local.ch blog

Last Friday, I had the honour of drawing the ties of the first round in the Swiss Football Cup. I hope I secured your dream match!

FC Amriswil (2nd League) got the biggest draw in last year’s league champion and cup winner FC Basel 1893 (Super League) and now has one month to organise this highlight as the home team. Certainly a huge, but also exciting challenge for the second league side.

Sion, the current leader of the Super League, will travel to second league FC Richemond, while SR Delémont, relegated from the Challenge League, can look forward to meeting last year’s finalist FC Lucerne.

As announced last week, we are giving away two tickets for each of the 32 matches.

Simply fill in the form to take part. You can only take part once and our employees are excluded from this draw; we are organising a separate, internal draw for them.

We wish you all the best of luck in the draw, lots of fun and exciting matches in the Swiss Cup!

Competition conditions:

the closing date is 26.08.2012. 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.

As the official sponsor, we are involved in the Swiss Football Cup 2012/13 from the very start. On Friday 17 August, the Swiss Football Association will be holding the draw for the first round on 15/16 September.

As something of a draw fairy (what is the corresponding male name for this? Male fairy?), I can take a hands-on approach and draw the 32 fixtures from two pots. The two pots are needed so that the 19 teams from the Raiffeisen Super League and from the Challenge League don’t meet already in the 1st round. The 19 teams in league 1, 10 teams from the amateur league and 16 teams from the regional associations can therefore hope to meet a “stronger” opponent and try to achieve a respectable result at home.

The draw will be broadcast on 17 August at 11.30 am by live stream at football.ch. We will then have a draw for tickets to all 32 fixtures here in the blog next week.

What fixtures would you like to see in this first round? – Let me know before 17 August. Maybe I can arrange something……  ;-)

Summer finally seems to have arrived, at least for a few days. Temperatures are rising, people are smiling more and yes, here and there couples are flirting and there’s some shy (or perhaps more self-confident) eye contact.

Today, though, I “must” write about taking a second glance in another sense. Taking a second glance today also refers to moving your eyes from one display to another. For example, when you search on local.ch for a telephone number and then want to tap it on your phone’s keypad. Those who don’t have an exceptional memory will certainly need to take a second or even third look at the screen and then at the telephone – and in doing so, each time refocusing on the screen and locating the right set of numbers. That’s a pain, isn’t it? For sure! That’s why in the future with us at local.ch you can simply go to the detailed entry and move the mouse pointer over “Telephone” (this area now has a gray background), click there, and in a flash the telephone number appears in very large digits – voilà, entering the number becomes far faster and easier. True, we didn’t invent this all on our own, but we copied a good idea from Apple ;)

PS: When you no longer need the number in large digits, simply click elsewhere and it disappears again.

“Today’s lunch menu for half price!” or “Our summer sale starts tomorrow!” Recently, we started showing you news and special offers near you with our app. Starting today, you can also receive these offers without the need to run our app. In addition, we offer you further innovations in the latest version of our iPhone app.

Everyone has a favourite restaurant or shop. We love their great food, pleasant atmosphere or special offers. Now you can find out immediately when the latest fashion collection has arrived, when a sale starts or when an especially good deal goes on the menu. And for this, you don’t even have to open up the local.ch app any more. Instead, we send a push notification directly to your mobile phone. Go here to learn how to enable push messages on your mobile phone. Of course, only if you want to.

Here’s how it works:

• Search for your favourite business establishment in the local.ch app
• Make this business one of your favourites using the yellow asterisk in the upper right
• Now you receive a push notification each time your favourite business has a new special offer.

If you no longer want to receive such notifications, simply remove the asterisk and we’ll leave you alone. All these offers are, of course, still available to you as before in the overview (under “Near me”).

Improved maps

Besides push notifications, we have packed a few other features in the latest version. In particular, we have improved the maps. For instance, if you would like to search for bars close to you, we always show you the latest search results, even if you blow up the map section or scroll off the map. You can also return to your staring point with the small arrow in the upper right or use the compass. Be sure to take a look at the pins we use to show you the results on the map – they now move along with you, depending on the direction in which you are currently looking.

Many additional improvements

In addition to these major changes, we have made other refinements to the app.

• When you look for special offers, you can see exactly what the business is offering directly in the results list.
• The photos in the special offers now have a cool zoom function.
• Descriptions of special offers now include clickable links, e-mail addresses, telephone numbers and calendar entries.
• We’ve eliminated a few small nasty bugs and have even made the app a bit faster.

By the way, our coffee invitation is still good – if you drop by and visit us at our local.ch office in Zurich by tomorrow, we’ll be pleased to offer you a free cup of coffee.

You don’t have this app yet? Get it here: go to the download!

By train, it’s only about six hours from St. Moritz to Geneva. Your grandmother has invited you to lunch next Saturday at 12.30 p.m. to celebrate her 80th birthday. You can board the train in St Moritz at 5.36 a.m. and arrive in Geneva at 12.15 p.m. Of course, you don’t want to show up at your grandmother’s doorstep empty handed, and she is always especially happy about a bunch of gladiolas.

Of course, one option would be to buy the flowers on Friday evening. They’ll look more fresh though, if you don’t buy them until you reach Geneva. That’s now really easy with the new “What’s around the train station” function at sbb.ch. Once you have found your train connection, you can see a corresponding menu entry on the right side next to the train connections.

Find it easily – around the train station; here’s how it works

It’s possible to find much more than just flower shops – in addition you will see that restaurants, bars, cinemas, hair salons and even doctors and pharmacies close to train stations are only a click away.

By the way, this function is also available on a page optimised for mobile phones m.sbb.ch.