local.ch blog

Is your favourite team playing in the Cup? As the sponsoring partner of the Swiss Cup, we are giving away 100 tickets to the round of the last sixteen on 8 and 9 December.

With a bit of luck, you could win two tickets for the game of your choice:

FC Schaffhausen – FC Grasshoppers
FC Köniz – FC Zürich
FC Wil – FC Young Boys
FC Wohlen – FC Thun
FC Locarno – FC Basel
FC Kriens – FC Sion
FC Aarau – FC St. Gallen
SC Brühl St.Gallen – Lausanne-Sport

Just fill out the form and you’re in the draw. As usual, you can only enter once and our employees cannot participate.

local.ch wishes you good luck and an exciting game!

Competition conditions:

the closing date is 29.11.2012. local.ch will draw the winners and inform them in person. No correspondence will be kept about the competition. There is no right of appeal. The winnings cannot be paid out in cash. Your data will not be used for advertising purposes or disclosed to third parties. Employees of local.ch are excluded from this draw of the cup tickets.

If facebook was a country, it would be the third largest in the world. So we asked ourselves, which country would we be with our apps? We recently crossed the two million download threshold and can now proudly say: we are Botswana!

Who hasn’t heard these comparisons already? Facebook has almost as many users as India has inhabitants, Twitter has twice as many users as there are people living in the USA and Google+ has almost the same number of active users as there are inhabitants in Liechtenstein and Andorra combined (optimistically calculated).

All of these comparisons are, of course, pretty lame, but that still didn’t stop us from checking in Wikipedia to see how big we are with our apps. And, lo and behold: With now two million downloads we are on a par with Botswana and in front of countries such as Iceland, Bahrain and Gambia. Incidentally, the largest share of our two million downloads is achieved by our iPhone app, just a short distance ahead of the Android app.

We would like to warmly thank you for your downloads and the kind reviews. When we are bigger than Jamaica (2.7 million downloads), there will be a Bob Marley Day in the local.ch office.

And in order to make the lame comparison yet more abstract: our website, with 3.6 million users, is even bigger than our apps, thus making it not only bigger than Kuwait, but also the biggest Swiss website.

And for those who would like to eat out African style once in a while, we recommend Mama Africa in Zurich: mamaafrica.ch

The new face of Windows: Microsoft has developed a completely new design for Windows 8. We’ve followed it closely from day one and proudly present the brand new local.ch app for Windows 8.

The tile design for apps, which is based on Windows 7, is the most obvious change. The new system has been optimised especially for users of the new Windows tablets and smartphones, and looks much more cutting-edge than the familiar classic Windows design. You’ll find comprehensive information about the new hardware on sites such as neuerdings.com. The most exciting new launch is the Microsoft Surface tablet.

We at local.ch have been avid supporters since day one and are proud to present our new app. The best thing about it is that local.ch has been integrated into the normal search function of Windows 8. So you can use your standard search to go directly to the required entry (as the screenshot shows).

Find out more about Windows 8 on the Microsoft website.

UPDATE: We’re still waiting for Microsoft’s final approval of our app. Once we have the approval we will post the link to download our app here.
Download: http://apps.microsoft.com/webpdp/de-DE/app/swiss-phone-book/473c0415-fe4b-4322-999d-386536efcc15

All good things come in threes. For the third time, we are sponsoring TEDxZurich – probably the most inspiring event of the year.

A day full of curiosity, inspiration and fascination. That is TEDxZurich. Bringing together people from diverse backgrounds and cultures, it is a platform for presenting new ideas, inventions and discoveries.

Last year, Sebastian Wernicke summed up the TED talks brilliantly:

More great talks can be found on the TED website ted.com. (By the way, one of my all-time favourite talks is “Global population growth, box by box” by Hans Rosling, which explains complex interrelationships in a simple way).

The TED organisation has set out to do no less than change the world with new ideas. And we love ambitious goals. So we are thrilled to support TEDx again in making the world a little bit better.

This year, we’re providing a special service for all participants. We’ll be sending details of the next event in the TEDx programme to all participants on their smartphones. This is how it works:

• Open the local.ch app on your iPhone or Android phone
• Search for “TEDxZurich 2012″
• Click on the star in the upper right-hand corner to add TEDx to your favourites. (Please note: push notifications must be activated on your phone)

We would like to wish all participants a great time at TEDxZurich 2012!

Let’s focus on women today. Because there are far too few women in IT and technical jobs. We are therefore delighted to support the 1.5-day Rails Girls workshop on 2 and 3 November in Zurich.

Rails Girls is a non-profit organisation. The first workshop was attended by more than 100 women in Helsinki in November 2010. Since then, workshops have been held in Shanghai, Singapore, Tallinn, Berlin and Krakow. And now in November, in Zurich!

Applications like Twitter, Groupon or Soundcloud are based on the Rails framework. At local.ch, we also use Rails for our website.

The aim of the workshop is to make web technologies more accessible to women interested in learning about the subject and to promote female grass roots in the IT sector.

The course is designed for:

• web developers,
• participants interested in developing their own app,
• and IT project managers.

30 fully sponsored places for women of all ages are up for grabs for the workshop on 2 and 3 November. Under the individual guidance of experienced developers, all basics will be taught and immediately applied in the practical development of an app. All applications to be sent by 19 October at railgirls.com/zurich.

We wish you lots of luck in the draw. And for the 30 participants, we hope you enjoy the exciting and insightful workshop and networking opportunity.

PS: We are always please to receive unsolicited applications from good software engineers: http://local-ch.github.com/! We will be particularly delighted to welcome our first female colleague to our software development team in the near future.