Jumbuck Launches Power Chat for iPhone

We are very pleased to announce the release of our incredibly popular mobile chat and flirt service, Power Chat, as an iPhone chat application. It is available for immediate download in the Apple App Store for $2.99. Power Chat for iPhone taps into Jumbuck’s enormous global user base. Power Chat users on the iPhone and iPod Touch now have instant access to a diverse mobile community of more than 15 million people around the world, even people who are not using an iPhone or who are on a non-iPhone carrier. Power Chat for iPhone delivers something that other mobile apps cannot offer: an abundance of fun, online people with whom you can chat and share photos.

Visit Jumbuck’s iPhone chat at the Apple App Store.

View a YouTube demo of Power Chat, Jumbuck’s iPhone chat.

CarBuddy – online car classifieds

CarBuddy.com.au is up and running with over 6,000 cars for sale. Used Cars at carbuddy.com.au

CarBuddy’s story:
CarBuddy is Australia’s newest car classifieds website and is backed by OZtion Pty Ltd Online Auctions and publicly listed company Jumbuck Entertainment Ltd. OZtion is Australia’s second-largest auction website with over 375,000 registered members and 1.8 million unique web browsers per month. The team operating CarBuddy intend to replicate OZtion’s ecommerce success in the online car classifieds market and provide Australians with a cost-effective, innovative and simple to use service that will improve the online car classifieds market in Australia.

Fast Flirting Beta Update

We have received a lot of feedback from users and will soon be implementing major changes to the site’s look and feel. This will include an Inbox, so you can leave messages for online and offline profiles.

We also plan to overhaul the feedback feature – since many don’t really understand the star feature and comments can be open to negative text (even though the dating session only went for say 30 seconds). We want feedback to be far more positive and helpful to others.

On the moderation front we are also ramping up – we really want to make the site as fun and free as possible to encourage everyone to join.

Have an opinion? drop us a line by clicking the Beta link on the FF beta service!

Beta Feedback

We really appreciate the beta feedback we are getting, keep it coming in. We had 600 people join the service in the first weekend and will be making some minor changes tonight. Invites is a bit difficult to see when you have an incoming flirt request so we want to fix that also at some point.

Remember, the beta URL is in the beta email we send out. The ‘thanks for registering’ email had www.fastflirting.com but now has the correct URL.

New Database, Betacode

We have shifted the database to a new platform that will be easy to manage, removed the Betacode since it was confusing a few people and completed a few other minor changes. We actually moved from Oracle to MySQL…some would say de-evolving others would say evolving depending on your outlook, however we are all far more comfortable with MySQL then the Oracle platform.

btw, thanks for the comments! never knew so many people (kl included) were interested in web flirting!

Beta Launch of Fast Flirting!

Its 4am in the morning and we have exhausted the city’s supply of Cola and Pizza for the launch Team but we are ready to go.

We already have 100 Beta sign-ups in a few minutes. To give everyone a run-down of what the service is and does, it is real-time dating service that uses a unique search interface based on tags. We want to give everyone the opportunity to find a date in under 30 seconds rather than wait hours or days like on traditional dating services.

To sign-up for the Beta please visit www.fastflirting.com.

Have a great Valentine’s Day and hope to see you online!

Close to the FF Launch

Launch soon……………………..We will invite our mobile users into the service first and then let the general web community sign up for the beta.

Plaxo + Cardscan = Plaxscan?

Techcrunch’s article on Plaxo potentially being bought by Google got me thinking that Plaxo should have a chat to the owners of Cardscan. Cardscan make business card scanners that store your business contact data in a digital format.

I know they are hardware company at heart but they have a sophisticated web backup site and PC software. I find that I use Cardscan’s web interface now to check my business contacts and numbers more than I use the hardware device to scan cards.

The Cardscan software is arguably more important to their business than the hardware, but the price-tag of $200 million being thrown around for Plaxo would probably make it a tough sell to the parent company’s board at Newell Rubbermaid. (btw- if they merge with another company I wonder if they will end up with a name like PriceWaterhouseCoopers?)

For Google I can see how Plaxo would fit with their Grandcentral service, click a contact and phone right away etc. Lets see what happens.

Chemistry.com Blocked in Dubai?

Last time I was in Dubai I tried to visit Chemistry.com and got a Website Blocked notice (similar to the above image) by the internet provider’s government-backed filter system. However, match.com worked fine even though both are owned by the same company. I find it hard to understand why a mainstream dating site would be blocked but I guess once a government goes down the path of total internet censorship the bureaucracy becomes self-perpetuating.

I’ve also read that Facebook is blocked, but it worked fine for me when I last visited on my way between Australia and Europe.

1800-YENTA

I’ve been following the founder’s blog of Plentyoffish (a traditional-style free dating service that has become a gorilla on a shoe-string budget) and reading with interest about a raft of legislation in the USA on dating services. I think law-makers need to understand that online dating is mainstream and a very popular method for people to meet one and other.

I 100% support the protection of minors from predators, but law abiding adults should not have to go through background checks before communicating with each other. If the rules are that tough then we might as well go back to arranged marriages and start dialing 1800-YENTA.

Apple to buy Sonos?

Apple should buy Sonos.

For those that have never heard of the system, Sonos is a wireless music system for your home that allows you to play different digital tracks (or select from a diminishing number of internet radio stations) in different rooms of your house. Everything is small and built as nice-looking components so you can expand your system one step at a time. The system performance is absolutely awesome and would fit hand-in-glove with Apple iTunes and their iTV system.

One issue with Sonos now is that you need to have a PC running with your library of digital music files, or have a network file server (allow at least 1 weekend of hacking to get this up). Having a dedicated network file server purpose built from Apple that could sync with iTunes wirelessly would be Sonos Nirvana.

The founder of Sonos, John MacFarlane, made a mint merging his former company Software.com to Phone.com (now called Openwave Nasdaq:OPWV) and looks set to do it again one day.

So if anyone from Apple ever reads this – I highly suggest you drive your M&A team over to Sonos and buy them out (before they get too big). They have already adopted an iPod style color scheme for all their devices.

The new Toy

We have a new Apple iMac in the office so we can test the FF alpha in a non-PC environment. After seeing the new toy arrive some of our business staff are considering switching sides and moving over from PC to iMac. I guess for non-programmers if you have Office tools, e-mail, a web browser and skype on an iMac it wouldn’t really make much difference.

iMacs also look a lot prettier than PCs in general – when Steve Jobs released the new ‘Air’ laptop recently people went crazy and it was written up in blogs everywhere, but when Dell or HP release a new laptop people barely blink an eye-lid. That’s the power of good design and the aura of the brand Apple.

I just wish we could get TV shows and movies on iTunes in Australia.

QAing

Everyone is busy QA testing the Fast Flirting Alpha version. IE7 on XP doesn’t handle Ajax as well as Firefox but we are working out ways to improve performance considering the large market share IE7 has.