Money Saving Websites
October 21, 2009 at 8:23 am
You’d want to be living under a stone not to have noticed the trend for money saving websites. Here are some of my favourites:
They’re only going 10 months and are this week celebrating their 1,000th post. That’s a brilliant achievement. This is a great little site that shares recipes and reviews, and I particularly like the ‘what’s in this week at Aldi and Lidl’ reports. They always have a competition going on and as a result there’s a vibrant community of followers.
Practical ways to save money in the areas of Personal Finance, Family Spending, Lifestyle, Health & Beauty and Technology. Well known Irish journalists do much of the writing, so the feel is rather like one of the weekend magazine supplements – but all about saving cash.
An initiative from Dublin City Council, Dublin Waste is a space where people can advertise items they no longer want and you can get them for free! I remember spotting, a couple of years ago when it first launched, a BMW for swap for something interesting… there are no Beamers on there now but there are plenty of TV’s, items of furniture, baby goods, sporting goods and other random items. To avail of something good on this site, you’ve got to be quick. Arrange transport and soon that item will be yours – for free.
Jumbletown is similar. My only complaint with it (apart from the hideous navigation up top) is the difficulty in removing your item once it’s gone.
Tags: money saving websites
10 Years Old Today
September 25, 2009 at 12:59 pm
We’d like to wish happy birthday to Cora Barnes and the team at 3Q Catering. 3Q is 10 years in business today.
Cora Barnes is one of the whizziest dynamo women in business that I’ve ever known.
Whenever I hear about the new breed of entrepreneurs and how they’re making Ireland proud, it’s not the men in the grey suits that come to my mind, but Cora Barnes. She’s obviously doing something right as her business has grown from strength to strength and she’s recently added a new subsidary that specialises in medical. View Cora’s profile on LinkedIn. But work is not her only thing. Like any hero of mine, she’s got a whole lot more going on:
- Stylish to a tee.
- Fun. Always up for a laugh.
- Has the right mix of work life balance – oh she also runs a charity for Argentinian children in her spare time
- She’s young – set up her business when she was in her very early 20’s.
- She is extremely generous with her time. She mentors young business owners coming up, is an active Board member of many industry groups.
Happy birthday 3Q Catering. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to do some work for you in that time. Here’s to another decade – onwards and upwards!
Tags: 3q catering, cora barnes
Wish We Had This When I Was In School
September 17, 2009 at 6:48 pm
But then, because the internet wasn’t invented yet, we didn’t!
The Clubhouse – a state of the art multi-media centre in the Liberties. It’s a place for kids to hang out after school and learn how to make games, ‘mess around on photoshop’ and do lots of other cool things online. 100 kids a week, aged between 10 and 18 come in and do games, animation, photography, and any technology.
The aim of the Clubhouse is to “help close the digital divide for a community that may not have the same kind of access to technology available elsewhere.”
Like the guy in the video, I believe that there should be one of these tacked on to every single school in Ireland.
Tags: Technology Education, The Clubhouse Dublin
Feeling Ranty? Then have your say here..
September 16, 2009 at 8:31 am
A great Irish ranty review site I’ve been meaning to share:
Whose View
From their own About Us page:
We won’t give you the boring line of “We are a social review based website etc etc……..”, because we are so much more than that. Rather we are a home for people who are not afraid to speak their mind; who like to say it as it is; who like to help others know when something is worth raving about and when it’s a complete rant. There are many sweakie clean review based websites out there, but are they really entertaining? We want to bring the celebrity and entertainment factor back into ranting and raving!
I especially like the way they are marketing this. Very effective use of social media tools. Here’s my experience so far. And remember folks I’m just one person. These guys are probably doing this hundred-fold:
- Whose View find Simple Assembly Me Hole and add it to their site as content
- I find their listing using Google Alerts
- Encouraged by clean design and my own personal penchant for sharing my opinion, I wrote a review of a restaurant
- Whose View contacted me to say thanks and offered me a voucher for €20 for anywhere
- I said thanks, I’d like a voucher for the Lighthouse Cinema in Smithfield (best cinema in Dublin)
- They provide. Then come back a few days later on Twitter and suggest that perhaps I might like to review the cinema.
