So Hello again and welcome to a new Round of me interviewing people from the Web.
This time i’ve got into contact with Eileen Burbidge, while searching for an Invite to Flattr.com, the new Social Micropayment System from Sweden.
You all heard about Wikileaks getting their own FlattrAccount for getting new Sources of Income to make their Work possible, haven’t you?
You might have seen this little green Buttons popping up everywhere in the Web and don’t know what they are for?
Now meet Eileen, she’s the "Lead Evangelist" at Flattr and i asked her a few Questions:
1) Who are you and what are you doing for Flattr?
I am Eileen Burbidge (@flattr_e or @eileentso) and think of myself as "lead evangelist" for Flattr. But additionally, I am one of team’s angel investors and biggest fans.
2) What is Flattr? In one sentence, please.
Flattr is a social micropayments system. Or another/alternative sentence: Flattr is like Digg or Facebook Like but with a wallet.
3) How big is your team and how is it structured? Are there only Developers?
At the moment the team is 5 full-time developers in Malmö Sweden, plus myself and 2 part-time interns in London who work on evangelism/"outreach" and trying to spread the word.
4) On which technological Base is Flattr created? Ruby/Python/PHP?
Our system is built upon Lighttpd, PHP, MySQL and memcache. We don’t use any third party frameworks instead we built our own to handle all the quirks of our particular system.
5) How big is Flattr right now and how fast is it growing?
We don’t release user figures or statistics, but others have speculated and described our userbase as being in excess of 20,000 users. This would be from a basis of 0 users in February 2010.
Note: I have created another Account for my Wife this morning and since the FlattrID is incremental this would make approx. 27000 Users, Status 02. August 2010
6) Are you hosted in the Clouds?
Unless you count loading jQuery from google then no, we don’t use any cloud services. Everything is hosted on our own servers running Linux.
7) Where are you located, i think i heard in Sweden, is this correct?
That’s correct, Malmö Sweden.
8) What are your next plans?
We’re looking forward to removing the need to use invite codes in order to register and use the system, i.e. go to open/public beta from current private beta phase. And we’re also looking to integrate with more partners with our REST API.
9) 10% is quite a lot, will you lower the fee?
At the moment we’ll leave it there because it gives us flexibility — for partners and also possible marketing/mechanics we may implement in the future. Since we’re in beta, we may eventually change the 10% but want to make sure we have enough room to do what we need to do in order to further grow the userbase.
10) Are you hiring?
Yes, yes, yes! Please see our blog post about this here: http://blog.flattr.com/2010/07/searchlight-for-new-flattr-developers/
Well, thank you Eileen and we’re all looking forward towards the new Features and the PreInvitationPhase. Maybe you want to come over to Munich in October for the BarCamp Munich. Would be nice to meet FaceToFace.
