If you are reading this, and you saw us at the festival, then you shall notice it looks a little different. We spent the whole time leading up to the beer festival preparing for it, and so the new design hasn’t made it online yet. Don’t worry, a few exams and we’ll have a huge amount of time up our sleeves to get everything online - for now apologies.

So we’re back. Tired from the long drive, but happy to be back with our families. It was a good swap, going from standing up for two days, to sitting down for a thirteen hour drive - but the weekend was a fantastic experience for us, and also for our website.

So, I think the shortest review is we had a ball. Two days, lots of beer to test, time to hang out with some awesome people, and nice weather.

For us the festival was about connecting with brewers, beer fans and getting the idea of what we do out there. Yes, it was the very first festival that MyPerfect has been at, and judging by how it went, I think it won’t be the last.

We spent most of Saturday morning fixing up the website. Yes, we left home like cowboys with a broken computer that needed a format - the RAID controller had died. We downloaded the data we needed while making our way through the Sydney traffic (Thanks to AB). It shows that we are truly bootstrapping just making sure we can get through what we can, with what we have - if you came and saw us on Saturday, sorry but we had it working a treat on Sunday.

The weather got better. Our computers didn’t misbehave. We showed people beer they would enjoy. Sunday was brilliant, it was as if the gremilins were taken out of the system and everything was proper. Plenty of people stopped by, played the game and went to try beer - many of those came back to let us know that it was something they enjoyed, most loved it.

For me, the stand out things were that our site worked. For sure, we have known while we’re making the site it was a great idea, but the interaction with people has been watching google stats. To actually see it work in the real world, point people to their perfect beer, and see them respond was something rated ’super cool’.

Another thing I’ll always remember was the crew we took up. Nathan (the people person) was a great dude to have on board (except the strawberry donuts) he chatted to the brewers while they were busy and got the message out there. And Roger, the powerhouse - rebuild a computer, debug a web application, change queries, enter beer data all in a single bound.

It was a great experience and a great way for us to connect with people who love beer. As I told a few people, we are just geeks who would like to learn to love beer, and the only way to do that is hang out with guys like we met on the weekend. So thanks for sharing your knowledge, your passion and time with us. We really appreciate it.

Shout outs to Dean from Pukara Estate. The guys from Snowy Mountains for the Pilsner. The guys from Beer Masons for being inspiring - Chris you make beer interesting.

All internet startups have a niche, or a beach-head. An angle they attack first to gain as much ground as possible. Ours has been MyPerfectBeer. And I can’t think of a better starting place, its a huge market with a huge opening for us to step into. Many people have a favourite beer and don’t stray much from it, but now they can browse, find their perfect beer and find similar beers. Broaden the horizons, and experience new tastes.

With that in mind, when we heard of the Maitland Beer Festival it took all we could do to stop us going. It was a ‘perfect match’, we show beer lovers, brewers and fans what we do, in turn they get to experience a new way of searching beers. Oh, and did I mention its a Beer Festival - there will be beer.

So with not much stopping us we used it as a target to develop a refreshed look to the site. The new look came about by some people letting us know that it doesn’t feel very ‘beery’ - so we took those comments into account and worked up a fresh style that we’re going to launch at the festival.

It has been interesting to see peoples reactions when we tell them about our business trip. In so many ways it could be not a business trip, and I think thats awesome, how close to stepping the line from work and play is.

It starts this Friday with a road trip up to Maitland. We’re pretty excited about the whole thing, but I think I am looking forward to meeting some brewers and getting teir opinion of our site. I think that will be fantastic.

2008 Maitland Beer Festival here we come.

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

That’s how many Australian beers our bot found around the web - but we’re sure there are hundreds more out there.

We’ve turned on My Perfect Beer, BUT we only have two questions fully answered: so it’s up to you now…  My Perfect is a *human* powered choice engine - so we have two requests of you:

1) If you know something about beer, then browse the 175 brewers, click on a beer, and then EDIT the beer, to add in any missing info. We need to know things like colour, bitterness, and what type of food you’d drink it with.

2) If you know of a beer we don’t have yet, then add it in from any Beer Details page. Put in the brewer and all the tech specs you know, and we’ll add it to the choice engine.

Beer is our first foray into the realm of human-powered: camera, phone and others like them are easy to find tech specs, but beer is trickier to find real technical data - and wine will probably be harder still.

The My Perfect choice engine thrives on information, and the ‘purer’ the better. So if it’s a published tech spec, then we’re good to go; if we only find reviews or ‘wordy’ specifications, then it suddenly gets a lot harder to pull out the real data.

Rest assured, we’ve working on finding more and more data for our choice engine - and in the meantime, get cracking on adding and updating the beers we already have.

Oh, and our legal team wishes us to promote responsible drinking. So no going on a pub crawl on our behalf doing “research”! 

AB

(Choose up to three sites)

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

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

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 

We’ve been holding on to this little gem since the start of 2008 - so almost 8 months.

The secret? Well - when you’re a startup in ’stealth mode’, you have to develop behind closed doors, and only do user testing a small, discreet scale.

The secret is that we’re about ready to launch a minor revolution in search engine technology. Not just a tiny evolution in making search engines a little ‘more manageable’ - but a radical yet soo obvious way of searching for, and researching products on the internet.

The *good* news is that we’ll be launching My Perfect in the next week or so - we had high hopes of launching the network of sites as the Tour de France rolled over the Champs-Élysées last week - but the trivialities of family life decree that once one member of a household gets a nasty cold, they have to share it around to the rest of the family.

Such is life.

This time we’ll aim for a launch the end of the Olympics - there’s no media attention to be gained between here and then, not in Australia, anyway!

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Watch this space.