- I duly behave in the way that they want!
- Now they seem to be using Twitter as a search tool and tracking people who mention “Lighthouse Cinema”.
- They then contact them on Twitter with my review and ask them what they think.
A smart way of sourcing content, engaging me, and then using the content on Twitter to engage others.
They are also running a good blogger outreach programme, which they call ” a focus group with Twitter users, bloggers and members of the WhoseView site”. They invite key bloggers (not me!!) to take part in an exercise to figure out what the Best Pizza in Dublin is. The result, by the way, is Bianconi’s in Ranelagh. It’s a smart way of getting bloggers into a room, to engage with their site, pay them (with free pizza) and then sit back and wait for the links.
Keep your eye on the Whoseview blog. It’s well written and contains some interesting ideas about marketing.
Tags: rating sites, whoseview
Dot ie For A Fiver
August 25, 2009 at 8:08 am
For one week only, Blacknight are offering .ie domain names for just €5. You can register or transfer domains for that price. That’s amazing value.
The special price is limited to one order per customer and you can only register one .ie domain for a maximum of two years at this special price. So if you register for 1 year it’s €5, while registering for 2 years would be €10.
They don’t tie you in for hosting – although I find their order form is a bit complex and can often lead people to unwittingly transferring hosting and registration to Blacknight. This offer is available until 29 August, this Saturday, so get registering now!
More information on €5 domains
Tags: .ie domains, blacknight, Domain name registration
Simple Assembly Me Hole
July 25, 2009 at 2:32 pm
Dedicated to IKEA virgins, this is my latest venture: Simple Assembly Me Hole.
Launching on Monday to coincide with the IKEA Dublin launch, I set it up for people like me. I’d be just the one to go in for a milk jug and come out with a sofa, wardrobe, and a new set of pots and pans… but I’d hate having to face the assembly nightmare back home.
Paul Cullen in today’s Irish Times makes me shudder when he refers to how:
We have strugged to assemble flatpack furniture with nothing more than an Allen key, a wordless set of instructions and a passing acquaintance with DIY.
I know I’m not alone! Judging by the comments on Twitter, which range from “flatpack furniture assembly should be included in pre-marriage courses” to “a day in IKEA, a man’s idea of hell. Getting it home and having to assemble it, Dante’s inferno”.
Simple Assembly Me Hole offers the following services:
- Assembly of Ikea furniture – at a very reasonable €30 per item. Other flatpack services insofar as they exist charge by the hour.
- Installation of Ikea kitchens – again at very reasonable rates.
- Delivery – we’ll deliver next day for all orders before noon and again good rates. I think people will find they’ll have to wait 7 days for Ikea to deliver
Key benefits:
- While there are already a number of flatpack furniture assembly guys, they tend to be one man with a van – so you may find you have to wait til he gets around to you. I’ve assembled and vetted a team of highly skilled carpenters, cabinet makers and fitters dotted all around the city, so if we get an order in Lucan, our man in Lucan will be there in a jiffy.
- Another key differentiator is that we charge a fixed flat fee per item. All of the others charge based on time. Therefore it is in our interests to get the job done as quickly as possible, whereas competitors might be tempted to push things into the ’second hour’.
- Our delivery service offers next day delivery for bookings made before noon. Ikea delivers alright, but experience overseas shows that you’ll be waiting up to 7 days for your item to be delivered.
Who Needs Us?
- Singles who don’t own a own toolbox (and don’t want to!)
- Couples who are DIY-challenged
- Expectant parents wanting to kit out baby’s new room safely
- Property owners who need to kit out apartments for rental
- Business owners who can’t afford the downtime of assembling new office furniture when it arrives
Is this you? If wobbly coffee tables and sloping bookshelves are a feature of your life, then visit “Simple Assembly Me Hole.com” on Monday and book in for a low cost solution to your needs.
