“This year, is my year”

We’ve all heard this statement before. Usually spoken by some optimistic or really pumped up individual. For me it always conjures up associations of a professional athlete; a football player, who over the season scores in every game, intercepts passes, makes the important tackles and wins his team the grand final. When he remembers that season or year, he remembers it as his year.

This proclamation can be both a reflection of the year that has passed or a predication for the year to come. It implies a sense of ownership, of possession. And at this time of year, it is a statement that prompts us to look back and evaluate the year that was.

For pureprofile, 2007 was a year of things launched and the promise things to come. There was the launch of the new website with improved design, communications and navigation. The new, smarter and more comprehensive profile was also launched along with the dashboard for real research. We brought you free content like the Earth from Above exhibition, where 78% of you said you would like to receive more free content. And we expanded the nextbutton to include updated profile questions and new paid videos.

We worked hard and we played hard. This year we celebrated the festive season in style with 300 clients at our office Christmas party. It was a night that solidified our traditions and created some new ones. Our red carpet and nextbutton shots were back and this time they were accompanied by Sal’s ever popular red cocktails (see him in action below) and a Louis Vuitton raffle giveaway. Two lucky people walked away with a Louis Vuitton roxbury drive clutch for the women and a signature monogram wallet for the men. DJ She with saxophonist Graham Cordery had everyone dancing the night away and it was all topped off with a fireworks display on the harbour, which we’ll pretend was just for us. Check out the photos! -for all photos take a look at - http://www.flickr.com/photos/pureprofile/

New nextbutton shots

Merry Christmas!

Sal mixes up a storm

Our clients

Everybody gettin’ down

Our Christmas party was also a perfect occasion for us to unveil the newest member of the pureprofile team - the nextbutton smart car!

This kaleidoscope on wheels, complete with roll cage (just in case this feather takes flight) and a bursting nextbutton, will be zipping all over Sydney for the next six weeks. So if you see a bright rainbow streaming across town, just know the pot of gold at the end is the nextbutton, and it’s full to the brim with cool content to be delivered in 2008.

In profiling 2007, the declaration I stated earlier - ‘this year is my year’ - can form the basis of spectrum scale for assessment. It raises questions like ‘do we get only one ‘my year’ in our life? Does everything have to go perfectly for it to be ’my year’? How much control do we have over whether it will be ‘our year’?

For pureprofile, 2007 was a year of big ideas. Some of which have come to fruition, many of which we are still working hard to deliver. In reflection, 2007 was not our year, because we want, and know we will, do so much more in 2008. This last year has been like a warm up, a stretch, a preparation for the year ahead. Our ideas have not been forgotten about, but rather are projects that we continue to evolve, perfect and expand. We do also have some new surprises in store, all will be revealed soon. So without trying to be overly optimistic or assuming the power of psychic, we will proclaim that 2008 will be our year.

And of course we want thank all our account holders for their participation, enthusiasm and opinions throughout the year. you are the reason we strive to create and launch awesome new ideas and cool content so….

thank you!

Check back soon to see what we’re working on!

As you all know, the Melbourne Cup is a greatly celebrated national event where we all drink large amounts of water and uphold our stoic principles against gambling (cough). We also congratulate the losing horse for trying, shake hands and say “jolly good” before returning to a hard afternoon of work. (cough, cough) I don’t think I need to tell you that certainly wasn’t the case for the pureprofile office who could be found drinking (not water) and crying and laughing over winnings and lost bets at Bungalow 8.

It has been brought to our attention that one of the staff ran a survey comparing politicians to Melbourne Cup racehorses. I thought it would only be fair to share the intriguing findings.

32.77% of people say that the Melbourne Cup is a more significant event that the Federal Election- at least you know where your priorities lie. Gambling and drinking requires far more attention than how the country is run.

pureprofile asked respondents to assume that John Howard and Kevin Rudd were race horses running in the Melbourne Cup against this years favourite Master O’Reilly and Melbourne Cup hero Makybe Diva. A whopping 48.46% nominated Makybe Diva as their favourite in this field, with Kevin Rudd coming in second place with 28.08% of the vote. John Howard was tipped by just 9.42% of respondents. Can we then assume that Makybe Diva would be a sure bet if she was running for office in the federal election?

Respondents were asked to nominate how much of their own money they would be willing to gamble on John Howard and Kevin Rudd in the Federal Election: 66.86% were willing to gamble something on Kevin Rudd, with 26% willing to put $50 on him to come out on top! Just 43.93% of respondents were willing to gamble some of their hard earned cash on John Howard, with only 6.74% willing to opt for the maximum $50 option!

