Sony Special On-Line promotion temporarily unavailable online

Came across this while looking at digital cameras on the Sony website.

Defeats the purpose of having an online special when it is unavailable online. Is this some sort of marketing technique I am not aware of?

Daffodil Day: My Donation

After donating $5 to the Cancer Society on the growinghope.co.nz website, I received the following virtual daffodil on the site:


Ive also donated gold coins for 'jeans day' which has taken part every Friday for the last four weeks. I found out that you can also get a cute little bear for only $10 at the National Bank branches.

Orcon Broadband vs Vodafone Wireless in South Auckland

Today I borrowed a vodafone 3G wireless card from a colleague at work. I ran some very unscientific speed tests and below are the results of one test conducted in South Auckland this evening.

The speed test was also performed with the Vodafone speedtest. As expected, the ADSL wired solutions bet the pants off the wireless option.

(Orcon ADSL Broadband)

(Vodafone 3G Wireless)

Vodafone Mobile Broadband does not appear to be a viable option where I am unless you are looking for the portability that it can provide.

Free TubeMogul Tee

A couple of days ago whilst checking my email I opened a rather enticing message from TubeMogul. I had previously signed up with this free service as it was an excellent tool for gathering and analysing statistics relating to my Youtube channel. (see http://nz.youtube.com/pickledhamster).

I was quite surprised when the email offered a free tshirt. What was required to get this free TubeMogul tshirt? It simply required you to complete a brief online survey and the tee is yours at no charge. After completing the survey you are provided with an email address to manually send you request through to TubeMogul. The site just asks you to send your full postal address to this address, but don't forget your size too!

Google have had Youtube Insight available for quite a while now, but TubeMogul has the advantage of being able to bring statistics from all the major video-sharing services together into one neat interface. You also have the ability to monitor any channel, not just your own.

TubeMogul users should head over and fill out the survey here
[Update: Sorry everyone but this survey is now closed!]

After filling in the brief survey (9 questions) I sent an email to eugene@tubemogul.com as instructed, stating that I had completed the survey and would like a tee.

I'll keep this blog updated if my tshirt arrives in the land of the long white cloud called New Zealand.

Update 11-Sep-08: I received my Tubemogul tee in the mail today! I recently sent an email to Tubemogul to follow-up on it as it had not arrived and it had been about a month since I completed the online survey offering the free shirt. They replied incredibly quickly and promised that my shirt would be on it's way. True to their word it arrived!