Christmas presents seem to come early this year. Two weeks ago we were awarded Best Technical Innovation at the SIME conference in Stockholm, last week we were announced to be on the Red Herring Global 200 100 list, and yesterday the World Economic Forum selected us a Technology Pioneer 2008 alongside Wikipedia, Clearwire and Yandex.ru.

We’re honored, we’re charmed, and we couldn’t be happier. While recognitions like these don’t in and of themselves resolve issues like those we’ve had the past couple of days, they – together with great user feedback – definitely keep up the spirits in Warsaw, Malmö and Amsterdam and makes the late night crunches more bearable.

See you in Davos come January!

We’re experiencing some database issues and the plugin and web site are temporarily down. We’ll post an update here as soon as it is resolved.

Update: (Tuesday 17:00 CET) This problem was more serious than we thought. There are corrupted entries in our database and while fixing this it is likely that some data will get lost.

We apologize for any inconvenience this downtime causes our testers. We are working hard at resolving the problem but it may take a little longer.

Update: (Wednesday 18:00 CET) We’re back. Hopefully all issues were resolved as of now. It looks like data is intact up to sometime early Monday afternoon. Unfortunately we could not save the data entered during the later part of Monday. We are sorry for that and for the disruption of our service.

As most of the active beta testers will have discovered by now through the Firefox auto-update service, we released a major upgrade of the plugin on Monday evening, taking us to version 0.50.

A few visible highlights of the release:

• Stability! As those of you who have used the plugin know – and as originally reported – the plugin has had a longstanding issue of often losing connection and stopping to show roses. This has been solved and I’m happy to see the web sprinkled with roses again.


• Several core performance enhancements, including a much faster rendering of roses on photos.


• New status and error messages for better debugging.


• Improved auto-complete of names (which will get better yet soon)

The new plugin is basically a full rewrite and for those of you who are interested in the underlying solution, we have started rendering the drop-down naming window as an iframe served from polarrose.com. This allows much greater flexibility with regards to adding new features to the plugin by simply changing the corresponding pages server-side.

(For a more in-depth overview read the separate post by my colleague Stefan Arentz.)

Next up will be the Internet Explorer plugin, the first matching using the data that has been accumulated by our beta users, and finally our APIs – two of the three will be coming in time for Christmas.

Please report any issues through the feedback page or feel free to comment directly on this post.

Finally, thanks to Mo Jo for leading this rewrite and the rest of the crew in Warsaw, Amsterdam and Malmö for making this happen.

PS. We’ll be adding more beta users as soon as the new plugin has proven itself in the wild over the next days.