Category Archives: Announcement

It’s a Sugar Rush!

Hi folks and happy Friday/Saturday depending on where you are in the world right now!

mshares_1300

We have just release some new bonuses and pie upgrades to keep you warm. We now have Pie Upgrades that will allow you to take the maximum you invest in someone to 1300 shares using upgrades. And of course, the current More Dessert and Even More Dessert Bonuses are still active, previous Dessert Bonuses you’ve used will be active even with the new Pie which means you might be able to go to 1500 shares in someone.

power_more_dessert_30Today we have also released more dessert packs for those who love to grow their share ownership beyond the max in all their favourite stocks. These packs are designed to reduce the amount of clicking required to buy More Dessert bonuses. Come on over to the bonus store and check out the latest packs.

As always, thanks for the continued feedback and support

Team Empire Avenue

Black Friday eaves sales.

Not to let the day slip by without giving you a sale we have posted some Eaves sales. Check out the shop for more details: https://www.empireavenue.com/shop/money

They will remain up for the weekend so you have time to take advantage, sale ends Monday (Nov 26th, 2012). For any users who have purchased today (since midnight UTC) we have adjusted your purchases to reflect the current sale so you don’t lose anything.  For those of you with a holiday we wish you a happy long weekend…. for those who don’t, rest assured we will be working as well.

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Changes to our Blog!

If you are a frequent visitor to the Empire Avenue Blog, you might notice that the blog has had a bit of a facelift to more closely match EmpireAvenue.com itself. It’s been on our list of things to do for a while! We’ve moved over to a hosted service by our friends over at WordPress.com who do such a fantastic job that we thought supporting their efforts and having our blog hosted there was the right thing to do! We’ve even taken advantage of one  of Automattic’s Premium Themes. Don’t forget that you can connect your WordPress.com blog directly through the WordPress API at Empire Avenue.

As part of the changes we’re also removing Planet.EmpireAvenue.com. We’ve moved over the relevant content including the “Apps and Fansites” information which is now housed with this Blog. If you have an App or Fansite that you wish listed, please let us know by way of the form we’ve enabled on the page!

Empire Avenue and new horizons

Though it seems like we have been quiet over the last couple of months we have busily been pulling a few things together and we have a couple of exciting announcements to make (and more to come in the future!).

Empire Avenue is proud to announce a strategic partnership with social media superstar Liz Strauss (e)LIZS.

Liz Strauss will be Empire Avenue’s (empireavenue.com) new Director of Strategic Partnerships. As the title describes, Liz will be helping to drive new partnerships with businesses, utilizing Empire Avenue’s social media fuelled stock exchange and engagement tools. If you are a new or existing business on Empire Avenue and wish to drive their social media engagement with our innovative platform then please contact Liz at Liz@empireavenue.com. If you would like to engage Empire Avenue’s Bonuses for your business please contact Liz for further information and options.

We are also very excited to announce a new complementary product from Empire Avenue Inc.: GamrCred.com. GamrCred is a brand-new service that shows gamers how they rank in the world of gaming credibility. By combining the play, say and community based respect of a gamer, GamrCred is the Ultimate Rank in Games. Like Empire Avenue, we also see GamrCred being useful for gamers looking for ways to improve their gaming prowess both through social media and the games themselves.

GamrCred will remain in invite-only beta for a number of weeks, so if you want to come in and discover what your GamrCred is, or learn from the masters go to GamrCred.com and sign up for an invite.

GamrCred grew out of the passion of the Empire Avenue inc. team and is a great example of our love for video games and the social media technology we have created with EmpireAvenue.com.

EmpireAvenue.com will continue as social media rocket fuel for people and businesses who are looking to expand, engage and evaluate their social media profiles. We are always on a continuous improvement path, and we appreciate all the feedback we receive and are working hard to improve the usability, acquisition and retention for the site.

- The Empire Avenue Inc. Team

Scheduled outage on August 11th

We have been informed by Rudiger that some of our systems need updates. As a result Empire Avenue will experience an outage on August 11, 2012 between 1 a.m. – 5 a.m. UTC  (Friday evening, August 10, 2012 8 p.m. – Midnight CT).  We hope to complete the work as quickly as possible but during this time you may find the site unavailable.  

Don’t worry though, we will have Rudiger in the engine room making sure all the blinky lights and appropriate cables are reconnected. Please check our twitter feed or the blog for any additional updates.

The Empire Ave. Team. 

 

 

 

Project Cleanup Update

Schedule Updated : due to some internal scheduling conflicts we are extending this release until 8am June 27th, 2012 GMT.  Most users will likely begin seeing changes soon but may experience some additional changes during this time.

As posted earlier this week we are working on a clean up and some general house keeping of EmpireAvenue.com to help improve the overall consistency and also address some of the issues sent to us by our great community. The roll-out of these changes will occur between 8pm GMT June 25th, 2012 and 8pm GMT June 26th, 2012.  Please check our previous post as well as this one. We would like to re-iterate that these updates are focused mainly on addressing existing issues and improving the consistency of your user experience. To help put this in perspective here are a couple of the subtle changes we are making:

New Modal Dialogs and Inline Alerts.

