You may have noticed over the course of the Empire Avenue beta that Influencers originate from many different parts of the world. Sadly, we’ve only been able to offer the site in English. That’s about to change.

As some of you may be aware, we’ve taken some small steps this past week to test our process, and get some basic translation in at the same time.

If you go to your Settings/Edit Profile page, you’ll find you can change your language preference to Français or Español. This will change some of the tabs, buttons, and navigation links to the selected language. A small step, but it’s a start.

Next steps.
In the next few weeks, we’ll be rolling out Translate.EmpireAvenue.com -- a site which will let you get more involved with Empire Avenue and help us out with translation tasks.

We’re still fleshing out the process and the interface, but since we’ve received a lot of enthusiastic offers of translation support we’d be fools not to take advantage of it. And we’re not fools, unless it’s intentional

So, here it is, a Call for Translators!
We can’t wait for the next few weeks for the whole system to get built, so what we’re doing is switching to manual procedures. If you want to help out, just fill out this handy form and someone (likely me) will get back to you with a translation task or three. Some of you have already helped us out with translation tasks (thank you!). If you’re willing to continue, please fill out the form as we’re changing how we keep track of translation work.

What you’ll be doing.
Basically, you’ll get a section of text, perhaps a portion of a help page. This will be your unit of work. Your job will be to translate it into the language(s) you indicated you can work in, while maintaining the spirit and tone of the text.

What’s in it for you?
Glory, and, erm, other stuff! As I’ve said before, we’re still fleshing out the whole Translate.EmpireAvenue.com process but if you get involved in translation now, there will be something special for you when the full site goes live. Oh, and you get to work with Rudiger, though some may not consider that a perk

"Always in motion is the future... And so is Empire Avenue!" Today we released a minor update to the new account sign-up process, which is the first step in making it easier for people to get up and running on Empire Avenue. You might have noticed that we've been tinkering with our front page and other parts of the public-facing pages; you’ll see more changes in the coming weeks and months as we get closer to delivering the site we’ve envisioned.

With any change we make to Empire Avenue we put the needs of our users up front and constantly strive to provide a cohesive user experience. With that in mind, we have re-worked the new-user signup, focusing on simplifying the whole process. Decide whether you are a Person or a Business, pick a ticker, provide your site URL if you're a business, and then you’re off and running.

The second part of this simplification (releasing later this week) is the consolidation of your connections into one place.  We will be updating the connections page to have your Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and Blog connections all in one place so you can easily make updates without having to run around to different settings pages.

In addition to combining all your connections, new users will have the ability to add their social connections before they begin trading and exploring on the site.  Sorry existing users... but hey, you are unique, just like everyone else

Signing up is easier than ever… so go tell your friends, cohorts, enemies, siblings, government officials! Everyone!

Cheers,

-Aaron

This is the first in a series of posts that will deal with our next release, slated for the entire month of September. Wow. Yes, we're planning on releasing a lot this month and we like to tell you in advance, just like we did with the 'Road to Dublin' series in July/August.

1. Share-price Calculations

In August we quietly launched a beta version of our Influence Scores. This was partly done to show you the relevance of your online activity in calculating your share price and partly in preparation for the increase in relevance and importance we are now making to the value of your online activity, as it relates to calculating your share price.

As of September 7th/8th, 2010, your share price will be more reliant on Market Makers. This addresses a number of issues: most importantly, we believe that in order to achieve our vision of evaluating your online Influence, we need to take into greater account your external activities. However, what hasn't changed is that to prove your Influence you need to get people to buy you. Your ability to sell shares will *always* make you more valuable/influential than a person that cannot.

This means next week many of you will see a one-day correction in your share price. There is just no getting around such a correction. Our models show that the new share prices will be more reflective of people's influence on and off Empire Avenue. This is a necessary and relevant step as we move towards a greater real-world relevance of those share prices and attach more external services and get ready to invite millions of people and business onto the system.

2. Rules on Buying and Selling

We will also be removing a few rules related to buying and selling shares. Our 100 shares/12 hours for selling shares achieved its intended goal of minimizing "runs" as stocks are sold en masse, but did so at the cost of adding more rules than we wanted. Also, it made it difficult to divest oneself of all shares if you disagreed with someone's content.

From September 7th/8th, 2010, that rule will disappear, as will the rule for elevated commissions between two parties when they do multiple share transactions.

Instead, we will introduce the concept of a fast-moving stock or "Fast Mover". These stocks will face commission increases that will be clearly displayed in the user interface. When you reach "Fast Mover" status, we will start increasing commissions on that stock for a limited time (up to a maximum of 50% commission!). You can then judge when to jump in or jump out.

