October 2006 Archives

Westnet launched MyWestnet, a personalisable homepage, last Thursday.

The content & features are fairly standard:

• News from AAP
  
• Video from Fairfax
  
• Weather from TheWeatherCo
  
• Fuel Price data from MotorMouth
  
• Movie showtimes & TV guide from HWW(?)
  
• DVD rental via dvddirect.net.au
  
• Stock quotes & horoscopes via links to ASX.com.au and astrology.com.au
  

What is interesting is that they're running banner advertising, and that they're even bothering to build such a site. iINet built something similar quite a while back only to shut it down a year or so later. Also, traffic from the site is not counted towards Westnet users' download quotas.

Australians are paying too much for their advertising.

Too bloody right. That's a quote from Find It's blog. Find It are a new classifieds site with what seems to be a social/moral conscience. From their About page:

Find It is a new online classifieds website set to launch commercially in Australia early in 2007. The site is currently in pre-beta with all facilities available free of charge. Once we launch commercially, around two thirds of all categories will continue to be free. We believe in a fair go for advertisers.

I really hope these guys succeed, and don't sell out in the process. :)

SEEK, RealEstate.com.au, Domain all have far too much hold on the classifieds market, and they suck ass. I started looking at real estate online last year and noted the lack of features such as browsing by map and sales data. The maps thing improved on both RE and Domain just recently, both using Google Maps mashups -- but why the hell did it take so long? Both sites had been around for years, and so has the mapping technology.

I have something of a personal beef with the way the real estate industry works and so it also bugs me that RealEstate.com.au only accepts listings from agents. Could this be for any reason other than to ensure both groups stitch up the real estate market in order to maximise fees?

I've held shares in Ventracor for about 4.5 years. They're the guys behind a 3rd generation artificial heart known as the VentrAssist. Their share price hit some pretty nice highs a few years ago but I didn't sell and now they're down to a point just slightly above where I bought em. From an investment standpoint its a loser - I could have made more just putting the money in ING Direct. But its a company I believe in - one of my lecturers from the biomedical engineering program I dropped out of (hehe) works there, they've got a really elegant product, and IMHO they have a noble goal.

A beautiful data point came recently - a girl whose heart had failed and wasn't eligible for a heart transplant because she also had cancer had a VentrAssist implanted, and after a year her heart had recovered and she's doing fine now with the device removed.

Check out the story from ABC's 7:30 Report.
Teen achieves world-first after battling life-threatening illnesses

For a long time I used Sanford for their company announcement email alerts. That was until they turned it into a pay-for service. Since then I've not found a good replacement so I've hacked up my own.

Yahoo! Alerts will let you setup email alerts based off an RSS feed (its the Feed / Blog alert type). You can give it the URL of any RSS feed and have it email you whenever it changes. So all I had to do was rig up an RSS feed for the companies I was interested in.

Behold my ASX Company Announcements RSS feed.

There are a few other services which syndicate company announcements via RSS but AFAIK mine is the only one to let you specify a custom list of tickers which IMHO is more useful for the typical investor tracking a portfolio or two.