Invoice #0000001

Last night I sent out the first infome invoice. It’s been almost a year or more in the making. Evolving from rough idea, tried concept in many different fields through to what infome is today, www.pickmylunch.com.au.

Part of me wishes I could have reached this point sooner. Another part of me realises that there is no way I could have arrived at this point without going through the process I went through.

I’ve come to realise that it is a lot harder work then I thought it would be, however it isn’t hard in the way I thought it would be. Instead, it is hard in that you are confronting yourself each day, questioning yourself and pushing yourself forward. It’s easy to slave away writing code, writing plans and writing documents. It’s hard, so hard, to work up the courage to walk up to someone you’ve never met and convince them to pay you for a service that has never been used before. The battles you face are with the conflicting voices in your head, rather than with those around.

I love it. Every bit of it.

Things are going great

I’ve been pretty snowed under getting pickmylunch.com.au well and truly running. We’ve got a few people on board and we’re pushing into new locations.

I’ll try and get some interesting content up soon!!!

3 trial customers for pickmylunch.com.au

Last week we got out there and made things happen. We spoke to many of the businesses in North Sydney that offer lunch. We’ve still got many more to go, but we’re SO happy with the result of our early talks.

Many of the owners have been receptive and we’ve signed up 3 businesses in North Sydney to trial accounts. We’re looking forward to working closely with each of them to ensure that pickmylunch.com.au really does help bring people to their door at lunch time.

I can’t describe how happy it makes me.

Australian Mobile Internet Statistics

BuzzCity has just launched a mobile advertising campaign planner. The campaign planner gives you access to some high level mobile internet statistics for countries around the world. There are some important take-aways from a quick skim over the data:

The iPhone is only one handset in a portfolio of handsets

The first statistic that really stands out is that iPhone users make up less than 1% of the mobile internet market in Australia. Therefore less than 200,000 Australian’s own an iPhone, given that almost 100% of the 20+ million Australians and some percentage less than that would actually use the mobile internet. What does this mean? It means that the iPhone should only form part of your mobile offering, along with all the other available handsets.

XHTML services have viability

BuzzCity says 22% of mobiles accessing the internet have an XHTML browser feature. This would imply about 4.4 million handsets with the ability to checkout standard XHTML websites.

XHTML browsing may only make up 22% of handsets accessing the internet but if you combine this with figures indicating that iPhone users consume much more data than other users then you could assume that XHTML mobile users consume more than non-XHTML mobile users. This might be because those users are more savvy, have better phones, or just have a better browsing experience because of richer data or a richer browser.

So, it would now seem viable to develop straight XHTML services to suit your mobile users which will make development easier.

Further Information

Where it starts to get interesting is mixing this data up and being able to drill down from all different angles at once. Unfortunately, the statistics BuzzCity provides are just broad at the stage, but they do serve as a great starting point for mobile internet usage. Something that needs to be done is to verify these statistics against statistics from others.

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Keep your users coming back

When you put in the time and effort to attract users to your site, service or business you need to have something in place to make sure they stay and that they keep coming back. You can’t just rely on your service being a cool service.

With pickmylunch.com.au we pushed strongly through relatively inexpensive media to really get some early, relevant traffic.  We’re seeing continuing use but not at the levels I’d like (I tend to aim high…). So we’re about to add features and mechanisms that keep users coming back.

You should take this as a reminder to yourself or just as a chance to ask, “what keeps my users and customers coming back and what could I do to increase that level of return?”

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Interview with Vishal Sharma

I recently did an interview with Vishal Sharma for his blog that follows Aussie startups and tech trends.

Today we showcase story of an exciting venture, from Sydeny, Australia, infome - Find Anything Nearby from your Mobile, co-founded by Scott Middleton, Andrew Lowe and Brett McDowall.

Read the rest of the interview…

Release Early, Motivate Yourself

It is so important to release early, even if you don’t think you’re ready yet.

When I think back to the version of infome we released almost 3 months ago, I cringe.

Since then we’ve moved on a bit and just last night I was reminded of one of the biggest benefits of releasing early: customer feedback. Despite the steady stream of searches we’re getting nothing beats hearing the voice of one of your users. With Don’t Tell I was having quite a few conversations, but with infome we had the first this morning.

And mate, let me tell you it makes you feel good. I lent back in my chair and smiled – we’re doing something worthwhile. We’re creating something that helps people – what more can you want to do in life?

People are excited about iPhone Apps

It was amazing to watch two complete strangers discuss an iPhone application on the bus today. I couldn’t see which it was, I’ve got a feeling it was one of the twitter ones. They were helping each other with a few features and chatting about the application itself.

You read about the stats and you use the apps yourself (being the techie that you are), but when you see two “everyday people” talking iPhone it really drives home the statistics like a median of 5 apps per iPhone user, a supposed 10x larger iPhone web usage share than it’s rival and the huge success of the App Store.

What seeing these two people talk iPhone really means to me is that people are ready to make use of mobile applications and are really excited about it. It takes a lot to turn around and start talking to a stranger on a bus and an iPhone application managed to get someone to do this.

New version of infome available

A new version of infome has just been approved by Apple.

This new version is based on how the application has been used and our thoughts on needing to make it more friendly and informative.

To download the application and view the full list of changes, head over to infome on the App Store.

infome now has over 10,000+ businesses across Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth and Brisbane

infome now has over 10,000+ businesses across Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth and Brisbane. You can search for cafes, supermarkets, plumbers, karaoke, bars, malls, petrol stations, hospitals… the list goes on. Most of the businesses are in Sydney and we have only just started to cover Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth and Brisbane. We will be expanding this over the days and weeks to come.