It's three days to Chinese New Year and part of the Koolred team has disappeared back to their hometown and all for the festivities.

The other half is holding the fort here at the Koolred office, just to make sure everything is moo-ving along smoothly.

Whether you are celebrating or not, we hope all Redsters is enjoying the festivity of ushering the Year of the Ox and the long holidays.  Remember to share your photos on Koolred later! We want to see photos of Chinese New Year's Eve family reunion dinner, yummy cookies, your angpow stash, your friends' visiting, fireworks, you stuffing yourself silly, or evidence of Uncle Chong getting tipsy too soon on the first day of festivity while Auntie Lily nags away.

That sort of stuff.

You can blog about it too.

Have a smashing Chinese New Year and be safe!

As the title suggest, this week has shown much changes to Koolred. First, was the little touches like the Updates Feed and Koolgifts as highlighted in the previousblog post.

Now, we've given our homepage a little makeover.


So.What do you think of all the new changes we introduced this week? You like the new homepage layout?

Of course, we're not done yet. There will be more tweaks ahead.

Last Friday, we have emailed you Redsters a Feedback Questionnaire to fill out and send it back to us. The feedback we get from you will help us improve Koolred for you. We hope you can spare 5 minutes of your time to do this. If you didn't receive the questionnaire in your inbox, please email us at team@koolred.com and we will send you a copy. We truly appreciate your help.

Do get a feel of the new changes on Koolred and share your thoughts with us. We'd love to hear from you.

If you've been on Koolred since late yesterday afternoon, you might noticed that something looked a little different on your Me! page.

Did you see the little touches we've added to that page?

First off is the most visible: The Updates Feed.

Next Monday, we'll be ushering in the Ox for this Chinese New Year. This year's will see the Earth Ox, a hardworking animal in the Chinese zodiac, also known for its patience, dependable, logical and capable of enduring hardship in trying times without complaint.

Trying times, indeed. So this year is not the year to rest your laurels, the Earth Ox is really going to make everyone work hard to stay stable and secure. There's a tough road ahead.

Though none of the Koolred team are either feng shui experts or know much about astrology, we do foresee plenty of hard work trying to fine tune Koolred for you.

All Redsters must have received our email, a call for feedback sent out last Friday to your registered email. The email came attached with two questionnaire documents: one in English, the other in Bahasa Malaysia. All you have to do is answer 6 easy questions that would only take 5 minutes of your time.

The reason we sent out this feedback questionnaire is to find out what you, the user, think of our site. Koolred is only a little over a month's old since it went 'live' with its alpha release. It's not perfect and still under development. Your feedback will shed light on things we might have missed or could have done better. We would like to improve more of the site before it eventually went into beta release (still in testing phase, but open to public).

So we look forward to your response soon. We have received a handful of feedback so far and hope more Redsters would participate. If you did not receive the questionnaire in your email, please do not hesitate to inform us through the Contact Us page (as linked on the footer). We will email you one soonest possible.

Our thanks to those who already made time to complete the questionnaire and returned to us. We appreciate your help.

There are strangers in the office today, armed with hammers and tools. They knocked, smashed and tore. Debris everywhere. Well, OK, almost.

But oh, the noise! The drilling and hammering...



A renovation is in progress at the Koolred office space today. The Koolred team currently takes up one corner of an office floor, sharing the space with another small company. Soon, one more company will be moving in and hence, the renovation. Their renovation.

So what happens to the Koolred team?

The pleasant news is, we'll be moving to a new office space soon. We're ecstatic! Our own place. Ours.

We've been scouring around the web for inspiration for office interior design (We envy quite a number of offices around the world with such fun interiors like Google, Playlab and Yahoo!). Should we have bean bags in the office? A mini basketball net to shoot hoops from our desks? A coffee machine to brew our own in the morning? A floor-to-ceiling whiteboard for our many scribbles and occasional graffiti?

What do you think? Do you have a cool idea for the Koolred office? We are open to suggestions.

Oh yes you can. This is one part of the customization you can do with your Koolred account. Honestly, nothing beats a simple, easy-to-remember website address or URL (Uniform Resource Locator).

Upon signup on Koolred, our system automatically generates a unique URL for you, which looks lengthy with its alpha-numerical combination. Too difficult to memorize and tell your friends all about it, really.

A web address should roll out of your tongue with ease and makes you proud to say it. It makes a great contact info to give out to people, to tell them where they can find you online.

So once you've signed up, head on to My Profile to customize your URL. Here's how:

Step #1: First, go to your Me! (1) page and click My Profile (2) as shown in the image below.

Step #2: At My Profile, select Account Settings (3). From there, you will see the Profile Settings page.



Step #3: Go to Set Koolred URL (4) as shown above and type in a unique name of your choice in the box field given (5).

Step #4: Remember to click the Save button below the page to save your changes. Your new URL will take effect immediately.



Simple, isn't it?

Oh, by the way, once you set your personal URL on Koolred, it's fixed to your account. You cannot change or edit it after it's been set and saved into our system. So think it through thoroughly before you do so.

Seriously. Do you want to tell a cute girl you like to go to your website at www.koolred.com/imahorndog? We don't think so either (It may be funny at first. But in the long run, it may not be such a good idea). The cute girl or your mom may not be impressed.

Choose wisely and customize it before somebody else takes up your cool URL today!

If you have already done so, bravo. Now go explore Koolred and have fun meeting new friends.

The world returns to normalcy today as everyone is back at work after a long holiday; it's back to school for the kids as well.

It's Day Five of 2009 and we are sure most of us are still struggling to get back into the groove of things, the daily routine of juggling work/school, home and keeping everything together.

Then again, there are also those who are still in the holiday mood as another New Year celebration is in the horizon: Chinese New Year, that is. Come end of this month - or January 26 and 27, to be exact - the Year of the Ox will enter as the Rat will step aside. That's like only 3 weeks away!

Happy 2009, Redsters!

Today is just the second day of 2009 and most of us are still recovering from the New Year's Eve partying in 2008. We hope you Redsters had a smashing celebration wherever you were then.

For those living in Taiwan, South and North Korea, New Zealand, Mauritius, Romania and Russia, today is still a public holiday. Lucky you, if you're still on your break off work until next Monday. As to the rest of us, it's back to work today.

Yep. The Koolred Team (well, half of it anyway) are back at our desks to ensure the site goes smoothly for everyone.

As mentioned in the previous post, we would like to get feedback on Koolred from all of you. Feel free to share your thoughts!

This new year, the Koolred Team resolved to improve Koolred in many ways and bring great new fun things to all Redsters. So keep your eyes peeled to this blog for more updates.

Enjoy the weekend!