Half-Geek

from A to B for free

It was almost a year ago that I took an opportunity to congratulate my good friend Espen and his partner Brian for their success in getting their new online rental car relocation business Transfercar up and running.

I was having a chat with Espen the other day and the good news is that Transfercar is progressing nicely. Their new site was only launched recently and it is already helping people find cheap rental car deals across the country every day.

Trnasfercar proves to me that with the right idea, there is still a whole bunch of opportunity for online startups in New Zealand.

silverstripe getting traction

Just a quick post today as Xmas party commitments are starting to kick in. After seeing quite a bit of Silverstripe in the press lately, I wanted to publicly show my support for Siggy, Tim, Sam and their team down in Wellington.

Silverstripe is leading the way in the field of 'new breed' open source CMS (Content management systems) using PHP5. I had the pleasure of working with these guys back in 2005 when Silverstripe was yet to be opened up. It's a great CMS and I am absolutely positive that these guys have a huge future.

According to Deloitte, Silverstripe is the 113th fastest growing technology business in the Asia Pac region. However, the most impressive of their feats for 2007 has to be their inclusion in the Google Highly Open Participation Contest.

Keep an eye on Silverstripe, especially if you want a robust, open source CMS! I have included a great interview with Siggy (Sigurd Magnusson) below-

hulu and on demand tv content

My invite to join the private beta of Hulu finally came through today. For those of you that are unaware of what hulu is all about....

"Hulu's ambitious and never-ending mission is to help you find and enjoy the world's premium content when, where and how you want it. We hope to provide you with the web's most comprehensive selection of premium programming across all genres and formats – television shows, feature films, clips, and more. Additionally, we want to give you more choices of when and where you can enjoy your favorite programming, while creating innovative experiences that let you watch and participate in online video in new and exciting ways."

This arrival of this new service is all thanks to NBC universal and News Corp. The cool thing about hulu is the definitely the quality and timeliness of the video content available. Whilst most of us have become used to the grainy, segmented uploads of TV shows and content on youtube, it is nice to see the big players in TV finally coming to the party and giving users what we always wanted- TV on demand online.

Unfortunately, the content on hulu is currently only available to members residing in the USA.....so I am still stuck with TVNZ's wannabe version of TV on demand online. The TVNZ on demand site sorta pisses me off as it really only contains a limited snapshot of certain TVNZ content. When it first launched I expected to be able to view any content that TVNZ had in their content database, dating back to whenever they started. Now that would be true on-demand television!

What do you guys think of your local TV networks strategies to make their content available online?

skitch invites 20 more to give away

Thanks to the team at Skitch who have kindly offered half-geek 20 more invites to give away.

In case you are not sure what im on about, check out my mini-review of skitch.

As with the give away rules from my last post, first 20 comments get the invites, it's that simple!

skitch in snag-it out

When I decided to make the move to mac, I anticipated that there would be a few issues as far as software was concerned. You know, I want to use this software but I can't on my new mac- this sort of thing.

To be honest I really didn't experience any software issues at all. Well, except for one.........

When I was a PC user I used a techsmith program called snag-it regularly. I would not be surprised if most half-geek readers were familiar with snag-it. As far as was concerned, it was the perfect companion for any serious 2.0 geek. If you do a lot of blogging you need a good screen capture tool, snag-it is the best for PC IMO.

Getting back to my point, when I changed to mac I was disgusted to find that techsmith did not offer a mac version of the snag-it software. I was actually quite pissed off. In recent months I have been using the 'grab' function that came on my macbookpro.

Well my grab days are over now since I got invited to the beta of plasq.com's new program called skitch. This is my new favorite tool. It's got all the great features of snag-it and I have to say it's actually easier to use. That 'drag n drop' mac software style is well utilised by the makers of skitch who have nailed the usability in this new image sharing tool.

The screen-shot above and to the left of this post is of my skitch page, where I can upload images that I have created. One of the cool features is an i-sight plugin. This allows you to create and edit shots using your macs inbuilt camera.

I could go on and on about skitch, however, why don't you try it yourself? I have two invites to the limited  enrollment beta. If you have a mac and want to try skitch, leave a comment here. First two comments get the invites.

congratulations transfercar

Today I want to take the opportunity to congratulate Brian and Espen from transfercar. These guys are friends of mine who recently got a grant for being winners of the Spark Entrepreneurial Challenge.

Both Brian and Espen have toiled away over the past few months preparing this new start-up which is focused on facilitating transportation/re-location services, initially in the rental car industry. Transfercar will be of great benefit to rental car companies and tourists.

