ChessCube has launched a great new service that offers you as a chess player, chess blogger, coach, retailer, club operator and so forth the ability to have their own branded chess application on their website, for free. As ChessCube’s Community Manager, I’ve been watching the project develop and grow over time, and was massively excited when the email announcing the ChessCube Business Partner offer was sent to our user base as well as external coaches. From all accounts the feedback and interest has been wonderful thus far!

Wanting a piece of the action myself, I went ahead and signed up to become a Business Partner. Setting ChessCube up on my private blog was extremely easy. Even as an end-user with fairly minimal knowledge of HTML coding, I was able to embed the website onto my own private site in less than 3 minutes. Registration with ChessCube took less than 1 minute, pasting the code given to me by ChessCube into my webpage took seconds, and uploading the new web page to my server took all of 1 minute. And that’s it, I refreshed my page, and there it was – a great chess site running on my own personal blog. Installing ChessCube vs writing a blog post on my site: Writing a blog post with Tumblr is harder, and takes longer. ChessCube makes setting their site up easy, and can be done in quicker than most can finish a blitz chess game!

ChessCube running on my own private blog

The features of the ‘Powered by ChessCube’ solution:

• A branded chess application for your website
• Offer private rooms for your users to meet & chat
• Run your own private or public online tournaments
• Generate ongoing revenue

Find out how easy becoming a ChessCube Business Partner is for yourself. Head over to http://www.chesscube.com/b2b to get started.

Regards,
Sean
ChessCube Community Manager

Flash 10.2 is a key part of the Adobe move towards a faster lightweight flash that leverages hardware acceleration. Early indications are that performance is massively enhanced. Flash is also on a critical path to get onto Android and other devices. This is something we at ChessCube are very excited about and support.

Immediately after the release of Flash Player 10.2, ChessCube noticed that users’ Adobe plug-in was crashing. It was particularly bad for our Chrome browser customers as Chrome automatically updates users to the latest version of Flash under the hood.

The diagram below shows the time online of people on our website. Some of our users play online and that is the part that uses Flash.

Just after the first week we can see a divergence of Chrome users as they start to spend less and less time on our site compared to the other browsers, who are, we are certain, on Flash 10.1.

The diagram above shows the length of time users spend online within specific versions of Adobe.

At first we assumed that there were changes to the Adobe system that were not backward compatible. Comprehensive searching on the Internet uncovered that other sites were having issues, but most were not. There were some who advised switching off hardware acceleration on the client – although this has no effect for our users.

The ChessCube tech team embarked on an internal project to replicate the crashed browser in the smallest amount of code and then to see if we could work around the error in Flash 10.2. Download the code here.

Ultimately our team realized that the cause of our crashing was very obscure. It is related to the use of a specific combination of rest arguments and the switch-case statement.

We added a simple try-catch element and, for magical reasons, this prevents the Adobe Plug-in Crash. We released our new version on 23 February, and immediately we see that Flash 10.2 is now working beautifully for ChessCube users.

Feel free to distribute our code to any website that is having a similar problem.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

ChessCube sponsors the 2011 Online Commonwealth Chess Championships

Cape Town, South Africa – 18 February 2011

ChessCube, the world leader in online chess tournaments, with over 20,000 tournaments and 5 million games played per month, will partner with the organizers of the 2011 Commonwealth Chess Championships. ChessCube.com will run an online pre-event where three lucky winners will gain free entry, free accommodation at the venue’s Peermont Mondior hotel, as well as $1,500 in cash towards their flights and other expenses.

Graham Jurgensen, the convenor of the 2011 Commonwealth & South African Open Chess Championships, which will be held in Johannesburg South Africa from June 25th through July 3rd, said: “We are very excited to be partnering with ChessCube on this world-first online event. The real-world event will be held at the beautiful Emperors Palace Hotel Casino & Convention Resort, and the online event will give three lucky participants free entry and accommodation as well as expenses.”

The online tournament series is aimed at three groups: above 2000 players, 1700 to 2000 and below 1700 rated players. Each series will have a round robin final with eight finalists in each.

“Anyone in the world can enter the online event”, said ChessCube CEO Mark Levitt. “The Commonwealth Championships will be held in conjunction with the South African Open – and players who are not from commonwealth countries are still eligible for all cash prizes”. We are expecting a massive turnout for this online event and we would not be surprised if this breaks all known online tournament world records.”

