blog..com

Here at Gazelle we are constantly updating innovating and trying to anticipate our customers needs. Recently we added hundreds of Blu-ray and video game titles to our ever-growing catalog, and people have been responding.

How do we know what to add to our catalog?  Well, in this case it’s simple.  Blu-ray disc sales climbed to an all time high with the release of “The Dark Knight” this week. The Batman sequel apparently sold 600,000 Blu-ray copies on its release day this Tuesday, beating the previous record of 260,000 set by Iron Man over a month ago. Consumer research this year puts Blu-ray as one of the most highly requested holiday gifts among HDTV owners.

Lots of people buying Blu-ray discs today means they’ll be looking for an outlet once they’ve memorized all the lines in a few months.

Now, consider that analysts predict a 76% surge in Blu-ray player sales during 2009 and you don’t have to be Nostradamus to guess the next category addition on Gazelle…

If you are ever unfortunate enough to be upwind of the Agbobloshie dump in Accra, capital of the West African country of Ghana, you might want to wear a gas mask.  Will Ross, a BBC correspondent wrote a great piece earlier this month that shines a light on the practice of shipping e-waste to other countries. The BBC reports that Great clouds of acrid black smoke corrupt the air.  People are burning off the plastic coatings on computer cable to capture the copper.  Children maneuver through the dump looking to smash computer monitors to sell the metal inside them. It’s illegal, but unwanted computers from industrial countries arriving in Third World Countries are dumped, turning the water and earth into toxic swamps. Environmental journalist Mike Anane has been keeping tabs on this phenomenon.  Although the computers arriving in the Ghanese port of Tema are marked “usable second-hand goods,” Anane has found that only about 10 percent are functional.   “The rest go straight to Agbobloshie dump site and other dumps around the country where they contaminate ground water, surface water, the rivers and the streams.   And they all end up in the sea, and that’s where we get all the fish.” The United Nations estimates that 20 to 50 million tons of e-waste are produced yearly. And you know what – those e-dump mountains start one iPod, one computer, one cell phone at a time.  It starts with that Blackberry of yours that you don’t want anymore.  You might think, “I’m busy. If I throw the Blackberry into the trash, what difference will it make?” Multiply that one by hundreds and thousands of others, and the effect on the environment is tremendous. But now you have an alternative that’s just as easy as tossing your device into the trash.  You can send it to Gazelle.  We’ll promote the cycle of reuse by paying you for that gadget and reselling  it.  If your item is too old or in too poor condition for resale, we will make sure it is recycled responsibly—for free!

What does “responsible” mean?  Our recycling partners are based in the United States, and the items we send them to be broken down into parts do not leave the country.  And they do not end up in the Agbobloshie dump. You can make a difference and end what the environmental group Greenpeace calls “poisoning the poor.” And you might even make money doing it.  Be Green.  Get Green.  That’s Gazelle.

This week, the development team here that created Gazelle.com received a new mascot, sent to us by a fellow Boston area developer to congratulate us on our successful launch. We’d like to thank Wyatt Greene of MakeMeSustainable.com, another cool “green” company who is helping people realize an environmentally responsible and economically rewarding future. Their site also uses our current platform of choice, Ruby on Rails.

We had another exciting week, with a huge spike in traffic due to a Yahoo/US News and World Report link and a nice mention on the Today Show. We’d like to thank our hosting provider, EngineYard who helped us ramp up our capacity on short notice.

Finally, I’d like to give a well deserved shout out to our development team. They worked their butts off for the site launch and continue to keep gazelle.com running smoothly. Thanks to: Jason Wadsworth, our software architect, Kevin Kardian, our data architect, Graham Babbit, our front-end web developer, Dan Pickett, our director of engineering, Catherine Headen, our graphic designer, and Thos Niles, our product manager. We also had help from Brian Kaney and Eastern Suns with code development and Robin Dratch led QA efforts and managed a world-wide fleet of testers via our testing partner, uTest.  The team worked hard and smart and saw the sunrise on several marathon coding sessions that allowed us to launch on time with minimal downtime. What a team!

Gazelle.com also brought to you by: Lemmy, Radio Paradise, Red Bull, Moxie, the Upper Crust, and habenero hot sauce from Casa de Pedro.

It has only been 3 full days since we opened the doors on the new site, and the reaction so far has been incredible.

We are really grateful for the kind words everyone has written so far, and more than a little proud too.

It’s been tough to keep up with about 20 great online features from blogs like Mashable, TechCrunch, and Xconomy, mainstream news sites like cNet, Fortune Small Business, and US News, as well as TV coverage on ABC Ahead of the Curve and our own New England Cable News.

Not to mention all the tweets…

Seriously, after all the late nights working on this, it means the world to see such a positive response. Thank you.