Of course we are not going to state whether such results are an indication of the upcoming election results or that the Melbourne Cup requires the same diligent attention of citizens as the Federal election, but it is interesting to consider the statistics. Please let me know if you have any quirky, interesting or controversial survey ideas you would like me to run?

By The Online Angel

I was walking through Woolworth’s last night, amazed at the new displays of fruit mince pies and Christmas decorations. Of course, I shouldn’t have been. This happens every year. I am always delighted to see shops posting Christmas reminders in early November just to heighten my anxiousness for an extra month or so. I am never prepared for Christmas. I am one of those people who views Christmas Eve late night shopping as an absolute necessity, rather than an option. You can barely catch me as the speedy blur whizzing around the aisles gathering all my Christmas shopping at once. Christmas should be recognised at Christmas I say. I realise I sound slightly like the Grinch and was wondering whether most people felt the same way or whether I’ve simply been drained of all my Christmas jeer. So, in true pureprofile fashion, I ran a quick survey. Here are the results:

81% of you said you had definitely noticed the emergence of Christmas in retail shops,
56% of you thought the idea of Christmas gradually decayed as you grew older,
43% of said you either metaphorically bashed your head against a wall or zoned out when people around you were mentioning Christmas early, while
77% of you thought the pre-Christmas hype was merely a marketing ploy.

I would be lying if I said I wasn’t inwardly pleased by your responses. I shall use them as reassurance that I have simply grown more aware of sneaky marketing ploys, rather than older and grumpier. I have to mention that I am honestly pleased that I could use a pureprofile survey to speak to you guys within a couple of hours. Truly neat.

The Online Angel

Mark quickened his pace as he strode across campus to make his next computer science class, although he was officially enrolled as a psychology student. He was feeling somewhat forlorn as he slumped in his seat with a copy of the campus newspaper in hand.   The front page illustrated the gory details of his near expulsion for creating an on-campus clone website of ‘Hot or Not’, on which several fascinated students had spent the past couple of months rating each other’s attractiveness. Mark attempted to forget about the story as his focus rested on the guest speaker at the front of the class who, funnily enough, was encouraging the class to skip school to work on outside projects. Daydreams of his other online project- an on-campus networking site clouded his thoughts.

The guest speaker who inspired Mark Zuckerberg in one of his Harvard classes in 2004 happened to be Bill Gates. While, Mark’s dorm room social networking project is known today as Facebook.

Mark, now 23 years old strode into his office decked in his usual uniform of jeans and Adidas sandals, ready to direct Facebook’s 300 staff and annual revenues of $US 100 million. Although, Mark is known is now compared to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, he remains true to his humble grassroots, evident by a comment recorded in the Sydney Morning Herald last week: “I don’t care about running a company. I just want to build cool things”.

It remains to be seen whether Mark maintains his laid-back composure since, Facebook has been recently valued at a cool US 15 billion dollars following Microsoft’s recent purchase of a 1.6% stake in the site for US 240 million dollars. With a 20% stake in the company, Mark could sell out for US 3 billion dollars and buy all the Adidas sandals his heart desired. Not that that’s the sort of thing a billionaire who lived on a mattress on the floor in rental accommodation until as recently as May would spend his money on.

However, with success comes pressure and Mark’s inexperience will be his greatest challenge. He now allows his executive team to talk after fumbling through a presentation to approximately 750 programmers earlier this year while visibly sweating. Meanwhile, former Harvard classmates, now the founders of rival site, ConnectU have filed a federal lawsuit requesting Facebook be shut down on the basis that Mark stole their social network idea when he helped them with a project in 2003.

The high-speed success of Facebook is a result of the growing trend towards online author or user-written content. Part of this phase is the growing popularity of blogs. People are more and more wanting to use the net as an interactive tool to post their own material and converse openly with others. Gone are the days of passive searching. This is why we appreciate you need to be in charge of your own profiles and provided with choice at every level of participation.

By The Diligent Nerd

You, our account holders, have contributed to the nextbutton’s success. Since its launch in December 2006, your use of it has created buzzing amounts of activity, which businesses like to see!

Well over 2 million clicks of the nextbutton per month are being made, and we have only just started! The clicks are made up of you viewing offers, videos, websites, and completing surveys.

These numbers are growing every day as more account holders join and use the nextbutton. Your activity helps entice businesses to keep sending you campaigns! Moreover, new businesses sign-up to send campaigns because they can see a track record of activity.

As we are coming out of testing mode with the nextbutton, we can devote fully to expanding its features and benefits to you. This means giving you brand new ways to get more out of the web and earn money. Watch out for the browser version of the nextbutton !