As you can see we our “modal” windows (those that show up for a message or action – such as investing in someone) will be changing to incorporate new alerts/error/message dialogs.  These alerts will now appear over the page and replace the old popup boxes which you might accidentally click away from or even notice. In addition, we had several types of these popups and used in different ways and will be moving to one consistent look, style and functionality.

New buttons consistency

We are cleaning up old interface elements such as buttons and inline navigation. Our concerns here are not just in consistency but overall user experience for those accessing the site on mobile devices or far-flung places. Moving to new consistent styles, CSS and scripts we will be reducing some of our load times with half the amount of data being served at times!

Old layout - would not fit properly on iPad

New Responsive Layout for mobile

A concern for many in our community was the inability for EmpireAvenue.com to be used easily on mobile devices. While the community has access to such great community-built applications such as MyEmpire and EAV Mogul for iOS devices, we wanted to improve the experience on any mobile device at any screen resolution. As such we have implemented a new “Responsive” layout.

As you can see from the screens here, re-sizing the site onto a different type of screen will actually resize and move around the elements. It may not be “perfect” on launch, but we certainly hope it will be better and more user-friendly. We will be improving the usefulness of the responsive layouts with time and feedback from you, our community.

These are but some of the few changes that we will be rolling out. Please again understand, this update will touch almost every page and function of the current EmpireAvenue.com. As such, we have opted to not put in new features or enhancements. We also anticipate that there will be some bugs that will crop up and we will be working crazily post launching to ensure that they are squashed and fixed.

Project: Cleanup

As part of an ongoing effort to support you better and improve the overall consistency and user interface we have been working tirelessly to do some house keeping. As such we will be releasing a cleaned up site on June 25th.

What does this mean for you?  Well in some cases we are implementing some minor tweaks to address issues you have sent us, in others its as simple as a button made consistent throughout the site. It is important to know this is *not* a redesign or an substaintial overhaul of the site design and/or feature set as some previous Empire Avenue changes have been!

In general we are aiming for:

  •  improved consistency across platforms
  •  mobile friendly responsive layouts
  •  consistent look and feel, buttons, naming, and navigation
  •  fixes to address loading times, optimize javascript and improve general responsiveness of forms.
  • surface some functions which were buried in the recent releases (block, mute, etc)

Most importantly we are focusing are cleaning up so we improve the turn around time on bug fixes and new features for Empire Avenue.

Will there be some things you don’t like?  Well possibly but when possible we have keep things as close to how they are but tweaked a colour or fixed things as small as spacing.  Rest assured we will take your feedback into account and continue to work on improving your Empire Avenue experience.

Here you can see some of the changes to the profile, we are bringing back some navigation and making better use of the real-estate. We have also improved the search to try and make it easier to find other users on the site.

They’re back! Dilbert & Dessert redux!

Once again, for a limited time, everyone’s favourite Bonus items have returned to Empire Avenue. We introduced Dilbert Bonus items back in February, and they were a great hit!

And the Dessert, well, who couldn’t do with more Dessert (or Even More Dessert)!

As mentioned, they’re available for a limited time — in the shop, of course :)

Celebrate Spring and [X]pendapalooza VII

Happy Spring! To celebrate the season of Engagement and Growth (two concepts we wholeheartedly support), we’ve mounted another time-limited Eaves Sale!

Since there was such demand last time, we’ve introduced a new, larger 225,000 Eave package, in addition to the other 5 popular Eave bundles.

So yeah, if you’re looking to build up your warchest, perhaps for the upcoming [X]pendapalooza VII event (March 24 & 25), now is the time.

Because the sale ends at 23:59 Tuesday March 27th (GMT).

Buh Bye Buy!

Sharp-eyed members of Empire Avenue will have noticed a minor change today — the lovely green Buy button is gone. Well, the button is still there, but the text now reads, ‘Invest‘. We’ve changed only the text, not the functionality.

Why tell us about it?
It’s a subtle change, but one we feel is important to highlight. The word ‘buy’ never seemed to capture the true sentiment of the action taken by Empire Avenue members when connecting and engaging with other members. You’re not simply ‘buying’ a piece of a member when you press that button.

Rather, you’re starting an engagement process that will, hopefully, benefit both members in ways that transcend simple ownership.

The word ‘invest’ seems a much better description in this context, and I’m going to refer to the Dictionary.com definitions of the words to further illustrate the point.

Buy
to acquire the possession of, or the right to, by paying or promising to pay an equivalent, especially in money; purchase.

Invest
to put (money) to use, by purchase or expenditure, in something offering potential profitable returns, as interest, income, or appreciation in value.

See that? “…offering potential profitable returns, as interest, income, or appreciation in value.” Much more inline with how we think of an engagement transaction.

So yes, a minor change, but one that helps align the spirit of the engagement transaction — your investment in another member — with the spirit of Empire Avenue.

In other words, an investment is a way to say, ‘I value your engagement, your content, your contribution’, or show support, or even thank someone. Invest is a much better word for all of that — at least we think so.

How ’bout you? What do you think of the subtle shift from ‘Buy’ to ‘Invest’? Let us know in the comments!