bradKELLETT

I’ve been living in the United States for almost a year now, and there are a few services that I use very regularly that would do fantastically well if someone were to bring them to Australia. It’s been a while since I’ve been home, so someone could have started these already, but here is the list of things that should really be in Australia:

• Craigslist: This is the No. 1 thing I’d miss if I moved back home. Fast, easy, super simple online classifieds. In Australia, you have to turn to eBay or Trading Post, which aren’t nearly as quick and easy. There is a Sydney Craigslist category, but that’s as far as it goes – the beauty of Craigslist is in the refined localization.
• Threadless: Yes, almost my entire wardrobe is made up of Threadless shirts. Sure, you can get them shipped, but it takes forever and can be costly.
• Amazon: The entire online department store scene in Australia is horrible, bring Amazon in please.
• Google Voice: I could care less whether it’s from Google or not, but the GrandCentral/Google Voice model is a winner and should absolutely come down under.
• PhoneTag: Short of a full Google Voice style system, voicemail-to-text services are almost as awesome.
• Fandango: Online movie ticketing just makes sense. Buy online, pick up at the theatre with a swipe of your card.
• Public WiFi: It’s starting to pick up in Australia, but there is a heap of public WiFi in the States. Not all of it is free, but at least it’s there at a pinch if you need it.
• Hulu: I don’t use it all the time, but online video streaming is great. NetFlix to the Xbox 360 and other TV-connected gear is a great idea too, I just hate NetFlix’s implementation of it.
• Mint: This is by far the best way to manage your money. Awesome on every level, from the elegant and information-rich web interface, to the handy SMS notifications and savings tips via email.

And a few offline things that rock too:

• Unlimited bus transport for $1.50: Muni might be dirty, but the price rocks, especially with unlimited transfers for four hours.
• ZipCar: Car sharing is awesome. I hear that it’s just starting in Sydney, but it needs to be everywhere.
• At home snail mail postage: you can just leave letters in your letterbox, and the postman grabs them when he does his rounds
• Bikes on public transport: more a San Francisco thing than a general USA thing, but CityRail needs bike cars like Caltrain has.
• Bike lanes: San Francisco still doesn’t have enough, but it at least has some bike lanes. These are sorely missing in Australia, and really do encourage people to leave the car at home.

Obviously, this list isn’t exhaustive, but could someone please bring them to Australia? Thanks, I appreciate it…

Launched at Startup Camp Australia last weekend, uTag is a new service aimed at rewarding users for the value they pass onto their online social networks. At its core, it is a URL shortening service – the difference is that uTag place a banner ad frame on top of the redirected website, sharing revenue with the user that originally posted the link.

This sounds simple enough, but what do the members of these social networks think of being advertised to though the links they click? I asked my Twitter followers whether they would unfollow someone monetizing their links through the service, and these are a small selection of the responses I received:

Navarr: @bck: I would unfollow them if they became spam. If they were relevant, and had context, and just fit in, then its all good. And as long as it wasn’t just outright spam. Ads are the driving force of the internet. I recognize this.

rgillettpr: @bck they would need to continue with links the way they were, not increase the noise just to get $$ for it

lindsayevans: @bck probably wouldn’t unfollow, but wouldn’t click on their links any more either

rgillettpr: @bck if i started seeing way more links from that person, and if they didn’t seem like links that person would usually send, would unfollow

shauntrennery: @bck A good idea would be if Google have some type of API that would allow ut.ag to search for ads relative to the tweet. That could work.

The two main concerns overall were that the user continues their current trend of link posting, and that the ads were context sensitive. No one raised the issue of people making money off another’s work, and instead focused on rewarding the user that posted the link for their work in finding it. This is somewhat the same as how ‘guides’ on Mahalo and other link aggregation kind of sites get paid – they didn’t make the content, but they add value to it by indexing it and revealing it to others.

Personally? I don’t expect to get rewarded for linking to other people’s content, since I don’t see that posting a link in my stream is adding enough value to justify that. As such, I can’t see myself using the service, but at the same time I wouldn’t not click a link that is shortened with uTag just because it is using uTag. What it will do is reduce the chances of me ‘blind clicking’ to links without a description – at the moment, I’ll click through to a link that someone posts just out of curiosity, but I wouldn’t do this if it was a uTag link without adequate description. I do believe that in their current form, the ads are slightly too intrusive, but at least there is a close button on them (though it can get hidden depending on the size of your browser window).

Overall, this system is exactly how About.com does things, though in most cases they are adding far more commentary to the links than can be had in the limited space that most social networks allow. I see the use in uTag as a monetizing service for bloggers more than through social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

When the opportunity to move to the United States first came up, the number one potential issue in my mind was obtaining a working visa. The U.S. Embassy website makes the process seem incredibly complex, and the only first-hand accounts of the visa application process made it sound very hard and daunting. Plus, these accounts were from people that had their University degrees, which the Embassy says is a requirement, but I didn’t even have this (though I did have a lot of work experience).

I am writing this to let people that are thinking about going through the process for an E3 visa know that while there are a lot of forms to fill in, the process is overall very painless. The actual interview session, which is the part most people are most worried about, took no more than two minutes.

What follows are the tips and processes that I followed. This is by no means legal advise, but is what I did to successfully secure my working visa. Continue Reading

I have been using the new Brightkite location-aware social network (invite-only at this point) a lot over the last few days, and one of the very common questions I hear is how I do check-ins from my mobile phone, since at this point only U.S. carriers are supported for their SMS service. The (not so) secret is you can send MMS messages to email addresses with most Australian carriers (Vodafone seems to be only exception here), and Brightkite gives a personal email address for every account to send commands to.

Once you have an MMS compatible handset, simply:

1. Log in to Brightkite and select Account settings from the left of the screen
2. Click the Mobile tab
3. Scroll to the bottom and find your unique account email address, program this into your phone or remember it
4. On your mobile phone, create a new MMS message
5. In the To field, instead of putting in a phone number, put your Brightkite email address
6. Put the standard SMS commands into the body of the message. These can be found in the Brightkite help, but the basic ones are:
   • @placemark or @full address to check-in
   • !message to post a message and attach it to your current location

Using this method also means you can post photos to Brightkite from your phone. To do so, just add the photo in the body of the MMS message, and the text you want to go with it in the Subject field.

Enjoy, and feel free to add me as a friend over on Brightkite.