The nextbutton provides an intersection where consumers and businesses can meet; you earn money for your attention to what they are selling and the answers they require to their research. More than just the money, though, you also save time by having offers find you!

All we can say is, keep on clicking the nextbutton! It’s working for you, us and businesses.

Last month we appeared in an article in The Sydney Morning Herald’s My Career section, talking about what it’s like to work at pureprofile. Read the article here.

We have an exciting new way for you to make money with your profile. Businesses will now be sending you paid videos to promote their products and services to you.

As with every other offer you receive, videos will be matched to your profile. As more businesses launch their videos via pureprofile, make sure you are in as many target markets as possible by updating your profile.

Paid videos offers allow you to:

• Earn a payment to view a video
• Learn about products/services relevant to you in a fun way
• Share cool videos with friends

We have created a pure player especially for viewing videos. Our plans are to launch a range of video content for you, including unpaid videos, to make your web life much more interesting. We want to bring cool content to you rather than you having to search for it all the time.

Let us know when you get your first video and what you thought of it.

Thanks for all your feedback in relation to my last post about the brands you want via the nextbutton. I really appreciate it!

Many businesses - above and beyond my initial list to you - have come on board as a result of your guidance. So I’m quite happy about that

I’m still working on  your suggestions, making sure I prize open more offers and cool campaigns for you. Please keep posting your suggestions - I’ll take them to the companies you suggest and get them to bring you what you want!

I did the rounds in Perth and Adelaide last week, trying to get some of the companies over there to start using us more.

One of the main things that businesses want us to get for them is more Account Holders so please keep referring your friends, colleagues, etc. Remember, there is a good referral incentive for you to do so!

More Account Holders = More businesses using us = More campaigns for you guys!

Bus Dev Ninja signing out

It’s been a while since my last post but I have been seriously busy working on the profile as always.

NEW CATEGORY

One of the fun new categories in the profile is Beauty, taking our total categories to 19. When we add a new category, we think about the ways businesses can target you with more offers and surveys, and the questions reflect this. Beauty is a big industry and your answers are going to give businesses extra reasons to start talking to you.

The questions are not just for women, so I hope that lots of men will add in their answers too.

The current topics in Beauty are hair, cosmetics (this one has just been moved over from Health & Wellbeing where it didn’t quite fit), fragrance, and face care. There are three more topics to come under Beauty and should hopefully go live next week some time.

NEW TOPICS

New topics added and live:

1. Boat under Automotive & Transport
2. Air-conditioning under Home & Furniture
3. Gifts under Shopping
4. Weekend Getaways under Travel
5. Art under Entertainment & Leisure
6. Pool under Home & Furniture (Australia only because of our obsession with backyard pools!)

General news on the profile:

A few questions here and there have been added into existing categories of the profile to make them more targeting-friendly so that we can bring more offers to you. About 10 in all that are scattered throughout the profile. For example, in the Alcohol topic we now ask what type of wine you drink (red, white, rose). Other new questions focus on subjects like personal trainer, day spas, massages, aromatherapy, etc.

Check your Profile Dashboard for a quick and easy way to get to these new questions, and complete them on the spot. I will also be sending Profile update campaigns giving you a heads up on areas of your profile that need more answers.

I think that is about all from me.

An account holder in the previous post “Do Not Call Register launches“, asked how many of our account holders have opted-in to receive paid phone calls via the pureprofile platform.

That’s an easy question to answer. I ran a little report last night, and here are the percentages of people who have set a preference as either “yes” or “no” to receiving paid phone calls.

Yes = 52%

No = 47%

Many of you still have not set a preference, and that’s okay. It’s up to you whether you set a preference or not, but not setting a preference, means you will not be in the target market of a business wanting to reach you via a paid telephone call.

Australia’s “Do Not Call” register has launched.

You can now add your phone number/s to the register as a way of stopping some telemarketing calls interfering in your life! Calls from charities, religious organisations, registered political parties and market researchers are still allowed. The latest legislation is also allowing research calls to be made on Sundays.

For our UK account holders, you can “record your preference not to receive unsolicited sales and marketing telephone calls” at the Telephone Preference Service.

Our views on telemarketing calls are expressed in a previous post “Opt-in for paid telephone calls.”

Update your pureprofile Preferences so you can be on the list for receiving PAID marketing and research calls - at a time that suits you.

The world seems like it’s getting more and more focused on specifics – the fine details.

Today “The French” shared a great site with me called the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), which has an ambitious mission: “To transform the science of biology, and inspire a new generation of scientists, by aggregating all known data about every living species.”

