Get Enlightened!

Great news, Criticube has been invited to join the Accenture Innovation Award for 2012! If you love what we are trying to build through Criticube, you can vote for us on the official Accenture award page. Voting can be done through Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

The Accenture Innovation Award is an annual competition to profile and reward companies for outstanding innovation. This year the competition counts a total of 1441 participants. Criticube is competing within the sector Communication, Media and Technology. To find out more about the award click here. 

Show your support and help take Criticube to the next level!

The Criticube Team

Whats new?

1. Facebook Like button for Cubes and Thoughts
2. Twitter button to share a Cube or a Thought as a tweet

Knowledge sharing should be fast, easy and manageable. Do you agree? We do, and that’s why we have implemented new social media share buttons on Criticube.  You can now quickly Facebook Like or tweet a Cube or a Thought on Twitter.

Don’t worry we have more in store for you!

We realised that when you post a thought you would like to be able to automatically post it on your Facebook page, Twitter or Blog. That’s why we are working hard on making this possible asap. 

Many of our changes are driven by you; the people who use Criticube. If you have any ideas how Criticube could better serve you, we encourage you to post them in our cube: Improve Criticube.

Interested in developments within Criticube? 

You can receive quick updates about our new developments by liking our Facebook page or following our official Criticube Twitter @Criticube.

Stay tuned for more exciting developments in Criticube!

The Criticube Team

Yes, that’s right…we have relaunched! The new Criticube is packed with some awesome functionality to help you express yourself.  

The new platform has a more casual feel to it. It allows you to freely express yourself and share your intellectual interests.  We have added an organisational element to your profile (read about the cube feature below) to give you more freedom in organising your interests and expressing yourself. We hope you enjoy the improvements!

So what’s changed?

Post thoughts instead of facts

Following the release of the first version of Criticube, we realised that sharing facts restricted the possibilities for debating. It limited Criticubers from expressing themselves and most importantly sharing their opinions. So instead of facts we now encourage you to post ‘thoughts’.

What do we mean by thoughts? Every day we have countless thoughts in the form of ideas or opinions about the little and big things that go on around us. Criticube helps you collect these thoughts as you post them onto your profile.  

Cube your thoughts

Our daily thoughts are often very diverse. Therefore, it is important that we are able to organise them somehow. The new Criticube allows you to create your own personal ‘Cubes’. These Cubes can represent a variety of topics like your interests, curiosities, hobbies, professional expertise, and simply your crazy thoughts - the possibilities are endless and entirely up to you. You can post your thoughts into the corresponding cubes and collect information in an organised way. The Cubes you create, are pinned to your profile and automatically shared with others.

Discuss each others thoughts

Other Criticubers are able to access your cubes to add comments and discussions to the thoughts inside them. You may have posted a thought about a news article you just read, an inspirational thought about saving the world or wanted to share your opinion about an awesome new website you just discovered (Criticube for example).  All these thoughts and more can be expressed and discussed on Criticube. We have retained the ‘support and challenge’ functionality to make discussions more exciting and interactive.

So without further ado, we invite you to have a look for yourself.  We would love to hear what you think of the new platform.  If you have any problems using Criticube or suggestions for improvement you can contact us using the Feedback button located at the top of your profile.

Happy Cubing!

The Criticube Team,

Still here to discover, share & enlighten

Dear Criticubers,

We’ve been slightly delayed in creating the functionality necessary for the new and improved Criticube. Unfortunately this means there has been a slight delay in launching the platform.

We are currently working around the clock to get the platform up and running. Our apologies for the delay.

You should be able to log back into Criticube by tomorrow and check out the new functionality.

Hope you are as excited as we are!

Titus

Discover, Share, Enlighten

Dear Criticubers,

As you may have noticed, Criticube has been offline for the last few days. This is because we have been gearing up to launch the new and improved Criticube platform!

In our pursuit of building the best possible social platform for knowledge sharing, we realized that Criticube required a major revamp. So we have been working around the clock to make this happen.

