Hi there everyone - two bits of good news this week:

Firstly, myperfectcareer is up and running. About 450 different job types, and a dozen insightful questions, and you have the beginnings of a true expert system to help you determine what career you should plan for/should consider changing to/or should have chosen instead of your current career!

It’s heartening to see how the intelligence we put into each question and each career almost multiplies itself out, to create a truly intelligent choice engine for careers. In the future, we’ll link off to job portals to provide you with real-time numbers of jobs in that field, and further information by peak industry bodies to complete your research on your career choices.

ALSO: myperfect was featured on the new ZDnet blog “bootstrappr”:

http://www.zdnet.com.au/blogs/bootstrappr/soa/MyPerfect-com-au-has-potential/

It’s fantastic that we were one of the first to be profiled on this new blog, focussing on Aussie Tech/Web 2.0 startups - and even more fantastic that we were given the inaugural ‘boom’ rating. It’s great to get some third-party feedback from someone ‘in the game’, so a big thank you to Renai for his time and effort.

We were inundated (of course!) all day, and we apologies to those who were in the middle of a javascript bug - in an effort to streamline the site with the increased load, we removed a key AJAX feature - which, of course made two other, totally remote parts of the site begin to act up for certain browsers. Our bad!

We’ve had to re-learn the lesson my grandfather, a cabinatmaker, taught me: measure twice, cut once. In our haste, we fixed one problem, and caused two more. So sorry - al should be AOK now. If not, send feedback!

We’re off to do a pitch tomorrow - unsure if we’ll be able to report anything concrete tomorrow night - but we’ll certainly keep everyone in the loop as much as possible.

With thanks,

AB out

Welcome one and all - yes, we’re now *officially* up and running.

With 1200 cameras on the site, and now 1300 mobile phones, there’s the first realisation that this baby will indeed get off the ground.

We have over 1200 beers half-data entered, but instead of *us* drinking 1200 beers to assess each beers’ colour, bitterness, etc, we’re going to leave beers as an exercise for *you* to help us with.

Yes, you heard right. We *want* you to drink beer, for legitimate reasons. Might it even be a tax lurk? Unsure!

So we’ll be turning on the beer site either today or tomorrow, but with the choice engine disabled, instead, we’ll direct you to browse for beers you’ve had recently, then help us by both filling out some tech specs, as well as writing a review of that beer.

In return, we’ll credit your account with ‘kudos points’, that will ultimately go towards raising your profile on the site, so that you’ll progress from a lowly beer novice, through the ranks of beer lover, and on up to the glorified level of beer guru and beer legend.

We’ll reveal the ranking system in the coming weeks - but don’t panic - every new beer you put in, every tech spec you tell us about, and every review you write are all recorded, and we’ll credit you with the right amount of kudos points at that time.

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In other news, James and I ‘celebrated’ the launch by going to a really cool networking night in Melbourne last night: the hive. Many thanks to Ross and the crew for introducing us to the local establishment - it was great to finally come out of stealth mode, and begin to tell people about our plans to conquer the world. So thank you all for your feedback, nd thank you in advance for testing/breaking our site. Very much appreciated!

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And finally, we’re already hard at work on two fronts: James is adding in the features we pulled at the last minute to get the launch possible. So that means that you’ll have the (standard) features of being able to go in and edit your profile pages, and change your primary email address, etc, from today. You’ll also be able to add new items and correct/suggest any changes to the published tech specs, making myperfect a truly human-powered choice engine. Sorry if you were already a little stuck - we simply had to weigh up bugs/features to finalise this last week, and some tasks were moved to this weeks’ todo list.

For myself, I’m currently working on the next site: careers. You’ll be able to access it at myperfectcareer.com.au OR career.myperfect.com.au in the next 72 hours, so if you do visit early: awesome, but be prepared for a work in progress. The great news is that our back-end bot/admin/boring business system is evolving just as fast as our front end, so pre-loading up 1000 careers is getting pretty efficient, although I’d love to push the clock forward about 12 month, and use the better tools I will have made then, now. Unfortunately, great tools require great insight, and that usually comes from equal measures of planning, knowledge and hard work. 

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Again, thanks for visiting/trialing the network of sites: we’re running, and we’re rolling out features and new sites as fast as we can. We’re grateful of any feedback you may have, since when it comes down to it, we’re a consumer focussed ’search’ engine, not big-business focussed. Controversial, I know, but we’ll explain more of the marketing drivers a different day.

With thanks,

AB out