Well…  yes, we are. But we’ll be ‘more live’ in about 2 days’ time…   

We’ve finalised myperfectcamera, with 1202 cameras pre-loaded and waiting to be chosen. We’re currently polishing 1300 phones, which will be online tomorrow, AND we have 2300 beers waiting in the wings, which should be ready to roll on Monday.

2300 beers? That’s *WAY* more than we were expecting, but our web-spider had been out and about, grabbing every Australian Beer on the market, and has returned to us with more than enough beer to fill an esky. In fact, there are so many that we’ll be hard pressed to be able to split many of them with the number of questions we had originally planned, but we’ll persevere for now, and add more beer questions/topics in the coming weeks, and therefore be better placed to assist you in choosing between two very similar beers.

For the launch today, we have just the basic user registration functionality, but at least we’ll welcome you into the MyPerfect world with open arms. To *be able* to launch today, we disabled a ton of important features that were 75% complete, so we could actually hit our mark.

The most important feature we’ll be opening back up in the next few weeks is that of adding new products into the choice engine. Registered users can directly add products to the collective brain of the choice engine, further enhancing the results, and also enhancing your ‘guru status’ in the community.

In this way, it’s a truly human powered choice engine: we provide the initial 80% dump of the world’s supply of cameras/phones/beer/whatever, and from that point onwards, the collective brain of the users of the site adds their one or two bits of knowledge. (Apologies to all Star Trek fans out there if I’ve used the word ‘collective’ too many times - no, we’re not part of the Borg, nor are we trying to assimilate anyone!)

Well, I’d better get back to my 1300 mobile phones - thanks for visiting us, and for following along with the fun and games we’ve been having launching this baby…

…if you have any feedback/comments/suggestions/next sites you’d like us to focus on, then please email us directly at feedback@myperfect.com.au - we value hearing from you, good, bad, or indifferent!

AB

I’m almost halfway sourcing over 1200 photos of digital cameras - yes, myperfectcamera.com.au is only days away from launch - and I think I’ve seen the entire pre-history of digital cameras float past my eyes.

It’s been fun to see the development of cameras over the years, and to watch the manufacturers come to grips with the types of weird shapes and really weird features that they thought we all would want.

Fortunately, we’ve settled down to a more compact, functional design regime these days, and so the amount of ‘design’ in a camera is now only to make it more ‘usable’.

I’m currently up to K for Kodak in my picture hunt - and I’d hope to be finished in another 24 hours. It’s a strangely demanding job - I’ve automating it as much as possible, but the final act of choosing and grabbing the best photos from the available pool takes about a minute for each item.

1200 cameras in the database times 1 minute per item? That’s 1200 minutes, or about 20 hours.

Yikes. I’d better get back to it.

AB out