On Sunday 29 July, we will be launching the new platform. We invite you all to come and try out the new functionality and experience the new platform for yourself!

We will put up a blog post in the near future to walk you through the new functionality and explain how it improves your ability to share your knowledge with others in an interactive and social way.

If you are an existing user you can login as you have always done in the past. If you experience any problems with your account please don’t hesitate to contact Rama rama.manusama@criticube.com, and we’ll get the problem fixed immediately.

See you on the new platform!

The Criticube Team.

Discover, Share, Enlighten

Fellow Criticubers,

In the past few weeks, we have been working hard to create some new (and awesome) functionality to improve your Criticube user experience.  Earlier this week we were finally able to release these updates!  

You may not have noticed some of them yet, so we wanted to cover them on the Cc blog in detail.

Starting with the big one!

References are now either SUPPORTING or CHALLENGING

Many of the facts posted on Criticube are often debatable. The process of debating and arguing stimulates our critical thinking and hence our ability to build and share knowledge (see Cc fact). Ergo, we have made it possible for you to choose whether the references you post support or challenge a fact. 

Supporting references are labelled with a green icon and challenging references with a red icon.

Add an argument to your reference

We found that often, when you want to post a reference, it is better to state the general argument of the reference to help others in the community quickly understand its relevance to the fact being discussed.  So we have created an optional argument field which pops up above your reference. To further simplify things, we have highlighted supporting arguments in green and challenging arguments in red. See below:

Add your educational background to your profile

Criticube is a community of knowledge lovers.  To further instil a sense of community spirit we are working hard to provide you with the means to create a more personalised profile to share with others.

You can now add universities and degrees to your profile to further help people know who you are and what kind of knowledge background you have. 

- Currently, the list only includes universities from the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, but we will will have more countries up very soon. We are also working on a module which will allow you to propose universities that have not been included. Stay tuned!

And finally,

A new set of icons

We are constantly working on optimizing Criticube to become the most user friendly interface it can possibly be.  So we have developed a set of icons to help you quickly identify the activities that are going on within the community. Below is a screenshot of the new icons.

That’s it for now folks.  We hope you enjoy the new functionality as much as we enjoyed building it. 

The Criticube Team is here to serve.  If you have any ideas of your own on how we might be able to improve the community and your user experience please don’t hesitate to get in touch!   

Titus

titus.vanderspek@criticube.com

Discover, Share, Enlighten

Fellow Criticubers,

Startupplays has honoured us within their 5 top rising startup videos to watch out for in 2012!

Any great startup engages and communicates with its community of users. This can be done subtly or explicitly, through blogging, tweeting, email and a huge list of other tools. But there is nothing like the power of visual stimuli (see proof on this fact).

In our case, we wanted to create a video teaser that would give you and other potential users a hint of what Criticube is. What do you think, have we evoked your curiosity?

The creative powers behind the video must not be forgotten. A special thank you to our Creative Director Ali Düzenli (ali.duzenli@criticube.com) (music and scenario) , who composed and arranged the awesome theme composition, Omar Adrian (omaradrianrozak@gmail.com) (video) and Dityo Pradhana (cybweapon@hotmail.com) (video), a budding Video Director (who is always up for new projects) must be credited for directing and editing the video. And let’s not forget our lead actress: the baby - Kaiva

Discover, Share, Enlighten

The Criticube Team

In an effort to expand our reach and share Criticube with the world, we are looking for individuals to join our team. As a Criticube Connector, you will play an important role in promoting Criticube within your university and social network. 

Want to learn more? Click here to find out what it means to be a Criticube Connector.

If you have any question or thoughts, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Titus

titus.vanderspek@criticube.com | @titusvanderspek

Shhh, we’re going to let you in on a little secret. Criticube recently launched its first crowdfunding initiative. The great news is that you could own a chunk and help us improve the Criticube community!

Why crowdfunding?

