RedStrong Red (default) BlueCalm Blue GreenFresh Green

Chose your color scheme.

You going to Taste of Cork?

Posted on June 15, 2008, by Conor O'Neill, under Business, Cork, Food.

It looks like Taste of Dublin this weekend was a big success and a huge improvement over last year. I was thrilled to hear that they are doing a Taste of Cork from Friday 27th June to Sunday 29th. Over on LouderVoice, we’d like to capture the quality of the event by having people review what they eat/drink/encounter by SMS. The most popular review will win a prize (suggestions on what that should be are very welcome).

Don’t worry, you don’t have to be remotely geeky to do the reviews. Both of my parents are very non-technical and they do SMS reviews all the time. You don’t even have to sign up on the site, it’ll happen automatically when you send your first review to 087-9409325. Here’s all you have to do:

LouderVoice SMS Instructions

There is a good selection of reviews from Taste of Dublin here so you can see the sort of things people were saying. If you want to do it in Cork just follow the instructions above and your reviews will appear on LouderVoice a few seconds later. If you know for definite that you’ll be trying it ahead of time, why not leave a comment here or ask any questions you might have?

The SMS are at your standard rate, they are not premium rate. You can also write long SMS reviews if your phone supports them. We’d love to see the feedback you all have on both the event and the exhibitors, many of whom are local Cork businesses.

By the way, if you run a local biz that is exhibiting at Taste of Cork, we’d love to provide you with mini-flyers to give out to encourage people to review your offerings. Either pop a comment here or mail me on conor AT loudervoice DOT com for more info.

11 Comments

Recipe and Gardening advice by SMS and Web

Posted on March 29, 2008, by Conor O'Neill, under Food, Gardening, Technology.

We’re just playing around with a few ideas on a site called Jaiku this morning (they were bought by Google a few months back). The idea is that you can have discussion channels on particular topics like technology, politics, Bandon GAA, whatever. What makes it (and other great sites like Twitter) so powerful is that you can interact with it entirely through SMS on your phone.

So this morning I created two non-techie ones that I thought might appeal to my more foodie readers. The first is #recipes and the second is #gardening. In both cases the idea was that they could be used for requesting advice (in addition to general chitchat).

The #recipes one was suggested by Michael Kiely and he thought it would be great if you were out shopping and spotted an ingredient and wanted suggestions for mini-recipes so you’d know what else to buy whilst you were there. A quick SMS, a bit more shopping and you might get some suggestions back by SMS.

recipes2 - Share on Ovi

I thought of the #gardening one and it could also be used in a similar way to #recipes when in a Garden Centre and wondering e.g. is X worth buying, it Y over-priced etc.

gardening2 - Share on Ovi

Of course you can use both channels on the web too (and obviously type a lot more than 140 characters!).

There are two flies in the ointment. The first is that it’ll need more people on these channels to make them work and the second is that joining Jaiku is officially closed at the minute. Both can be solved in one fell swoop by heading over to Jaiku Invites, setup by Ciarán Rooney and requesting an invite to join.

Give it a go. It’s just a bit of fun and I’ve already had two suggestions on how to cook the fennel bulbs I bought on a whim in Lidl during the week. Any problems using it, just pop a comment here.

3 Comments

Text Your Loves and Loathings to LouderVoice

Posted on November 20, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Business, Reviews.

We’re really excited over on LouderVoice by this latest feature. You can now SMS your reviews directly to the web-site. So if you walk out of a terrible movie or wonderful restaurant or just want to get your opinion on any product or service off your chest, now you can. Those reviews will appear within seconds on the LouderVoice site.

The format is simplicity itself:

Review Rating1-5 ItemName: Opinion

It should look like this on your phone:

sms_review_phone

Then a few moments later, it will look like this on LouderVoice:

lv_review_output

We have two numbers you can use: +353-87-9409325 and due to lots of demand +44-778-6205133

Each SMS costs your standard network rate if you are texting your local country number.

And if you are feeling strongly opinionated, we do accept multi-message SMSes up to slightly more than 400 characters.

Just add your mobile number to your LouderVoice account (or sign-up, it only takes a moment), try it out and let us know what you think.

5 Comments