible to get this clarified and transparent on the site. We intend to let users tag their listings as commercial or private and clearly indicate this back to other users.

If you are a commercial user and would like to give us feedback on how this might work for you please get on touch.

New account signup problems with Hotmail email addresses

We have noticed that people with Hotmail email addresses are not getting our account activation email. It looks like Hotmail is treating us as spam, which is not uncommon for new domains on the net.

If you have signed up but not received an activation email, please email us directly and we will sort it out

Release 0.2 live

In this release we have:

• # Changed the Captcha robot detector on the signup page. It now uses reCaptcha and is much easier to use, if you can't make out the words in the picture there is a refresh button to get a new set. It even has audio, you need amazing ears though.
• # Signup is now a 2 stage affair, quicker, better, more friendly.
• # Made the map bigger on the Journey Negotiate page.
• # Changed the 'New user' ad so it will not get blocked by adBlocker anymore.
• # Built some more admin tools so we can catch events easier

Next up is a much better way of entering multi way point routes...stay tuned...

Coming up for our next bug fixing release

We are aiming at releasing updates, mainly feature tuning changes, regularly and we are coming up to our second ever update tomorrow or Wednesday.

Our signup page has decided that half the people trying to signup are Robots. Either it is too aggressive or...well...bioengineering has advanced further than AI... so in this next update we will include a major change to the new account registration process. Fixing the Captcha and smoothing the way for new account creators.

Improvements :: Small launch bugs

Ahh, the beauty of web development. We don't have to post out CD's or pamphlets. We can do our testing, carefully apply updates, and they are available for you instantly.

• # Fixed the 'you need to login' bug on map popups. Thanks Tai, Ben, Chancey
• # Fixed the spelling mistake in the Main menu (gulp). Thanks Dad
• # Added some more obvious buttons for first timers looking to see what to do. Thanks Rob.
• # Fixed the dynamic page titles
• # Cleaned up a missing image or two
• # Added an RSS feed to this blog...should work...needs some testing
• # Fixed the drop down select box that was behaving funny

We are live!

Well... that's it then...we are leaving the comfort of the privacy of our own computer land - and putting Cooreea out there ... into the wilds of the Internet. Fare well dear child.

We are proud to announce that our eight months of work and 938 revisions has resulted in Cooreea Ver:NZ1. We are sticking our heads above the ramparts to see what is out there and if you, the public, like what we are doing.

Cooreea is fully operational and we would like everybody to get in there and have a go. We are in constant development and will be releasing new code weekly so if you find a bug or have a request, PLEASE, email us. We like feedback.

We have to say thanks! To Mike, Vic, Ben, Felix, Nicola, Hana, Davey, Hannes, Dave, Toby, Ralf and Pete for testing, yep - it's boring but it is really, really appreciated. As well as thank the Schlueter Family and Nicola for supporting some of our various 'work camps' in Shanghai and Germany with yummy food and mental support, without which we wouldn't have made some of the brilliant changes that happen when you spend intensive sessions focussing on one thing.

We'd also like to thank the CakePHP team without whom this wouldn't have been possible. And while we're at it we may as well thank the PHP team too, as without them Cake wouldn't exist. And Apache, Ubuntu etc etc etc :-) Opensource is superb.

Please note :: Because we have limited server power, to preserve the experience for users we have a limited number of new user accounts per day. If you can't get one, please come back tomorrow. If you still can't get one. Email help @ cooreea.co.nz

Gwilym, Stefan and Merle