Blogs

Bucking the trend of customer inconvenience, some savvy entrepreneurs have carved out a lucrative niche for themselves in the online food industry by reinstating consumer convenience as King.

Repetition is the enemy of creativity. How often have you begun the day with a grand vision for progress and change, only to end it with the nagging feeling that you’ve done much but achieved little? Time to get inspired.

Are you sick of waiting for the future to deliver on its promises? We let the boffins get away with announcing stuff, taking our money and then hiding. Our generation X and Y attention spans mean we forget to hold them accountable. Oh look over there, something shiny...

I was reading 'designing for the social web' by Joshua Porter for my UXbookclub Sydney meeting a couple of months ago. It opens with a quote...

HassleMe.co.uk is a simple internet service that allows you to enter a recurring message to yourself and set the time intervals between reminders. For example, you may choose to receive a reminder email every day to "Do some exercise" or to be asked every six months: "How many people want to buy your business?"

HassleMe.co.uk is a simple internet service that allows you to enter a recurring message to yourself and set the time intervals between reminders. For example, you may choose to receive a reminder email every day to "Do some exercise" or to be asked every six months: "How many people want to buy your business?"

Ben Kaufman, who also founded mophie and kluster, is back with a new variation on NameThis: quirky. The premise is this: entrepreneurs and creative people in general are bubbling with far more product ideas than they can possibly pursue. Consequently, these ideas end up dormant or exploited by someone else. Described by Kaulfman as a "social product development company", quirky invites users to submit their product ideas for US$99 each - this ensures that only the best ideas are lodged. The quirky community selects one product from the pool of submitted ideas every seven days. From there, the community (known as "influencers") weigh in by voting, rating and influencing other people's product ideas.

Forget "Intel Inside". The world's biggest manufacturer of microprocessors has a new tagline: "Sponsors of Tomorrow". Intel's new three-year advertising campaign kicked off in May with the launch of a thoughtful new website, viral video ads and interactive display advertising in New York's Times Square and other branding hotspots around the globe.

Forget "Intel Inside". The world's biggest manufacturer of microprocessors has a new tagline: "Sponsors of Tomorrow". Intel's new three-year advertising campaign kicked off in May with the launch of a thoughtful new website, viral video ads and interactive display advertising in New York's Times Square and other branding hotspots around the globe.

There are lots of smart online tools for new music discovery (Pandora, last.fm, jango and imeem come to mind - most of which have become quite familiar with legal representatives of the music labels). But the idea of comprehensively aggregating the online listening and networking behaviour of users is a breakthrough.

A few months back, Matthews teamed up with software developer Shaun Ervive to turn the Deck of Secrets guides into iPhone applications.

The winning websites and digital campaigns in this year's Webby Awards - dubbed the "Oscars for the Internet" - were announced last night.

The idea of locking a bunch of creative people in a room until they have hammered out a plan for a new business is not new. In fact, it's been done at Mixer events around the world for a number of years. But the concepts - which tends to engender a form of Stockholm Syndrome in entrepreneurs held hostage by market problems - always seems to churn out interesting formative business. They might not always go on to become the next Google, but the process illustrates the power of focused collaboration.

The real value in this new digital media landscape rests with networks and the ability to extract what is interesting and useful from the cacophony created online by pornographers, pontificators and penny-stock pushers. Last August, US business magazine BusinessWeek lifted the lid on Business Exchange, a social media initiative that it had been developing for two years.

This week, Gizmag launched The Mobiler, a sister site covering all things mobile. With the release of Apple's iPhone, Research In Motion's Blackberry Storm, Google's Android project and other cutting edge products, it's safe to say that mobile is hot right now.

While Rentoid contains the everyday items you'd expect to see listed (chainsaws, ladders, laptop computers, air conditioners, etc.) there are also some deliciously oddball items. You can rent an island, sports cars, private jets, a unicycle, a driveway, a full-size wrestling ring, an R2D2 projector, even a wife (listed in the "antique" category).

While Rentoid contains the everyday items you'd expect to see listed (chainsaws, ladders, laptop computers, air conditioners, etc.) there are also some deliciously oddball items. You can rent an island, sports cars, private jets, a unicycle, a driveway, a full-size wrestling ring, an R2D2 projector, even a wife (listed in the "antique" category).

Shanghai. You would think that in China - with its growing power base, its population of more than 1.4bn people and its status as a...

Shanghai. You would think that in China - with its growing power base, its population of more than 1.4bn people and its status as a...