Hamey

   If you need that little hit to see if your idea is viable, a new ongoing competition backed by Advanta Bank called Ideablob has just launched and might be able to help.  The site lets aspiring entrepreneurs and small business owners share and compare ideas and compete for a monthly user voted $10,000 prize for the best idea.  Advanta claim that launching Ideablob is:"Supporting and providing service to small businesses ...

At the recent TechCrunch40 conference New Zealand startup Ponoko caused a stir (and managed to pull 1 million hits to their site in under 24 hours).  It is a fabulous business proposition: a matchmaking service for designers, manufacturers and consumers.  Put simply, if you are a designer (and we are talking industrial here) you can get your ideas (jewellery, coffee tables, whatever) made by a convenient manufacturer somewhere ...

How do you make a social network successful? Girls. An acquaintance of mine from China mentioned a curious (but logical) phenomenon in Chinese social networks.  The developers openly market them almost exclusively for girls, knowing that the guys will follow.  After all, looking at it from a evolutionary perspective we know that women are far more social beings than men, and we know that men tend to gravitate to ...

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is taking Google to court over failing to distinguish between organic search results and sponsored links. The case is arguing against Google's pay-per-click AdSense program. The claim is that Trading Post (auto trader) violated Trade Practices by using competitor names "Kloster Ford" and "Charlestown Toyota" in the title of their sponsored links. This has been fought in various other countries, usually with ...

Google have announced an acquisition deal of Californian company Postini for $625m. This makes it the third largest acquisition for Google second to DoubleClick and YouTube. Postini has 10 million users worldwide and specialises in "message security, archiving, encryption, and policy enforcement". This would suggest a long term play for Google, as they move into the email corporate sector against heavyweights Microsoft and IBM. Google ...

Apple have kicked off their Worldwide Developers Conference with the usual flurry of announcements to surround it: New Apple website It has been a long time since I remember seeing any aesthetic changes to the Apple website, and it looks stunning now. Their old site was looking a bit dated. Check it out at www.apple.com. I particularly like this page, fantastic design, it really feels alive ...

There has been a fair deal of speculation about Joost and criticism that their content is not up to scratch. Is everyone forgetting they are in a selective beta? Obviously they aren't going to spend a whole lot of time and money sourcing cool content to throw straight in, now. I imagine they would be more concerned about making sure the software actually works, especially ...

Australian blog-to-email service Zookoda has been acquired by PayPerPost for an undisclosed amount. Zookoda was started in May 2006 and went up for sale in September 2006. With 10,000 bloggers sending emails to 2.3 million people, the numbers speak for themselves. PayPerPost has the controversial business model of paying bloggers to write about specific things. There has been a lot of talk about whether this will corrupt the ...

British Airways have a history of petty arguments but none as lame as this. The Bond film Casino Royale has been edited for BA flights so that Richard Branson's 2 second cameo is cut out and Virgin Atlantic planes are disguised. Why, you ask? Well according to a BA spokesman, "We want to ensure they contain no material that might upset our customers". ...

Apple has announced (see below) that Leopard will not be released until October after developers had to be used on polishing up the iPhone, which is one track for late June. Tradeoff is fine with me, bring on the iPhone! Apple Statement iPhone has already passed several of its required certification tests and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned. We can’t wait until customers get ...