Criticube strives to be the no 1. social media community to pursue intellectual interests.  Though we are well on our way in achieving this goal. We continuously find new and exciting ways to better serve you; the Criticube community.

For example, we are currently working hard at integrating Criticube with Facebook and Twitter so it is easier for you to seamlessly maneuver between your numerous profiles.  We are also working on some very exciting functionality, which will allow you to challenge each others facts. 

To make sure this functionality meets the light of day we require more manpower and resources. Specifically, we would like to hire programmers to continuously develop the existing platform and make sure that it can handle our growing user count. When looking for the best ways to raise capital, we wanted to find a solution which would involve the community and compliment our presence online. This is why we launched our very first crowdfunding investment round on Symbid. 

What is Crowdfunding?

Crowdfunding has gained popularity with the rise of tech startups, which have proven to be extremely interesting investment opportunities for individuals and venture capitalists (see Criticube fact). However, if we look back in history, we see that the concept of crowdfunding has existed much longer than we might think. Check out this video to get a better idea of where it all began and where we are now. 

Criticube is following the footsteps of other Internet company such as TruQu whose capital requirement was met in just four weeks. This demonstrates how crowd funding, especially equity-based crowdfunding, is gaining attention as it aims to provide both entrepreneurs and investors with mutual benefits. Furthermore, we love to do new things and it is exciting to see new people share our vision!

How can you get involved?

We have chosen Symbid, one of the most user friendly platforms around to host our crowdfunding initiative. By looking up ‘Criticube’ on their platform (or click here), you will get a overview of our objectives, the unique functionality we strive to create within Criticube, the funds we are looking to raise and why. You can already own a share of Criticube for €20 simply by making a payment through Symbid. What happens next is that Symbid will watch over your shares until the entire investment round is successful and then you will be kept upto date on the progress of your shares by us (for more info visit Symbids FAQ). By, joining our crowd funding initiative you will have the unique opportunity to become a part of our vision and follow our progress.

Curious but still have a few questions? Take a look on our profile on Symbid’s crowdfunding platform or contact us. We would be glad to clarify and doubts.

You can contact us via Twitter (@criticube), Facebook and Symbid, or contact Irman, our crowd funding expert irmansyah.putera@criticube.com  

The Criticube Team,

After months of blood, sweat and programming, the time has come to officially introduce Criticube and kick-start our official blog!

What can you expect to find here?

Through the Criticube blog, you can stay up to date on new features and get a first-hand insight into new functionalities. Follow the blog and find out how you can use Criticube to benefit your personal, professional and academic life. 

Those of you who have been following Criticube in its current beta phase will have a good understanding of what we are all about. Some of you may have seen our facts on friends’ Facebook pages, spotted us on twitter @criticube, or read about us in Startupplays top 35 Tech startups that Techcrunch missed out on. Whichever the case may be, let us introduce Criticube, so you can experience its benefits for yourself.

What is Criticube?

Our mission is to enable people to enlighten each other. We want to be the no 1. social media community to pursue intellectual interests. Ambitious you say? That’s exactly what Criticube is; aspiring and ambitious.

We have reached an era in the internet age where more is expected from the online communities that we interact with. The social media platforms that are commonly used are not optimal in our pursuit of intellectual interests. We want to be able to share our knowledge and tap into resources in a much more selective way. To do so, we require a new platform.

This is where Criticube comes into play.

As a global online community, we value the quality of the information we receive more and more. We Homo Sapiens are smart, curious and want to share our knowledge with others! 

Criticube enables you to enlighten yourself and others by sharing knowledge in a social and interactive way. Imagine combining the interactivity of Twitter with the open source knowledge approach of Wikipedia, add a few ingredients, and voila, we present Criticube. 

Together, we are building a new community of knowledge, one fact at a time.  We have some exciting new functionality in store for you in the coming month and aim to continuously expand the possibilities within Criticube.

So join us, in this unique community and expand your knowledge!

Share, discover, enlighten…that’s the Criticube way.

The Criticube Team