Love dining out?

Live in Melbourne?

Got really into watching Master Chef?

If any of those questions made you nod or got your saliva glands going then Taste of Melbourne is one festival you can’t miss! Create your own degustation menu from the signature dishes of the following restaurants:

Longrain Restaurant and Bar
Maze & Maze Grill
Melbourne Wine Room
Mezzo Bar & Grill
The European
The Palace by Luke Mangan
Stokehouse Restaurant & Bar
Izakaya Den
Charcoal Lane
Esposito
La Traiteur

Meet and greet world famous chefs in person and ask them to share a tip or two.

Check out Taste of Melbourne’s website for further details.

What’s the best thing? We’ve partnered with Crowdmass.com.au to give you a fantastic 2for1 General Entry offer.  Visit http://www.crowdmass.com.au to get this offer, or simply visit the Taste of Melbourne website, click ‘Buy Tickets’ and enter the promo code: TOM15

Crowdmass is a new Australian website that launched this week that aims to offer an effective, innovative marketing strategy for businesses that guarantees customers through their doors, while at the same time, providing consumers with great deals and large discounts

Each week, Crowdmass will shine the spotlight on one local business, offering some of the best deals. Whether it’s a beauty salon, activity, spa or restaurant, Crowdmass aims to give its site’s visitors up to 80% off standard prices.

Crowdmass differentiates itself to traditional forms of advertising by guaranteeing businesses a measurable number of customers, and not having any upfront costs. They do this by setting a required quota and only when the set number of people sign up for a deal, does it go ahead.

“If the minimum quota for a certain deal is 100 customers, only when 100 people buy the deal do we charge the customers, and the deal is considered valid”.

“The Crowdmass philosophy is to affect positive change and achieve a collective goal through the power of sheer numbers,” says David Wei, Co-Founder of Crowdmass Australia. “And of course it’s a win-win situation for consumers and business owners because we are providing benefits for everyone involved in the Crowdmass process.”

Businesses that will feature on crowdmass.com.au are some of the best, offering fantastic deals of over 50% off bills. This includes some of the top restaurants located in the heart of Melbourne who see Crowdmass as a fantastic opportunity in growing their customer base.

Prior to its launch, Crowdmass already has over 4000 Melbournian subscribers eagerly waiting for the first featured deal. With an extensive social media network reach, the site’s founders aim to grow Crowdmass to 50,000 subscribers by the end of the year and have plans to expand to all the capital cities in Australia.

Visit www.crowdmass.com.au. $12 cheap meals at top restaurants, cheap, bargain tickets for the best places to visit in Melbourne.

For those so inclined, let’s have a quick look under the hood.

How it works

It’s actually very simple. RotateMe loads our selected page into an iframe and then applies the following CSS styles to it:

Standard CSS for iframe

border: none;
height: 100%;
left: 0px;
position: absolute;
top: 0px;
width: 100%;

For Left Effect

-webkit-transform: rotate(-90deg);

For Right Effect

-webkit-transform: rotate(90deg);

For Mirror Effect

-webkit-transform: matrix(-1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0);

The magic is in the -webkit-transform’s rotate and matrix functions.

I can definitely see myself playing with these elements of CSS3 in the near future. 3D websites anyone?

I tested this in Chrome, which uses the webkit engine. For Mozilla based browsers like Firefox, all instances of -webkit-transform can be replaced with -moz-transform.

Click here to watch the making of this video

Clearly they have too much money for their own good, now get back to fixing those bugs and adding cooler features to Chrome!

Okay, so maybe Google isn’t moving anyway yet, especially just being named the world’s most valuable brand. While this may not replace our beloved Google search, but it does provide an interesting alternative.

What is Spezify (www.spezify.com)?

Spezify basically searches the social web for as much data as possible related to your search. It drills through websites like digg, twitter, flickr, youtube, blogs, amazon, etc etc and it slowly maps out a visual response to all this aggregated data which the user can interact with. I’ll do a quick comparison with Google just to give you a look and feel.

Initial impressions

Both present a relatively simple search function for users to input their topic of choice. Spezify features a nice little “Hot Searches” display which reminds me of Twitter’s Trending Topics, this lets you see whats the most popular search being conducted. Not sure how regularly this updates.

This isn’t where the real magic of Spezify shines tho, its the part right after this.

