Portable Film Festival A new short film everyday to get our creative juices flowing.

We’ve moved our blog so there won’t be any new posts here. Visit our new blog here.

This is in no way ‘new’ news as StumbleUpon (SU) has been around since 2001. Although unlike many other community-based sites the take up has not been as rapid – after four years Facebook has 63million active users compared to SU’s 5.5million.

Having said that, SU is unlike other community-based sites. Like all good sites, I discovered this not by surfing the web but after it was recommended to me; and therein lies the beauty of SU. In short, SU delivers pages matched to your personal preferences that have been either explicitly recommended by your friends or by one of 5.5million other users who share similar interests. 

I won’t go into how this works as you can check it for yourself. Instead I will ask you this, when was the last time you looked at page 10 or even page 45 of a search that has yielded 1.8million results? Never is an acceptable answer. That is because we are generally led to believe that the most relevant results will be on the first page; but marketers pay good money and spend a lot of time developing their websites to ensure that their’s appears at the top of a Google search result.  

In comparison, ’stumbling’ allows you to discover sites that your peers have suggested to be more relevant to your particular interests. It then learns what your likes/dislikes are in order to deliver even more relevant information in the future.

If only for a bit of fun, this is an exciting way of discovering content on the web.

There are so many blog posts today with the iPhone launch in Australia tomorrow that I won’t waste too much time on this (having a busy day!)…but thought there might be a few people out there wondering when we’re going to get confirmation on pricing for the iPhone.

Gizmodo managed to get screen grabs of Vodafone’s pricing before they took it down this morning…no idea what happened there!?

Optus’ pricing is up.

I’ve called Telstra today but you can’t even get on a waiting list to get an iPhone with Telstra, their website is asking everyone to go to their T-life stores from 6am tomorrow….that’ll be FUN! The guy I spoke to on the phones didn’t know much so it’s all very top secret.

He recommended calling up or going in store tomorrow, when ALL WILL BE REVEALED…

The Telstra rep did say there is a difference in speed, the iPhone with Telstra is on their 3G network (256KB/sec) whereas the Telstra NextG network is 550 – 3,000KB/sec, average speeds three times faster.

APC Magazine has published a leaked document on Telstra iPhone pricing today and according to them Telstra’s cheapest cap plan is $105 per month, $86 more than Optus’ cheapest plan. All unofficial of course.

For updated pricing and reviews on the iPhone, visit the MacTalk Forum. Here’s another very comprehensive review on the iPhone, originally from Australian Macworld.

I watched a great doco on SBS last night (from the BBC), ‘Bill Gates:How A Geek Changed The World‘ and it was interesting to hear some of the discussions around the future of Microsoft, given Google’s positioning with cloud computing.

What do people generally think about entrusting personal or confidential business data to the ‘clouds’?!

There are some interesting links on cloud computing on this blog. & have a read of the discussions on digg. Read about Microsoft’s Live Mesh Launch.

If you haven’t heard the buzz on QR Codes already, there will be half a million Telstra customer handsets with QR Code readers on their mobile phones from July 1, so it’s now a reality in Australia & the other carriers will most likely follow suit if it takes off like it has in Japan.

According to the Telstra press release, “This is the first time in the world that barcode readers have been automatically installed on mobile phones for free.”

The codes can be put on any surface from clothing, to packaged food and drinks, business cards, outdoor posters, so I guess the sky’s the limit and what’s exciting for digital marketers is that new level of interactivity that’s now possible in bringing products and services to life through digital content.

More information on this at Gizmodo.

Here’s the Telstra microsite with a demo if you’re Qrious!

I came across a fascinating blog post on seomoz.org the other day ‘The Evil Side of Google‘, have a read as it details the methods Google uses to capture data as well as listing what Google does with all that data. Some eye opening reading.

When you read the list of Google acquisitions, you start to understand the breadth of the data Google has captured. If I look at how many Google applications I regularly use, the list includes Google Reader, Gmail, iGoogle, Picasa, YouTube, Google Desktop, Google Analytics, DoubleClick (by default), Google Maps, Google Mobile, Google Earth, Google Checkout…aaagh, I’m such a Google!

Where privacy concerns come into play are when companies such as Viacom are suing Google and requesting all YouTube user histories are handed over. Read the entire US court order here. I suppose it’s no different to any other private data that any organisation we interact with captures on us, but Google’s strength is in the breadth of daily data that is captured on Internet users, which puts the company in a very unique position….which does make you think?!

With more and more social technologies allowing us to monitor every minute of our friends and enemies lives, is anyone concerned we’re opening ourselves up to too much transparency?

Fortunately this new application hasn’t yet launched in Australia, but have a look at Dirt Search, which searches public records data in the US. i obviously couldn’t search for myself, so I searched for Paris Hilton in New York who came up ‘dirty’. Her ‘Dirtscore’ is 1 times dirty, but the site it sent me to for details came up with no records. Hopefully this site isn’t genuinly searching public records and making them available to anyone searching online?

Another application I came across yesterday on springwise.com is Sense Networks’ Citysense service, which allows consumers in San Francisco to see the top nightlife hotspots. Citysense explain how it works “Using a billion points of GPS and WiFi positioning data from the last few years – plus real-time feeds – Citysense sees S.F. from above and puts the top live hotspots in your hand. You don’t even need to sign up, just go to citysense.com on your BlackBerry, download, and open.”

As a digital marketer, this kind of application opens up enormous potential for highly targeted consumer messaging, but as a human being I find this a bit freeky…does anyone else worry that this might be a great tool for terrorists to find the perfect place to set off a bomb?

I’ve just checked out this new site Filtrbox, which sounded like a brilliant concept as it allows you to monitor new media news, blogs, keywords, marketing effectiveness and more all in the one interface.

It’s a bit like FriendFeed, Google Alerts or Google Reader, but with more advanced tools.

I’m not sure if it’s just me, or if the site is still bug-testing, but my filters found 0 articles. I’ve checked out the community support pages and it seems to be a problem others have had.

I like the idea though, it would save me loads of research time once I got my filters set up.

Here’s an interesting extension on Twitter.

Members on Fuzz’s new service Blip.fm can search for MP3s and embed them in their posts.

A clever way to bring the music community of artists and fans closer together.