Relopia
Business Meets Pleasure

The name

Relopia is the utopian online world in the internet where you can relate to the people who are important to you.
Relate+Utopia=Relopia.

A couple of definitions for the word "relate":
1. to tell about something in a descriptive way
2. to have or establish a reciprocal relationship; interact
3. to establish a connection to someone
4. to react in response / sympathise: I can really relate to this web2.0 stuff.
A couple of definitions for the word "utopia"
1. a world in which everything and everyone works in perfect harmony.
2. any visionary system of social perfection.

Put these all together and you have Relopia.

The philosophy

Relopia is a socialising network platform.
Relopia is a place that exists around your thoughts, ideas and energy and when you share them with other people you can see that in Relopia 1+1 is more than 2.

Business Meets Pleasure
The slogan business meets pleasure portrays that Relopia can be used for both work and leisure. In the non-stop world we are living in today the boundaries between friends and pure colleagues is blurring as you spend more time at work or at work related events. While there may be some people you work with who remain in a pure professional context there are large portion with whom you will also go to an after office event or share some hobby with. After all, you’re spending more and more time with them – so it would be a shame if you didn’t actually like them!

The Aim
Unlike other platforms the aim within Relopia is not to have the biggest network and "collect contacts" but to deepen the relationship with the contacts you already have. Of course we don’t stop you getting to know new people and Relopia supports you in this area too.

Doing Business
When doing work related tasks in Relopia it’s like doing all of your business on the golf course as compared to other networking platforms where it feels like you’re stuck in a stuffy meeting room.

Communication
We realized that there are many different needs for different styles in communication which should be available directly from your browser and possible with all of your contacts:

- the normal email communication which can of course be used to contact people outside of Relopia. Nothing special to say here – keep on using email like you have done for years – but now you can also consider using the other forms of communicationavailable at your fingertips.

- real time chat for either flippant gossiping or getting an answer back quickly without needing to install a new application on your desktop and passing through corporate firewalls.

- conference chat rooms for brain storming or again extreme gossiping with a group of your contacts.

- shout for a less in your face discussion, kind of a cross between forums and a personal blog but private amongst the people you know and trust. When people have time they can browse through the shouts from their contacts and write a new one themselves. The most common uses of shouts are to announce personal news, have a general discussion about a topic that interests you or get help on a personal or professional problem – and all with the people important to you.

Address Book
In order to keep in contact we think the address book is an important part of the basics of Relopia – and of course letting those who are in Relopia update their own contact details is a must. Otherwise it’s a full time job trying to keep a track of changing email addresses, mobile phone numbers, companies and even home addresses as we all suffer / benefit from our global economy. Of course, for those of your contacts who do not join Relopia you can also add their contact information – but here you have to keep it up-to-date.

Calendar
The Relopia calendar contains of course all of the functionality you’ve come to expect from your desktop PIM.
This is of course essential but its also not enough.
The real aim of the Relopia calendar is to move away from being a purely scheduling machine and towards it being a record of your life. That’s why we added the event blog. Each event can have an associated event blog which any of the participants can start
– in order for you to understand how we think you can use the event blog consider the two extremes:

Event blog for a business meeting:
slides in advance of the meeting can be posted maybe with additional agenda information. Once the meeting is finished the draft minutes can be posted where feedback can be provided from all participants and a reviewed agreed upon version finally posted with action items or other associated documentation.

Event blog for your stand at a conference:
for example imagine you had a stand at the next macworld conference you could send your invite to your customers via the Relopia calendar, start off the blog with directions on how to find you,
maybe attaching a diagram of your location and a photo of the stand. You could even post your latest white papers to the blog. Afterwards your customers could ask questions about specifics over this blog.
Event blog for a leisure event:
in advance of the meeting there can be discussions about how to get there, who’s getting there when, which shoes+handbag you are going to wear and then after the event you can discuss informally about what everyone
who went thought about, maybe post photos or videos or even parts of the DJ set. This means that at a later date you can always find all of the photos for an event with a direct connection to when it happened and who went.

Event blog of your life:
here for example you can post the latest photos of your kids and simply send the link of the event blog around to friends. Again, it means that later you have your photos chronologically sorted in your calendar.
So now you can find documents and photos not only based on their name or associated tags but also with the context of time! Gone are the days of searching through a subtree of folders on your PC, looking for photos friends sent to you in some mishmash
of mail folders or trying to work out based on the date of the file in flickr when this happened.
While of course we want Relopians to use Relopia we mostly hope that you can use the calendar to organize events in the real world as nothing can replace face to face communication.

Essentially we are helping you to get your life back. Rather than having a scattering of accounts across the online world we want to put the most important parts within one application – to save you time and hassle and leave you time to enjoy those priceless moments.

Mobility
And more and more we will be trying to unify mobile and internet communication as while everyone seems to now have both email accounts and mobile phones many people don’t read their emails daily but read their SMS text messages within a couple of seconds of receiving them.
The start of our support here are SMS reminders for events including the possibility to send reminders to other people – especially those amongst your contacts who are infamous for forgetting meetings! But like I said this is just the beginning.

Physical location
More people are doing more travelling and know more people. So its almost impossible to remember to let all of your contacts know when you are visiting somewhere. Often trips are unplanned and can be rather sudden.
In order to help you let people know where you are Relopia supports you in announcing not whether you are online but also in which city / country you are.
This is also helpful if you are in a different timezone and don’t want to be woken at 03:00 in the morning by a friend who wants to chat about last nights TV. ;-)

The browser

The aim is to provide all of this functionality within a normal browser. And also to provide as much as possible online and also when you’re offline.
The browser is replacing / has replaced the operating system as the important piece in the IT pie. Everyone knows how to use it. Everyone has one.

Which browser should I use?
Well, I guess as the team who developed Relopia are heavily into internet usage themselves we have of course
being using the superior firefox browser initially and then ensuring that everything works in internet explorer
- which due to its inferior architecture and proprietary flavour is sometimes more difficult than you could ever imagine.
So as we of course try to make everything work with both browsers if you have to use IE then we’d recommend you use at least IE V7
but as we see from google (need a link here) maybe sometime in the future there will be a feature which only works in firefox.
But my personal view is that I wouldn’t feel safe browsing with any version of IE; its like walking around the streets with a wad
of money stashed or your passport visibly in your back pocket – waiting for somebody to steal what’s valuable to you.

What’s coming soon:

We haven’t stopped working yet! We have a todo list longer than you can imagine. ;-)

And coming up soon will be:
- synchronising with your mobile and outlook
- "All about tags"

The fun has only just begun!

Web2.0

Web2.0 is maybe becoming worn out as a term but the way we within the Relopia team understand this is really people 2.0.
It’s all about the people and not about the technology. Enabling people to relate in new forms.
Within the Relopia team we have fought over the last 18 months to make a rich web2.0 experience and I think we have finally made it.

Opening the doors:
One of the important changes within web2.0 is the paradigm shift in instead of trying to lock users to your web application to move to opening it all up. An example of what is meant here is that although Relopia provides its own chat application there is also support within the address book to fire off chat via external applications such as skype. Also of course we want more and more people to join Relopia but we try to let non-Relopians access in a read only mode as much as you choose to let them know – e.g. the event blogs can be viewed by anyone who receives the link. And you can invite non Relopians to events and also find out if they accepted or not.

ParsGroup Informationstechnologie GmbH
Lerchenfeldergürtel 43
1160 Vienna/Austria

Homepage:http://www.relopia.com/
E-Mail: contactform@relopia.com
Relopia is a registered Trademark of the ParsGroup Informationstechnologie GmbH.

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