Search Experience

Lets have a look at the experience we get from using both these search engines when we try to look up “delicious food”

Nothing unexpected. You get the usual links to popular websites. Has a few nice pictures slapped in the middle between some search results. If you scroll down a bit more, there’s a few nice video links as well. With certain search results you’ll get a live feed derived from twitter and other status update services.

But as a user, this is the norm isn’t it?

You search, you expect links mostly, and if you want videos – you go on youtube, if you want pictures – you click Images at the top of the google search.

Now let me blow your mind.

I don’t know about you… but my jaw just dropped to the ground and my tummy suddenly got extremely extremely empty. Also not to mention how wide my eyes just got from trying to absorb this information.

You’ll notice that Spezify slowly renders block elements onto the screen from various sources. You can pan the screen (click and drag) to see even more elements loading. When you click an element, rather then taking you out of Spezify into the source location (eg: digg, youtube, twitter) it shows you some related data.

It also grabs related data for other types of media such as:

• Music – will show artist details and album informtion
• Videos – embedded into the element so when you click on it, it starts loading and you can watch it from within Spezify
• Tweets – show who twittered it
• Images – shows the image title
• Diggs – show number of diggs
• Amazon – shows price
• Ebay – shows highest bid and how long till the auction ends

Those are the only ones I can think of at the moment, but it gives you an idea of whats possible.

Search Usefulness?

While Google is still my number one place to goto when I need specific information, if i was looking for sources of inspiration or media content for generic topics, i’d definitely give Spezify a go. It can be quite messy and hard to absorb at times though.

Also find it handy when I’m looking into researching brand names. It’s quite informative with all the tweets, images, news articles, blog posts etc.

Hope you all enjoyed this quick review, ’til next time, PEACE!

Found this in the news section on the NetBank portal – whilst I was inspecting how low my bank accounts are at *sad face*

Watch the demo video found here
www.commbank.com.au/personal/home-loans/i-phone-app/default.aspx

Wow! I was so surprised that the CBA are developing such an app, it is indeed giving them a foot forward in terms of digital innovation. I can see this app being wildly popular amongst home buyers if it works well.

CBA states that:

The core functionality uses ‘augmented reality’ technology where rich data including past sales history (on more than 95 per cent of properties in Australia), current property listings and recent sales, is mapped on to a real world view through your iPhone’s camera. It’ll also give you insightful tips and tools including videos, a repayment calculator and property hotspots.

A couple weeks back when Telstra announced the launch, they allowed users to register their interest. Due to the huge numbers of geeks and fanatics, they’ve dropped it into the market a week earlier at three different stores across Australia.

• Melbourne (Bourke St)
• Sydney (George St)
• Perth (Hay St)

You can also jump online and buy it now – click here

The HTC Desire is available outright for just under $780 and there is no carrier lock, so you can stick your optus, three, vodaphone sim and it should work.

Head down to your local store now if you want to pick one up, I just called the Bourke Street store and they only have about 50 in stock at the moment.

If you missed out today, it will be available across all stores on the original launch date of the 27th of April (next week).

[Disclaimer: James Giang is a Telstra employee, the views expressed in this post are mine only and do not necessarily reflect the views of Telstra]

—-

[Update]

Score! I managed to pick up one of the last few still remaining at the T[Life] store down on Bourke Street, Melbourne today but haven’t had time to update the post since, so here are the long awaited pics of the unboxing.

The box

Opened box

The phone!

The battery

The picture of the phone on the box has a 1:1 scale, true fact.

The goodies under the phone

The goodies: USB cable, power outlet plug (uses the USB cable), 2GB MicroSD card with adapter, headphones, little booklets of info

The mighty HTC Desire! (Powered off) - and my crappy iPhone 2G in the reflection

The battery, sim card and microSD card

The mighty HTC Desire! (Powered on)

Steve Jobs must be pretty pissed right now,

The prototype seems to have a pretty big design shift, as well as many improvements on the hardware, ones that users have been asking for, for a long time!

The full post on found on Gizmodo can be found here!

