Melbourne, Australia – 24 November 2010 – Club Intimate announced today it has won the 2010 Red Herring Asia Top 100 Tech Startup Award. Club Intimate was initially selected as a finalist for this award in October 2010. Following the presentation by Club Intimate’s Founder & CEO, Arshad Khan in Shanghai, Red Herring announced its Top 100 Asia Award in recognition of the leading private companies from Asia, celebrating these startups’ innovations and technologies across their respective industries.

“We are quite thrilled and proud of our accomplishment”, said Arshad Khan. “Winning of this ward was no easy task; Club Intimate was selected as a winner from hundreds of companies across Asia. Attending the event also gave me the opportunity to meet the brightest and smartest entrepreneurs from Asia”.

Melbourne, Australia – 25 October 2010 – Club Intimate announced today it has been selected as a Finalist for Red Herring’s top 100 Asia award, a prestigious list honouring the year’s most promising private technology ventures from the Asia business region.

“This is an amazing milestone for us. We are quite exited and humbled by this experience”, said Arshad Khan, Founder & CEO of Club Intimate. “This achievement further reinforces our resolve to continue to innovate and become a leading social dating service in 2011 and beyond”.

People are passionate about the things they do and it’s often hard to find people with whom they can share those passions, Club Intimate’s interactive features bring people together into communities of shared interests.

In 2006, 747 Media conducted a feasibility study for Twitter, asking people in the streets if they would use it. They were shown the Twitter website, and were given a basic rundown of the text-to-phone and text-to-website options.

See the video below for what people have to say if they would use such a service and how they would use it.

Global Information Industry Center, University of California, San Diego has just released a very interesting report entitled ‘How Much Information? A Report on American Consumers.’ This report looks at how much information Americans consume across all forms of media.

The report says, ‘In 2008, Americans consumed information for about 1.3 trillion hours, an average of almost 12 hours per day. Consumption totalled 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words, corresponding to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes for an average person on an average day.

Skype is a little piece of software that lets you make free calls to anyone else on Skype, anywhere in the world. Even though the calls are free, they are really excellent in quality. If you and your friends are using webcams, you can also make free video calls. Millions of individuals and businesses use Skype today. Every day, people everywhere also use Skype to make low-cost calls to landlines and mobiles.

Since recently, eBay had controlling interest in Skype. On 19 November 2009, eBay announced the sale of Skype in a deal valuing the business at $2.75 billion. The buyer, who will control an approximately 70 percent stake, is an investor group led by Silver Lake and includes Joltid Limited and certain affiliated parties, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Andreessen Horowitz.

Sean Parker, Managing Partner of Founder’s Fund, gave a presentation entitled “The New Era of The Network Service” at Web 2.0 Summit 2009. In his presentation, Sean tries to prove the point that in the next decade ‘network services’ like Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin will dominate the World Wide Web as compare to ‘information services’ like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

I totally agree with Sean on this. Whilst there will always bee a need for information and data, the real value is provided to people by providing platforms that help connect people and build relationships. This is the core value of Club Intimate as well.

“Ping.fm is a simple and FREE service that makes updating your social networks a snap!” This is how Ping.fm promotes its services on its front page of their website. So about ten days ago I decided to take up the offer and signed up. Anyone who uses services like Ping.fm or Hellotxt will understand the value of updating their social profiles on various different social networks and bookmarking services with one click. This is exactly the outcome I was hoping to achieve.

So on the day I signed up, I set-up my social profiles at Linkedin, Facebook and Plaxo with Ping.fm. Setting up these networks with Ping.fm was a breeze. I also tested the service by sending one status update and a blog post.

A Turkish court recently blocked access to MySpace and Last.fm, according to a Turkish blog. Internet users are already prevented in accessing Facebook and YouTube. This latest ban may be as a result of a case filed by Turkish Union of Music Producers.

The Turkish blog site Webrazzi has reported this on their website.

Access to MySpace and Last.fm is banned by Turkish court. We are currently not fully informed about the reason of the ban, but it may be due to music copyright violations.

Search Engine Optimisation remains a key element of internal marketing strategies for any organisation who wish to have a decent web presence. In fact, organisations spend thousands of dollars hiring SEO experts so that the volume and quality of traffic to their web site from search engines can be improved. But most of you would already know the importance of SEO optimised web sites.

In the last few days, I have been working on optimising Club Intimate pages. Whilst I could have outsourced this task to the experts, I decided to this myself. And the reason for this is, in my view, if one wants to learn the ins and outs of a technique or a method then one must get their hands dirty by doing it themselves.

The new website is now launched. It was launched yesterday (8 September) at around 8:00pm AEST. It took about 3 hours to complete the launch process, this also included migration of user data from the existing site to the new site. No major issues were encountered. Users were able to login and use Club Intimate as they usually do.

Since the launch however, we have been engaged in the quality control process to make sure that all functionalities are working as they should. There are some known minor issues which we think will be resolved this week.

The engineering team was working till late last night and I thank them for all their efforts. This has been a long road but a major milestone has been achieved.