ChessCube also sponsored the 2009 South African Open, where titled players participated from a second venue in Melbourne, Australia via www.ChessCube.com. This event made world chess history when FIDE, the world chess federation, worked with ChessCube to ensure that the Internet games, were officially rated, setting a precedent that could see tournaments using this technology in the future.

Useful links

ChessCube website: www.chesscube.com
Like us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ChessCube
Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/ChessCube
Tournament website: http://www.chessa.co.za/tournament_websites/CWCC2011/index.html
High Resolution Logo (PNG): http://www.chesscube.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/ChessCubeLogo.png

Contact information

ChessCube(Pty) Ltd.
Contact: Mark Levitt (CEO)
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=7230957&trk=tab_pro
Office: +27 21 555 2019
mark@chesscube.com

About ChessCube

ChessCube (www.chesscube.com) was launched in May 2007 from its Cape Town headquarters. It has since grown into a community of over 1.4m avid chess players, and continues to grow at a rapid pace. ChessCube is an innovative, live chess platform, focused on online tournaments and live playing within a social community. Mark Levitt, founder and CEO of ChessCube, is four times South African Chess Champion. ChessCube’s investors include InVenfin, Vinny Lingham and Michael Leeman.

For more information or images, please contact Mark Levitt (mark@chesscube.com).

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Hi Cubers!

We’ve launched ChessCube V5.09, and we have been listening to the feedback from our community – and this release offers great improvements:

• ‘Sit & Go’ tournaments: These start as soon as enough people have entered – no more waiting around!
• New tournament list: This makes it even easier to find an exciting event to play.
• Play rated games for 0 Cubits: That’s right – rated games are now free!
• Wagering amounts: These have been amended to reflect the most popular values.
• Improved level system: It’s now even easier to unlock the full ChessCube experience. More Info

The all new Tournament List out with ChessCube V5.09, including Sit & Go Tournaments

We hope you enjoy these great improvements, and look forward to hearing your feedback.

Best Regards,
The ChessCube Team

Hi Cubers!

Exciting news coming out of the ChessCube Labs today! With today’s launch of v5.06, you will now find our new in-application store – containing even more backgrounds to make your ChessCube interface more vibrant, plus fantastic chess piece sets to make your playing experience even more exciting.

ChessCube's in-application store

Together with the in-application store, you can also purchase Cubit bundles from within ChessCube. It’s now even simpler and easier to top up your Cubits balance, right from within ChessCube!

Get Cubits from within ChessCube!

We’re really excited to welcome you into the new in-application store, and hope you have fun personalizing your ChessCube experience.

See you soon!
The ChessCube Team

Hi Cubers!

We’re excited to let you know that ChessCube V5.04 has been launched, and with it comes a a few great updates:

Minimize your Friends Bar:

The Friends Bar can now be minimized at any time while on ChessCube. With the Friends Bar minimized, you still have access to the Tournaments, Watch, Play, Chat, Shop and Leaderboard buttons. You can also show the friends bar in its normal size at any time to see how your friends are progressing through the levels and ratings.

Choose to hide or show your Friends Bar

Bigger chessboard:

With your Friends Bar minimized, you can now play on the biggest chessboard we’ve ever had on ChessCube. When watching a live game in progress, sit back and enjoy an even bigger board in full screen mode!

Unified user and profile settings:

We’ve unified all your profile, interface, playing, and community settings in the new “Settings” box. To find this box, simply click on the cogwheel above the Tournament and Watch button.

We hope you enjoy this release!

Regards,
The ChessCube Team

Well, we finished off July with over 640,000 registered users. Almost at the 1 million mark! Almost

We also keep on improving ChessCube. We’re now on version 3.96 (beta) – and we hope you’ve noticed the improved platform. Fewer disconnects (we hate those too) and faster games. And, it’s gonna keep getting better!

We also launched two new article sections on our blog: Andrew Martin’s regular puzzles (a great way to improve your game), and updates from the WCC.

In July, we were also involved in a chess world-first – FIDE rated online matches in a real world tournament!

So, as we settle into a wintry Cape Town, keep an eye on what is happening on ChessCube in August.