Brendans Blog
Life, Love & the Interwebs
Mobile Payments & NFC
Mar 27th
Here’s a little video our company made around mobile & tablet trends, specifically around mobile payments & NFC. Hope you like!
An intro to AWS | Part 2 – EC2 SSH Access for Multiple Users
Aug 22nd
Last week we covered an introduction to Regions & Availability, EC2 Instances, EBS Block Storage, RDS & S3:
An intro to AWS | Part 1
This week, I’ll be covering some tips to help you get started, especially if you are accustomed to a typical production environment. Unfortunately for you, but fortunately for the security of your hosting environment, there is no easy-to-use CPanel arrangement here.
Configuring Access to your EC2
When you first setup an instance, you’ll be required to create a key-pair or select an existing one. The Amazon key-pair file is in .pem format and will allow you to connect to your instance without a password, usually using the following terminal command in Mac / Linux:
An intro to AWS | Part 1
Jul 26th
Just recently I attended the AWS Cloud Tour 2011 & in the weeks following, have been setting up & tweaking a cloud architecture that I’ll be migrating to in the coming month or so.
Here is an introduction to the cloud based on what I’ve learnt from the seminar & from my experiments thus far. If you’re considering migrating to the cloud, hopefully this will help demystify all the jargon & explain in practical terms, how it all works.
The “girls I wanna bang” circle (G+)
Jul 25th
We’ve all been raving about Google+ and with good reason, it’s a beautifully crafted alternative to Facebook that promotes relevance & privacy, all within an easy to use UI.
But I think there is another side to this puzzle, an unexpected consequence of this heightened level of privacy. I call it the “Girls I Wanna Bang” effect.
When you use linkedin, how often do you post personal shit about your life? Never. Why? Because the people watching are either your current employers or potential employers. I believe we’ll start to see the same effect with Google+. Now we all have opportunity to be exactly what we want others to think we are, selectively within groups of people.
Imagine, you have the following circles… (exaggerated for lulz)
Family – “Studying hard for my exams in 3 weeks time”
Mates – “Totally banged that hot stripper last night, you shoulda been there.”
Best Friends – “How do you know if you’ve got crabs?”
Work (Management) – “Just finished all my reports for the week.” (posted on Tuesday, 11pm)
Work (Friends) – “15 minutes till I can get boozed. Who’s with me?” (posted on Tuesday, 4:45pm)
& last but not least…
Hot Girls I Wanna Bang – “Just helped an old lady cross the road, which reminds me, I should send my mum some flowers.”
I think that this may be the hidden flaw in Google+ that is going to be hard to ignore in the months to come.
The Future of Daily Deals
Jul 15th
There’s no doubt that Daily Deals are here to stay, with Daily Deal providers sprouting up all over the place on an almost daily (pardon the pun) basis, so I thought I’d take the time to reflect on where we came from, where we’re at now & what the future might hold.
Where we came from…
In my opinion, it all started around 2004 with a popular website in the US called Woot!
Woot! provided one deal a day, everyday. The deal was almost always a product that would be delivered to you, no restaurants, no sky diving, just a great product that is heavily discounted every day.
In Australia, we saw the beginning of the industry in a company called Catch of the Day, which launched in 2006. Catch of the Day leveraged this same principle & built up a huge database of subscribers. You may have also heard of their sister company Scoopon.
In 2007 we saw the beginning of Living Social & in 2008 we saw Groupon enter the market, both companies eventually raising significant amounts of money & hitting the ground running, reporting huge revenues. More >
Google+ First Impressions
Jun 29th
Brendan works… FAST! (Timelapse App)
Jun 7th
Thought I would have a crack at creating a timelapse using an iPhone app called “iTimelapse”
I shot this video over the space of about an hour and half with intervals of 1 shot / 2 seconds, with a frame rate of 24 frames/sec.
I love this app, it’s so easy to use, the interface is clean, it renders the videos for you, it uploads it to vimeo/youtube & you can add music soundtracks to your videos, either from your iPod/iPhone or from a list of tracks that come with the app (such as flight of the bumblebee!)
Someone buy this woman a copy of Carmageddon
Feb 14th
And perhaps an old 486 in order to play it…
Just when you thought the controversy surrounding the 1997 video game release of Carmageddon was all over, Renee Geyer, an Australian 
Diva is bringing it all back. It started when she tried to take out a local optometrist store “Wink” about 50m from my house:
Renee Geyer Crashes Car into Shop
And now she’s done it again:
Renee Geyer involved in Car Smash in St Kilda
Seriously. Someone get her a copy of Carmageddon, or even Grand Theft Auto, otherwise the streets of St Kilda & Elwood will not be safe for anyone!
Dell bypasses Groupon Clones, launches “Dell Swarm”
Nov 24th
With modest sales volumes purely from promoting their twitter-only discounts ($6.5 million circa Dec 2009), naturally the next step was for Dell to start promoting group-buying deals.
So Dell has jumped in to the Group Buying arena but they aren’t backing Groupon or one of their many clones, they’ve decided to go it alone with “Dell Swarm“. Lets face it, if anyone can pull this off, its Dell. It’s not surprising that they’ve chosen to promote daily-deal style group discounts, but it’s the positioning of this proposition that interests me the most.
Rather than setting up a flashy “BUY THIS DEAL” groupon-style mass mailout site, they’ve opted for a friendly, clean group-buy platform that uses its own terminology to differentiate with other group buying sites. At the time of reviewing their site, they were promoting 2 products, a 23″ monitor (26% off) and a CISCO Flip (56% off).
The most appealing factor of this setup was the inobtrusive nature of the website. If you don’t wish to commit to buy, you can simply ‘watch’ the product and be informed when the deal goes through, a similar concept to eBay which I think is a great way to give the consumer a non-spammy approach to showing interest in a group deal.
The site comes complete with sharing options to promote the viral nature of these deals, however the sharing options are not blatent, which is also quite appealing. I especially like the twitter feed of people tweeting the deal, to show the real-time activity of the deal.
Finally, I’m saving the most intriguing feature for last. Dell have installed the ability to ‘suggest’ products that you’d like to see a group deal for. Why not combine customer preference with choice of group buying deals, let the consumer decide what they would like to buy & be discounted on.
This ties in very nicely with the concept of CrowdSauce, a project that is nearing completion that I am actively working on. CrowdSauce allows the customer to put pressure on Businesses to give them a discount. I think we’ll see a shift from Mass-Email group-buying schemes to giving the power back to consumers to band together and get a great deal on the stuff that they like.
What do you think of Dell’s new venture? Is it risky to branch out and do this themselves or is it a smart, profitable venture that will keep the profits with Dell and (hopefully) allow them to pass on these costs to discounting their products?
Groupon Clones & Foursquare Boredom
Nov 1st
Groupon Clones
Groupon, Scoopon, Zoupon, Spreets, Living Social, Jump on It, Cudo, Ouffer – you’ve probably heard of at least one of these by now. The concept of daily deals is so popular that we’re now living in a saturated market where a few players dominate the headlines and the rest dominate your inbox.
Let’s face it, we all love heavily discounted consumerism. But how many of you are receiving a daily deal from YOUR favourite restaurant? I think as consumers, we’re starting to get fed up with all the advertising and the overtly promotional offers. What happened to good old fashioned customer loyalty?
What happened to getting a great deal from the Businesses that YOU love?
More >