If you’d like to keep updated on our progress, I’ll be posting regular updates to the Facebook Fan Page and on Twitter. So join us over there – and don’t forget to tell people!
Simple Assembly Me Hole
Promote your Page too
Tags: flatpack furniture assembly, IKEA Dublin delivery, IKEA furniture assembly, IKEA kitchens installation, Simple Assembly Me Hole
Great Value Training Courses
June 8, 2009 at 5:12 pm
My top three training courses are:
- Writing for the Web
- Internet Marketing
- How to be a good Blogger
I run these as public courses from time to time. I also run them on behalf of industry bodies. And now I run them in association with Europa Training Academy. That’s the one that Bill Cullen is involved with. It’s a really smart venue located just off the M1 and, importantly, they do a really good lunch as well!
Europa is offering some amazing value right now – check out all its training courses here.
The really great news is that you can get ME for just €195!
I normally charge way more than that; Europa are much more generous than me!
Check these dates and if you’re up for increasing your knowledge in these areas, book your place now:
- 25 June: How to be a good blogger
- 26 June: Write for the web
- 29 June: Internet Marketing
Tags: Blog Training Ireland, internet marketing training, Write for Web Training
Good News From Uganda
June 2, 2009 at 9:41 am
Before the last bank holiday weekend, I shared an email that I’d got in about helping the children of sex slaves who had been brutally raped and tortured during their time in the LRA in Northern Uganda.
Now, post another bank holiday weekend I’d like to share with you the great news that Zest4Kidz, the charity who had made this call for help, have secured sponsorship for all of these kids and all 20 of them will be starting school immediately.
Their Mums (only kids themselves- some as young as 13) are over the moon. This means they can start working to try and build a better future for themselves and their kids.
So it’s a good news update from Uganda and Zest4Kidz. Sunshine in Ireland. And the markets are on the up?
Tags: Lords Resistance Army, Zest4Kidz
Jack & Jill Website
May 6, 2009 at 8:18 am
The Jack & Jill Foundation has a new website. I assisted on the architecture and content writing. The objectives of the new site are:
- To encourage donations
- To share stories
- To disemminate information about all the various events and fund raisers they’ve got on
It’s seldom that I get moved to tears when working on website content. Earlier this year, I was working on the family stories. These are the letters from parents of Jack & Jill babies that thank the foundation for what it has done for them. As I read through tales of tiny babies suffering – and HSE and Government non-intervention – I thought about all the healthy happy little babies my friends and family have been blessed with. It was a particularly gloomy week at the start of the year – SR Technics had just laid off its knowledge based staff – but these stories from the front line made me realise how blessed we really are. I forwarded this page on to my friends as soon as it went into development – if you are a parent, I’d recommend you read it too.
Content writing by yours truly. Read some.
Design and development by Squire.
And welcome to the blog world – Jonathan Irwin – newest blogger on the block!
Tags: Jack & Jill Foundation
One Of Those Things That Can’t Be Ignored
May 1, 2009 at 3:20 pm
Sometimes an email lands in my inbox that makes me sit up.
Somehow the message breaks through the fug of noise in my head.
I read.
Scepticism enters.
What’s the cost? How much are they looking for?
And then the beauty of this one makes me smile and reach for my credit card – it’s only €40.
While in Northern Uganda recently, we came across some young kids between 3 and 5 who were the offspring of girls who had been abducted from their families and subjected to lives of rape and torture in the bush under the rebel leader Joseph Kony and the LRA.
These girls are made pregnant by the “commanders” (themselves kids) and if rescued find it hard to ever go home because of the shame.
The babies are usually the last to ever get any assistance or help.
But ZEST4KIDZ hopes to change that.
We plan to get these wonderful forgotten young kids into primary education and sponsor them for the next first steps of their lives. We will assist their young mums too – but we need your help to look after the babies.
WHAT DO THEY NEED? €40 – this will cover them for the next 12 months
Can you help us help them?
Donate €40 this bank holiday weekend and feel good about yourself. For these kids have had to deal with a very different R word. Now we have a chance to give them a chance.