It makes me think that in the future when having conversations with our friends to tell them about a specific bird we saw in Brazil, we won’t be describing it as a “Pretty bird with blue feathers but I can’t remember its name…”. We will have easy and quick access at our fingertips to look up the bird on EOL (via our phone for example) and tell our friends the exact name of the bird.

There are countless examples of how technology and the Internet are giving us the ability to do things at super-detailed levels. Think about Twitter – people’s answers to one question “What are you doing?” are available for your reading pleasure. Then there’s online dating – how much more detail can you get! You might know more about a person from their online dating profile than if you met them for a coffee date.

The future is not just about doing a Google search to find information, which works okay if you want to sort through sites that have top rankings for reasons other than being highly related to your keyword search.

The future may have something to do with knowing about sites that are specifically suited or meaningful to you and enhance your life in some way. “Knowing about” such sites is what I’m going to try to define. It covers any one of the following:

• Your friend recommends it
• You hear about it via the media
• You see it on a website
• You use a search engine to find it
• You use a service that matches sites/content to you (e.g. pureprofile)

Can you think of other ways to “know about” sites you want to know about?

And which of the above do you think will be the most popular way (in a few years’ time) to “know about” sites relevant to you?

Labelling software (or websites, or novels, or love letters, or blog posts) “beta” is a twenty first century disclaimer: “This software is not quite finished. We’re still working on it. We think it works, though. We think you should use it, but we’re not going to promise it is perfect just yet.”

Google loves beta; Gmail has been in beta for close to three years now. Joost is in beta, but they haven’t been around long, so they have a good excuse. Flickr wanted to stay in beta so much, they turned it into a joke and went gamma.

Is pureprofile in beta? We don’t think so. It’s not quite finished. We’re still working on it, and we are working hard.

The development team is working hard to reduce the number of bugs in our site. The entire team is working hard to ensure any bugs or usability problems are taken note of and stamped out quickly. There’s going to be errors sometimes - we’re sorry about that, and the claim in the error message that we’re working hard to fix the problem is true.

I get automatically emailed every error from the site. I get more error emails than I would like (and to be honest, I probably get less error emails in a day than I do idea emails from Paul in a lunch break), but the number of error emails is going down, so that is good news for everybody.

So why don’t we say pureprofile is in beta? Because we have the view that it is “agile”. Agile software development is currently very popular in the software development world. Basically, it boils down to a few things that we believe in very strongly here, two of which are:

• account holder satisfaction by rapid, continuous delivery of useful software, and
• simplicity

Computer science being what it is (full of nerds like me), some folks even went and wrote a Manifesto. Us computer nerds just love rules.

Account holder satisfaction is obviously our #1 goal. It has to be. To achieve that (and to keep achieving that), we’ve made our systems adaptable. We try new things and listen to feedback. If something is not working, let’s try it a different way.

We try to keep all projects to a week or less. If we take short, small steps then it’s a lot easier to backtrack when we take a step the wrong way. The wrong way can be hard to see initially, but it tends to show itself pretty quickly. Once it does, we can turn around and keep working towards the right way - simplicity.

Some things are inherently complicated and confusing - road maps in strange cities, for example, or modern art, or French films, or women pureprofile doesn’t have to be complicated or confusing. At the heart of it, we’re just asking questions and trying to help you based on your answer to those questions. The nextbutton is an attempt to simplify that. Just one button. Pretty simple.

We’re working hard to make the nextbutton not just help you provide your answers, but to help you answer your own questions: What did I need to remember today? What’s a good web site about fashion? How can I save money on my car insurance? Where is the closest Japanese restaurant to my work? What next?

So here’s some question for our account holders: What do you think is too hard at pureprofile? What can we do to make our site simpler? What can we do to make your life a bit simpler?

In relation to the future, Paul and The French are getting in on it, so I had to put my bit in too.

However, both of them knew about Joost long before I did!

I’m a bit later in my Internet discoveries…but then again I’m competing against two of the most addicted Internet users I know! I was about to say “Internet Junkies” but not sure if that term generates positivity

Anyway, Joost is all about:

“… a new way of watching TV on the internet. With Joost, you get all the things you love about TV, including a high-quality full-screen picture, hundreds of full-length shows and easy channel-flipping.”

Set-up by the founders of Skype, and backed by millions of dollars of investor funds, Joost is definitely something to WATCH out for (pardon the pun).

You need a friend who has already registered to invite you to the beta release, though. So start asking around!

I watched this video today and it was really worth watching. It has some formidable statistics about the world as it is today and predictions that really get you thinking about the future.