As the recent interesst in British Company Studivz Ltd., which is, upto now at least, run by three students (employing roughly 50 people) currently leads to “Studivz” being No. 1 phrase in Technorati searches, lots of people start wondering what all this German (definitely not Dutch ;)) babbling is about.
To put it in a nutshell, one student named Ehssan Dariani saw facebook during his intern at spreadshirt in the US, saw it’s potential for the german and european market and founded Studivz Ltd. with another student and some external money; there are hints that his copycat, Studivz is indeed at least at the CSS level copied from facebook. Others claim this is purely by chance, since both used the same book on website design during development …
Recently, Studivz won the “Online Star 2006”, despite the fact that there are massive problems with site stability for several months now. See article on SPIEGEL online, Dariani blames the hoster for that, who in turn rejects that and claims that the software isn’t as capable as neccessary. Later on, Dariani reveals in the official Blog of Studivz that the software, written one year ago for some hundred concurrent users, does not cope well with several thousand concurrent users using the site today. (English translation via Google available.)
Dariani publishes strange Interviews on the Studivz company blog, the other company founders were found already to have grabbed domains of competitors and lately there was some fuzz about Dariani being the domain holder of voelkischerbeobachter.de and voelkischer-beobachter.de; currently redirecting somewhere else, these domains were allegedly used to invite to a Studivz-Party on 2006-07-15.
While currently the original content is not available in full, parts of it are leaking out. While Dariani claimed satirical intentions before, those site(s) seem to have shown something resembling the “Völkischer Beobachter”; see en.wikipedia.org or de.wikipedia.org … The image, when enlarged, features in the middle something resembling the logo of Studivz, as can be seen by overlaying the enlarged image with a 5% upscaled current logo. Still, it’s unclear whether this is a bad joke on Dariani/Studivz or if it’s one made by him.
More on karsten-wenzlaff.de/, pulse2.0, fimpern.de; German summaries at Customer of Hell and current issues at Rebellmarkt.
An not up-to-date article on Studivz in English from MSNBC is available as well.
blogdoch — jetzt wird zurückgeblogt
