Kachingle is pleased to announce that our Medallion is now in German!

For readers who have their browsers set with German as the primary language, the Medallion will now be served up in German instead of English.  If you are one of these readers you will see the German Medallion right here on our blog.

In another Medallion enhancement, we have created a WordPress plug-in for the Medallion.  For details on that please see Kachingle Medallion now available as a WordPress Plugin

The German Market spoke to us!

We want to thank the many early adopters of Kachingle in Germany, Austria and Switzerland — these sites include blogs, travel magazines, musicians, political and economic group blog, a major newspaper, blogs about passions e.g. trains, celebrity watching, art, architecture…the range is enormous and the quality fantastic.

Special thanks to Carta.info, our first German language site, and vorwärts.de, our first German newspaper site.

Given all of this interest by German language sites/blogs it was easy to make it a priority that they should have the Medallion in German to attract more Kachinglers and encourage more content and service providers to join.  We also carefully listened to the German bloggers who wrote about Kachingle and helped to spread the word.  Thanks for all of the attention and analysis — we look forward to your feedback on the German Medallion.

Jens Horstmann, Chairman of Kachingle, announces the German Medallion [German]
Jens Horstmann, Vorsitzender von Kachingle, kündigt das deutsche Medaillon an [Deutsch]

There are two parts to the German implementation:

  • internationalization
  • localization

Internationalization means that our site and Medallion are designed to accommodate many languages.  This means that text strings are in a separate place from the code, and that the system can handle the universal set of characters.  Our CTO, Frank Spies, anticipated that Kachingle would immediately go worldwide after launch and he designed Kachingle from the ground up to be ready for languages other than English.  We didn’t know which language it would be, but we were prepared for it!

Localization is the actual translation of the text into the other language.  This is simple because we have a separate set of files for every language.  It was easy to edit the English into German because each language can be isolated from the others.  It also helped that our first language after English is German — since our Jens, our Chairman, Frank our CTO, and Andreas our CIO are all native German speakers.  Jens and Andreas each did a video (in German) to complement this announcement (see below).

What’s in German?

  • The Medallion states of:
    • orange (not yet a Kachingler)
    • green (a Kachingler for this site)
    • purple (a Kachingler but not for this site
  • The page for the user to tell the Medallion “Remember Me”
  • The page to choose your  identity on a site (as your Display Name, special name, or anonymous).
  • The settings page (when logged into Kachingle.com)

Also available on Kachingle.com is the Google translate tool for the pages that are not yet translated.  Google Translate is excellent — I can speak from personal experience as I use it constantly to read these wonderful Kachingle-enabled German sites and blogs and to follow the German tweets and blog post chatter about Kachingle.  If Google Translate had a Kachingle Medallion I would be kachingling it every day!

Kachingle Engineering

The Kachingle application consists of three major parts – The Medallion, the Kachingle site and the Backoffice. The Medallion tracks the activity for the sites that the user has marked to be paid.  It is placed on all of the site owners’ pages and will be rendered for every page view. Great care was taken to optimize the performance of the medallion server, so that the rendering time of content site pages is unaffected.  The Kachingle site provides an easy to use interface to access the activities of Kachinglers and sites. The Kachingle Backoffice handles all micro payment transactions by distributing the money from the Kachingler’s account to the site owners’ Kachingle accounts, and then from the site owners’ Kachingle accounts to the site owners’ paypal accounts.  Every penny is tracked each step of the way, and full transparency is supported, so that everyone can see where each Kachingler’s money went, and the source  of each Site Owner’s money.

The product is written in PHP and MySQL and designed to scale to millions of users and sites. Both the frontend and backend servers are fully redundant and support automatic failover in the event of an outage. They are hosted at multiple tier one co-location facilities with backup power and multiple high speed connections to the internet backbone. We have full access and control over the co-location facility, the servers and the network.  There has been no downtime since we started in November, 2009.

Andreas Junge, Chief Information Officer, speaks about Kachingle Engineering [German]
Andreas Junge, Chief Information Officer, spricht über Kachingle Engineering [Deutsch]

New Kachingle Videos

We also  published three new videos about Kachingle on YouTube (and on our blog and Kachingle.com).

Futures

Of course we are not neglecting the other markets Kachingle is in, particularly the sites/blogs in English!  We have many enhancements and improvements coming soon that will benefit all of our Kachinglers and sites/blogs.  These new features will be rolled out over the next few months and include:

  • email updates to Kachinglers and Site Owners
  • enhanced Medallion Add & Manage wizard including a language flag for sorting and searching
  • better PayPal pricing
  • Twitter integration
  • Facebook integration
  • and more…

New Sites

New sites are joining Kachingle every day.  Each site that joins makes kachingling more attractive to users.  You can always find the latest one by going to AllSites and sorting by “new sites”.

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Please do not hesitate to contact us with your ideas and suggestions via email to us directly (or in German to deutsch@kachingle.com), tweets to @kachingle, comments in our GetSatisfaction Forum, or comments right here on our blog.

Thanks, and we look forward to hearing from you.

Cynthia
Founder and Chief Kachingler
cynthia AT kachingle.com
skype: cynthia.typaldos
cynthia’s kachingling

Yves Huin
Director Kachingle Europe
Yves AT kachingle.com
skype: yveshuin
yves’ kachingling