Monitoring of coordinated Buys and Sells to manipulate shares will remain in place, and we will aggressively warn, suspend and ban accounts that participate in such activity, depending on the circumstances.

3. Earnings and Dividends

Our third set of changes deals with how you use our Earnings and Investment Earnings (Dividends) structures to invest in good Influencers.

Our Earnings structures have not changed since our Friends and Family Beta in March! As of September 7th and 8th, we will change our activity payouts to be more reliant on your Influence Scores. Similar to how it is now, simply posting 1000 tweets to make more earnings will not work. We will, however, better reward your activity based on the influence of that activity. Our goal is for you to better use earnings numbers of others to judge your value online.

So, to be precise, we will reward you for tweets, photos, postings, blogs, etc. as before albeit in a different formula, but now there will also be multipliers and additions for sharing, engagement, audience, and the influence scores of the audience that these reach.

Naturally, this will spill over into the earnings you get from your Investments, but we'll also be adding a small twist. Before these changes, when someone expands their shares available, the amount of dividends you receive from such an Influencer lessens. While this is how it works in the real world, many have correctly suggested this is an impediment to getting people to invest in you, especially if you have great content! We'll be increasing the amount you pay out as you expand your shares. It will not be linear, but it will ensure that, as long as you continue to produce *quality* content, you remain an attractive investment for others.

More "East of Erindale" posts coming up. These changes are currently slated for September 7th/8th, 2010.

Many of you may have now read that Empire Avenue is a real place. Oh we know it's the web site and it's the team, but it's actually a real place. The three founders of Empire Avenue, Mike Mannion, Niall Brown, and I, along with Nithum Thain and Ray Lambe proudly call Newfoundland home. When it came to creating our little part of the web, we hunted for a St. John's street name that we could name the site after. We came up with Empire Avenue.

So today, in recognition of coverage both by The Telegram and CBC Radio here in our home city, where we are visiting, we'd like to announce a contest which will net you a very special achievement.

Take a photograph of yourself and your Empire Avenue Ticker symbol in front of five different "Empire Avenue's" around the world and we will give you an achievement. We don't expect this to be handed out for a while, but today we'll add this achievement into the mix of achievements on the site. The first person to do so will get the pioneering achievement and everyone else will get the achievement for having accomplished the feat.

So the rules:

1. Go find 5 Empire Avenue's anywhere in the world (must be in English folks, sorry!)
2. Get yourself to that location, find a street sign, hold up your Ticker symbol and get a photo taken.
3. Put the photos up on your favourite photo sharing site and send us the links to the five photos to "avenue_contest@empireavenue.com"

By the way, this achievement is worth 2,500 Eaves!

Just in case you are wondering, here are some of the locations around the world:

* St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada
* Melbourne, Australia
* Toronto, Canada
* New York, USA

That's it!

EDIT: Photoshopping is NOT an option and the same person must appear in *Each* photo! Must be in 5 Different Cities!

It's no secret that we've been considering many changes over the last few weeks when it comes to the market mechanics. We made some changes already with regards to buying inactive accounts and we will now make some changes to selling shares.

Effective immediately, you will only be able to sell a maximum of 100 shares of any individual every 12 hours. That equates to a maximum of 200 shares in any given day. We will examine this rule and these numbers and adjust as required.

I would like to explain our reasoning:

* Empire Avenue is about buying shares in great content producers. We want to encourage you to consider the value of the content you are buying. If it is too easy to sell great quantities then we devalue the ability for you to consider what that content is actually doing.

* There are many different motivational biases for those using Empire Avenue. First and foremost, Empire Avenue is a social site and selling large amounts of shares can result in "revenge sells" and other tactics which are not within the spirit of Empire Avenue.

* Those that need to sell to upgrade can still do so, albeit a bit more slowly. More importantly it should give you cause to think why you buy shares in any Influencer because unloading such shares will be slower.

* Coordinated group selling is not something we tolerate. While the changes we are implementing will lessen the impact we will also take action (which may include suspension or banning) against those that participate in such coordinated activity.

We realize that this is quite a change. We don't want to catch problems after the fact or put in hard "stops" where share trading ceases on fast moving stocks. We would rather put in rules that control the markets within the spirit of what Empire Avenue intends.

