Risking again of being accused of “sounding too enthusiastic” I want
to comment on what our team is doing:
Calle, our tireless future-super-surgeon, who also has the “petsicon gene”,
meaning he apparently doesn’t need to sleep and, despite having night- and
weekend-shifts all the time, produces marvellous content for us.
At the moment he is translating the content to English which Mike then
corrects to “native English”. This system works well and approximately 90%
of the content is already translated to English, “naturalized” and in the first
proofreading loop.
Mike, our US petsi and master of the Japanese language, is working fulltime
on the Japanese front-line, translating like a maniac, coordinating with the
proofreaders and other helping hands in Japan as well as reaching out into
his extensive network to find Japanese veterinarians, something that we can
report first successes as Mike managed to establish some connections, let’s
hope something good will come from that 
I expect this weekend to be fun, as Calle will join us here in Berlin and we
plan to party “the petsicon way” because I think everybody in the team has
been so focused on working almost all the time that we forgot to take necessary
breaks and socialize but our team bonding weekend will do us good, we are
also planning on taking some nice group shots, so check our Team page for
even prettier pictures of us 
So as I said before, the petsies are a tight team, I even believe the BEST TEAM,
and WE WILL NOT LOSE TO ANYONE whether they’re from Silicon Valley,
Napa Valley or Death Valley for that matter!!
So here’s the conclusion and challenge to other companies:
BRING IT ON!!!
We are tremendously thankful to all you people who at the
moment are helping us with your advice and your experience.
It is a huge boost to the team that so many people believe
in our concept and in us.
We are currently finishing the fully translated Japanese
version and are at the moment actively looking for
“petsicon ambassadors” or “petsibassadors“ as we call
them:
We want win the most active and enthusiastic members
of the pet community to make our product even better! As “petsicon ambassadors/ petsibassadors” users will get free premium accounts (once we have those) and will
be able to test and review our newest unreleased
features that are still in development and therefore actively
contribute to and possibly change the direction petsicon
is heading.
So if you are actively engaged in your pet community and
want to get this exciting opportunity to get access to the
newest features our team came up with and therefore
help us shape this site, by all means send us a message
and get in touch with the petsies at petsibassy (a t) petsicon.de .
In other news we recently consulted with some really
helpful people who advised us on how to scale our service
and gave us an insight into the online advertising business.
Other people gave us hints on how to get users to our site
and what kind of questions potential investors will ask us
(Luckily we’ve already prepared that but will be able to convince
even more with even better answers and ideas)
So I’ll conclude this post with a famous quote from the movie
“Wayne’s world”:
“Petsi on, Garth!”- “Petsi on, Wayne!”
(ok, it’s slightly altered )
This week we worked hard on modifying and completing our business
plan, writing applications for competitions, producing screencasts
of our wonderful new petsicon and finding people to collaborate or
maybe hire (once we have money).
So with this finished and the applications sent we can once
again focus our attention to the really important things in life:
the development of petsicon
Last wednesday we started playing around with our Japanese version!!
I don’t want to brag but we must be the BEST team, I want to see
another company banging out a Japanese version of their site
in less than two weeks!!
Here you can see the first screenshots:
Everything basic is translated and our Japanese petsies
started testing immediately!
If you are native Japanese and want to help us, drop us a line and
we’ll give you a login and test account for the Japanese version!!
We have come up with a pretty clever idea on how to publish our
English version earlier so expect a preliminary version to come
out in the course of the next week.
Furthermore we’ve successfully extended our team of petsies!
David Michael Ramirez II., our Japanese literature PhD from Seattle
and Zhou Shaodan, our linguist from the University of Tokyo immediately
started with our new project, the Japanese version of the petsicon
and are also actively searching for collaborators in both Japan and
the US. They have already managed to find some English and Japanese
proofreaders and I am confident that we will find an English and a
Japanese veterinarian shortly.
We hope to get a preliminary Japanese version out by the
middle of august, so stay tuned!!