What’s new

• Front-facing video chat camera
• Improved regular back-camera (the lens is quite noticeably larger than the iPhone 3GS)
• Camera flash
• Micro-SIM instead of standard SIM (like the iPad)
• Improved display. It’s unclear if it’s the 960×460 display thrown around before – it certainly looks like it, with the “Connect to iTunes” screen displaying much higher resolution than on a 3GS.
• What looks to be a secondary mic for noise cancellation, at the top, next to the headphone jack
• Split buttons for volume
• Power, mute and volume buttons are all metallic

What’s changed

• The back is entirely flat, made of either glass (more likely) or shiny plastic in order for the cell signal to poke through. Tapping on the back makes a more hollow and higher pitched sound compared to tapping on the glass on the front/screen, but that could just be the orientation of components inside making for a different sound
• An aluminium border going completely around the outside
• Slightly smaller screen than the 3GS (but seemingly higher resolution)
• Everything is more squared off
• 3 grams heavier
• 16% larger battery
• Internals components are shrunken, miniaturised and reduced to make room for the larger battery

-from Gizmodo.com

These are just some of the problems Dropbox is able to solve. This post will explore what Dropbox is, and how you can utilize it to the best of your ability.

What is Dropbox?

Dropbox (www.dropbox.com) is essentially an online storage tool which provides you the ability to access your files from anywhere in the world (with an internet connection).

How does it work?

Once Dropbox is setup and everything is connected together, it synchronizes files in your Dropbox folder to the server, which updates all your other linked devices as well – instantly!

How do I access my Dropbox?

Dropbox sets up a folder in your documents called “My Dropbox” which has all your precious files. The green tick shows that its sync’d and up to date.

Alternatively you can go on Dropbox via the web interface which also packs a few extra features such as version control, folder sharing and the ability to travel back in time – to restore deleted file.

Restore deleted files??? HOW???

Dropbox keeps a collection of all your file changes and deleted files up to 30 days. So even if you accidentally delete something, you can easily log into the web interface, and restore it!

All your regular files and folders will be backed up forever until you decide to delete them. This makes it really easy when you setup a new computer, just link the new computer to Dropbox, and it’ll download all your files onto your new computer, no file transfer using a hard drive, usb, etc. Simple.

How do I share files with my mates?

Ever tried to share random pictures with friends, then you might be familiar with free services like imagehost, imageshack, tinypic, imgur etc etc. But Dropbox truely simplifies the process by utilizing a “Public” folder within Dropbox, which allows you to upload content, and link your friends directly to the file with a simple link.

Paste and you should get some text like http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1349362/somepicture.jpg

But that’s not all, if your friend also has a Dropbox account, you can share an entire folder with them! This becomes very handy when working on group tasks, assignments etc. which involve several people collaborating together – no need to constantly email people with updated documents and new revisions.

This has been Dropbox 101 in a nutshell, now its up to you if you want to try this service (www.dropbox.com). I would highly recommend it, but it comes down to personal preference. Feel free to leave a comment on your thoughts on Dropbox, especially if you are a new user. I’ll be looking at doing more posts very soon to highlight tips and tricks for Dropbox, so stay tuned!

Some images have been taken from Dropbox’s product tour – ain’t they great?

“By synthesising millions of aggregated search inputs from Australians as well as scanning 23 seasons of Home and Away scripts, we are able to Optimise for Colloquial Cultural Articulation (OCCA) – which means our products can now be tailored specifically for the typical Strayan user.”

What does this mean? Well see for yourself

Ain’t it great? If you don’t trust the image, feel free to try it yourself – Google Maps (AU)

Google has defined these terms  as

Directions
“Chucka U-ey” – Execute a U-Turn
“Hang a Right” – Make a right turn
“Fang a Left” – Make a left turn
“Hit the frog and toad” – The road
“Hoof it” – Walk
“100 Clicks” – 100 kilometres
“Not within Cooee” – Not close by
“Down the road” – Unspecified term indicating distance

Driving Styles
“Hit the anchors” – Brake, now
“Flat chat” – Going very fast
“Hoon” – Fast, irresponsible driver
“Bingle” – Car accident (not Lara)
“Bogged” – Stuck
“All over the shop” – Veering across lanes
“Rough as guts” – Car needs a tune
“Bag em up” – Smoke the tires
“Drive like my Grandma” – Going too slow
“Amber Gambler” – Runs orange lights
“Sunday Driver” – Poor driver.

Wishing everyone a happy easter and drive safe mate!

[via Google AU Blog]

ps. Happy April Fools Day