We want you to value the content and the content creators, to value their influence amongst their networks and with you. To do this, we believe being selective, spreading your hard-earned Eaves and certainly making good judgement calls is paramount. A great cartoonist once coined the most brilliant phrase for a red and blue suited superhero, which I will now blatantly adapt:

"With great virtual wealth comes great virtual responsibility."

We've always been upfront with our wonderful community that we will take all forms of abuse seriously on Empire Avenue. We review transactions, reports and other metrics on a daily basis to spot trends and issues so that we can react as quickly as we can. Of course, we discuss ideas, listen to community suggestions and make decisions as appropriate.

To this end, we are in the process of reviewing many aspects of the Empire Avenue markets in order to make them as fair for everyone as possible. There are a number of changes that we will likely implement over the next few weeks, similar to how we put in limits on how you could buy virtual shares in new arrivals during our "Dublin" release.

While we do try to release information as early as possible on such changes, we also don't want to encourage abuse and so some changes will be announced as we make them. Today we are announcing the following change effective immediately

* EDIT: We have changed this rule to be a more fair 50 shares in any 24 hour period in accounts which have not logged into Empire Avenue in the previous 14 days, we will adjust numbers and time periods based on how the markets behave! You will be able to buy a maximum of 10 shares in any single transaction from Influencers who have not logged into Empire Avenue in the preceeding 14 days. This change is being implemented to prevent abuse that has unfortunately occurred with people inappropriately trading inactive accounts. We appreciate the input from our community through the feedback channel and we believe that this change promotes better market strategies.

The integrity of our system and the enjoyment of our users is paramount and we appreciate your feedback and suggestions which help us ensure that the platform is fair and fun for everyone. We are committed to preventing people using the site to promote unethical behaviour or adversely affect other Influencers on Empire Avenue and we will continue to take whatever action is necessary to stop it.

We truly appreciate our community for their input and more changes will follow. Please watch this space!

"I know I waste half of my advertising dollars...I just wish I knew which half."
Henry Procter of Procter & Gamble, about 1895

Now the gates are open and everyone has had the opportunity to try the site the team has built over the last 10 months, we thought it was time to talk a little bit more about our developing advertising and rewards platform.

As Dups mentioned in one of the first blogs we always had a business model in mind for Empire Avenue, to make it a platform where you participate in better targeted advertising and have an opportunity, through your online influence and participation in Empire Avenue, to share in the trillions of marketing dollars spent every year worldwide.

Today we reveal the first step in our ultimate plan of bringing you this lofty goal. Our beta of Avenue Rewards are up and running. “What are Avenue Rewards?” I hear you ask. Well, you have been hard at work earning Eaves on the site, now you have a chance to spend some of them on more than your best friend, share upgrades, additional communities and a change of ticker symbol. Our Avenue Rewards enable you to spend Eaves on discounts, promotions and trials of real world and virtual goods.

Our first two partners Cream Junkie and Beamdog.com have decided to take the plunge with us today while SNS Cafe in Santiago, Chile will be offering a reward by Friday.

Cream Junkie is a small startup company based in Edmonton, Canada that offers all natural, SLS and Paraben free scrubs, moisturizers and cleansers for your booty, and other parts of your dried out anatomy that need cleansing and replenishing without those nasty chemicals. I personally use the bum butter for my booty and I tell you baby’s bum is an understatement! This offer is only available to Alberta, Canada residents (so you may not even see it if you don't live here) for those of you with dry bums in other places Cream Junkie assures us they will expand the offer once they sort out their postage partner.

Beamdog is an online store that gives you the ability to download video games without all the hassle of having an IT department at your beck and call to install new drivers, file management and all the boring stuff that normally ticks you off before you can get on with PC gaming. Trent and the boys have been decent enough to offer you coupons for your next purchase. 

So save up your Eaves folks and keep checking back on the Avenue Rewards Page of the Shop for future offers, as we are negotiating some really good deals for you to spend your “hard earned” on. We are also open to ideas from you on your interests and passions so we can reach out to the right brands for you.

Now for those brands who are reading this and thinking “Where is my Empire Avenue love?”, we have chosen to release Avenue Rewards on a staged basis, which we will expand over the next few weeks. Those of you who have expressed interest, we will be contacting and inviting you to join shortly! But if you want to get involved even in the beta of Avenue Rewards, don’t wait! We are here waiting for your email (bizdev@empireavenue.com) as we would love for you to get involved. Now your mind is probably boggling on where you can take this and yes, wherever your mind just took you we will accommodate your dreams of world domination. Even if those dreams are for small town domination we will accommodate you too, the Cream Junkie offer is a great example of target rewards offers, ie Alberta only, so email us!