Rental car companies will be able to maximise revenues from their distress inventory and reduce car transport costs in peak seasons. Transfercar members will have the potential to get great rental car deals.

The site is in beta at the moment, however, Brian and Espen's progress is very positive. The Spark award will certainly help them as they look to grow their profile in order to attract VC.

Well done again guys!

 

Micropledge software funding

Have you ever been annoyed by not being able to find a seemingly simple plugin for say, firefox? Then you think, "Crikey this is a good idea, no-ones done it and I could be the first. Bugger,  I wish I knew how to build this app!"

Unfortunately I find myself in this situation far too often. I have thought about learning how to code, however, I know that I don't really want to be a coder. I have tried getafreelancer, but it makes me a bit nervous for some reason. Who can I trust locally in New Zealand to market my software development idea and help me get funding to get the job done?

The answer for people such as myself could be newcomer micropledge. Micropledge is initially targeting software development projects as their core offering, however, any project requiring funding is a long term goal for site content.

The sites objective is quite simple- facilitate the process of raising enough interest in a proposed software application by way of micro financial pledges from members within the micropledge community. Developers who are interested in picking up the job put forward quotes for the job. Pledger's for a specific project then vote and accept or decline the offers put forward by developers which include proof of progress on the job etc..

On further inspection of the sites terms, there does seem to be a lot of complexity around the rules. Given the fact that this service is most well suited to people like myself who may want a service like this to get a job done, it may pay for the micropledge brothers to take a closer look into simplifying the explanation of the sites core processes and rules. This is not a huge problem though.

The founders of the site are brothers and are all software developers so it's natural for them to want to generate the most leads possible for their existing 'bread and butter' business. Micropledge is certainly a great step in the right direction.

Some may suggest that this association creates some sort of conflict. I would suggest that if there was enough interest in micropledge to warrant concern over this issue, the founders would have the best problem one could ever have in a startup- too much business =)

grab an Air NZ seat quick

With all the talk about virgin entering the New Zealand domestic airline market, I thought a post on a travel related startup would be a goody for today.

I am sort of pushing it suggesting that grab a seat quick is a web 2.0 startup, however, I don't really want to start another category for one site. Plus, this plugin for Air New Zealand's distress inventory mini site grab a seat is a great service which deserves a bit of a plug itself!

Grab a seat quick has picked up on providing a feature that should really be provided by the original Air New Zealand site- customised email alerts. It's a simple but very effective proposition.

The thing with Air NZ's grab a seat service that makes it a little bit of a hassle is that the inventory is updated at midnight (NZ time). Add to this the fact that you never actually know what is going to be on offer and it's pretty hard to get motivated to stay up every night for that elusive flight to China for $150 (or whatever).

Grab a quick seat allows you to configure basic email alerts. You tell the site what origins and destinations that you are interested in finding cheap seats for (domestic and international) and they will email you when seats come up on the main grab a seat site.

I imagine that the developers of grab a quick seat have utilised some sort of XML feed from Air NZ, although I am not certain of this. They are running Google adsense on the site which I would assume is only a temporary revenue stream given the low traffic volumes in New Zealand.

It will be interesting to follow the site and see how their long term business model evolves. If Air NZ ever (God forbid, LOL) start an affiliate program they will be in the money! In the mean time I'm keeping my eye on the inbox looking for cheap tickets to Quenstown.

Linka- New Zealand's own digg

I'm not sure how long these guys have been up and running. They are called linka, and seem to be a New Zealand version of the now famous 'community voted news' website digg.

The site seems to be quite good from a functional perspective. I joined up and submitted one of my more popular posts, social networking is better than smoking. Linka seems to have quite low membership at the moment with less than 50 subscribed, however, I think the sites got some potential.

The winning and losing of linka's start-up battle will be marketing and numbers. Not many web start-ups in New Zealand have the marketing funds to extract the sheer numbers that are required from our small population for a new web 2.0 community based site.

There is also the question of whether kiwis understand the benefit of a website such as linka. Whilst this may slow linka's initial progress it is always good to be ahead of the game........

Web 2.0 New Zealand- can it happen?

It's really hard to get a web 2.0 startup off the ground in New Zealand, and to a lesser extent, Australia. The  lack of population downunder is the standard excuse, and one that I am mostly prepared to support.

However, here in my home country of Aotearoa (its maori language week here, and thats Maori for New Zealand) there seem to be a number of contributing factors apart from population alone. In this post Im going to discuss these factors.