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’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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
In the movie Swingers, Mikey rings and repeatedly leaves messages that eventually freaks the woman out. He was a regular guy but goes down in flames.
The Answering Machine (and wireless voicemail) will be encountered often in dating so I thought I would list a few quick pointers I found off the web and heard from various people:
Try not to:
1. Leave repeated messages without hearing anything back.
2. Sound desperate.
3. Get paranoid because they haven’t called you.
4. Leave long messages – after all you need something to talk about when next you speak together.
Instead Try to:
1. Leave a short message without anything too specific (call me back, had a great time etc. is good – ‘I think you have a really hot body’ or ‘you could be the one, do you like kids?’ is probably not going to help unless your persona is totally out there and the other party likes it).
2. Wait a few days before calling back if you don’t hear anything.
3. Beware the caller ID – no one wants to see “you have 30 missed calls from that guy/gal I met the other night”.
4. Practice if needed before the call – takes the pressure off.
So remember be calm and cool when leaving those messages.
Techcrunch and Gigaom list the happenings of the hottest web 2.0 startups and are a must read for those in the web industry. In Australia it is much harder to read about local web 2.0 startups but Ross Dawson’s blog ‘Trends in the Living Network‘ is quickly bridging the gap. He also wrote a great article with his Top 60 web 2.0 Apps from Australia.
Comparing the sites in Alexa (a website that measures the global popularity of other websites):
* Rememberthemilk.com seems to be kicking goals, increasing to number 9,585 most popular website.
* Atlassian has a ranking of 20,941 (they are Enterprise focussed so ranking perhaps less important)
* Eurekster (in the Russel Crowe/claiming NZs as Australian category) has a high rating of 2,460, however they seem to have dropped from 1,000 in December. In any case they are higher than online job ad giant Seek.com.au that has a rank of 3,300.