Oh, almost forgot, social, creative and media agencies: we are more than happy to talk to you too, your competitors are already in the loop and haggling.

This is a notice that within a few days we will be making some changes to the Trading Post and how share trading works. This does not affect regular buying and selling. We have examined how share trading is occurring on Empire Avenue and feel that we need to reduce the amounts that people can bid on shares in the current implementation of the share trades.

At the moment you can bid for shares to be above or below 30% of the current trading price. To prevent abuse that we have detected we will reduce that number to 10% above or below the trading price.

With our commitment to examine all parts of the market on a daily basis we are always looking at how things can be made more fun and naturally how to keep abuse out of the system.

This change will occur between Thursday August 19 and Monday August 23, 2010.

Empire Avenue Secures Seed Investment
Group headed by Boris Wertz of W Media Ventures provides seed funding to the world’s first influence stock market.

A private group of prominent angel investors headed by Boris Wertz of W Media Ventures has provided seed funding to Empire Avenue (www.empireavenue.com), the world’s first influence stock market. The investment monies will be used to help accelerate development initiatives for the site, including the impending launch of its Avenue Rewards program and advertising platform, as well as fund marketing initiatives to increase user base and awareness.

In beta Empire Avenue has attracted over 15,000 registered users and local, national and international businesses from more than 95 countries worldwide who want to tap into the power and value of online influence. The site, its game-changing advertising platform and Avenue Rewards program connect consumers, influencers and brands in close-knit, value-based relationships to the benefit of everyone involved. Over 750,000 virtual share trades have occurred on the site in the past three months with a total value of over half a billion Eaves, Empire Avenue’s virtual currency.

“We are incredibly excited to be working with Boris and his group, who bring valuable industry knowledge with their backgrounds and investments in social media and games,” said Duleepa Wijayawardhana, CEO of Empire Avenue. “With this investment, we will be able to continue bringing our vision to life and Empire Avenue to the world.”

“We were really impressed with what the team around Duleepa had achieved with limited resources in a few months. The initial traction clearly shows how extremely engaging the product already is,” said Boris Wertz of W Media Ventures, who will serve on the Empire Avenue board.

About Empire Avenue
Empire Avenue (www.empireavenue.com) is an influence stock exchange created by former BioWare, Electronic Arts and MySQL/Sun Microsystems employees. Empire Avenue makes social media fun – and measurable – by tying users’ virtual share price on the site to activity, reach and engagement on external social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and blogs. The more active and influential a user is on the site and around the web, the higher their virtual share price.

About W Media Ventures
W Media Ventures is an angel fund focusing on early-stage Consumer Internet opportunities in the Pacific Northwest and Western Canada. Founded by Internet entrepreneur and investor Boris Wertz in 2007, W Media Ventures is based in Vancouver, BC. Current investments includes Tynt, Techvibes, Suite101, Indochino, Yapta and BootUp Labs. For more information visit http://www.wmediaventures.com.

Our "Dublin" cycle is over and we’ve set our "Erindale" releases for Empire Avenue into motion. Do not expect to see the kind of incredible overhaul of the site we did with "Dublin," though; instead we'll be focusing on usability enhancements and improving the site in all its various areas.

Last week, we finally revealed the ability to purchase Eaves with PayPal. Now comes the second PayPal purchase option, and that is the much-asked-for ability to buy Achievement Upgrades with a mixture of Eaves and PayPal. From this moment onwards, almost all our Shares Upgrades can be purchased with a mixture of real and virtual currency.

We have not changed the cost of what any of these upgrades would be with Eaves alone.

Notifications

This week will also see the release of a much-needed upgrade to the Notifications pages. Gone are the "Alerts by all the Influencers you have bought" (you might not even have noticed these!)!

Here are a list of some of the changes:

1. Moved the Notification Settings to the main Notification page, so no more hunting for the settings.

2. We've added a "Basic" and "Advanced" mode for settings. In advanced mode, you will have the ability to choose what notifications are displayed in the "You have notifications waiting" number and pop-up while on the site.

3. You can now filter by type of notification and page through as many notifications as you like!

4. The notification pop-up will resemble the rest of the pop-ups on the site and is scrollable!

We've also fixed some of the notification bugs and annoyances that people have reported to us, but there are still some remaining. If we haven't been in touch about your particular bug being fixed on either Get Satisfaction, e-mail or Twitter, it is because we haven't fixed it yet!

We're in final testing with the new Notification pages; expect to see them before the end of the week.