2011 was a heck of a roller coaster ride for me, and I’m going to spend a few minutes reflecting on my personal and commercial experiences this year and forecast my plans for 2012.

Personal

I have grown closer than ever with my beautiful wife. Even though my workload has increased this year, we manage to spend more time together, and we have more fun than ever before! Kell is the number one focus of my life, and I have never and will never lose sight of that fact.

I spent a month mid-year visiting the USA, Mexico, Cuba and Peru with some of my very best mates, and I have a greater appreciation for the virtue of friendship than I have ever had before. I have greater clarity around the definition of a friend; which ensures that I spend my time with high quality people that bring value to my life and to their own lives.

Unfortunately, I lost one of my truly great mates in the most tragic of circumstances. His passing continues to have a profound impact on the attitude I try to bring to my life each day, and it has opened my eyes to an important social issue that I was relatively uninformed about previously.

Business

This time, one year ago Vortilla Digital did not exist. There was no business, no staff, no clients, no name, nothing more than a vague plan for 2011 and a fairly bold projection of the market potential.

10 months after our launch – after a lot of hard work – Vortilla Digital has become one of Australia’s leading mobile app development companies with blue-chip clients including;

• Australian Federal Government
• Ambulance Victoria
• Goodyear & Dunlop Tyres Ltd
• Life Saving Victoria
• Hyundai Australia Ltd
• Henley Homes Ltd
• Drummond Golf Pty Ltd
• Nulon Oils
• Kidney Health Australia
• and many more…

In addition to these clients, we have also established business partnerships with;

• Scott Pendlebury
• The Shane Warne Foundation
• A couple more to come very soon… just pending contract signings!

Recently, we have also developed an amazing physical product to launch in early 2012; which I feel has the potential to become a commonly recognised brand by end of 2012. I promise to work tirelessly throughout 2012 to ensure that it achieves its full potential.

I would like to personally thank my whole team at Vortilla Digital for all of their hard work throughout this past year. It takes courage and faith to be involved in a start-up, and I am truly grateful that our team were able to share my vision for what we would become… I just never dreamed that it would happen so quickly!

What does 2012 hold?

In 2012 I am looking forward to working even more closely with The Shane Warne Foundation to raise funds for seriously ill and under privileged Australian children. The team at The Shane Warne Foundation, led by Jason Warne are so passionate about their work that it is completely infectious, and I can’t wait to help out again next year.

At Vortilla Digital, we will continue doing high quality work for our clients.

We will also establish ourselves within the retail sector of at least two unrelated industries with soon to be released products. I feel that this is an important way to future-proof our business against changes in technology and ensure greater sustainability for our business than we currently have by simply selling a software development service.

My wife and I are hoping to spend a month in Europe mid-year, which we are both very excited about. Seeing the Greek Islands would certainly be a big tick from my bucket list, and I think Kell plans to book us for a donkey ride through Malta… which should be… ummm… interesting!

Thanks to anybody that felt it worthwhile to endure my utterly self-indulgent summation of the past year. I suppose turning 30 this year has made me a little more reflective than I normally would be. Rest assured, I will now return my focus to the tasks ahead of me.

I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas, and that you all choose to make 2012 your best year yet!

If we were all able to put egos and greed aside, I think this situation is a no-brainer.

In a nutshell, the AVERAGE NBA player currently earns around $5.5m per year. This new collective bargaining agreement would have seen the AVERAGE NBA player earning around $8.5m per year by 2021 – with incremental increases along the way.

Now, I just need to know, how much does someone really need to be paid in order to have the privilege of living the dream they – and every other child – dreamed from the day they were old enough to dream.

Is being granted the opportunity to live your dream, really such a burden that you need more than $8.5m per year to live it? Come on.

I am objective enough to understand that the players have financial commitments, for which they expected a greater pay rise – via a greater share of the total BRI (Basketball Related Income) – but considering the current global economic situation, the players are displaying an extraordinary amount of greed.

You can hear the clip here: Listen to clip

I hope that during my lifetime, Eddie and the guys get their wish and cigarettes are completely banned in Australia. Not because I have anything against smokers, but I do have a problem with companies that use their products to kill their addicted customers for a profit in this country every day.

Apparently in Australia we are so concerned about people’s safety, that;

• It is illegal to drive 1kp/h over a speed limit because it’s dangerous and MIGHT injure or kill someone. This danger is legislated against and heavily enforced.

Our roads kill less than 300 people each year.

• We have lost almost every form of domestic privacy because people might get harmed by ‘terrorism’ or the ‘CBD Violence’ that we keep hearing so much about.

Terrorism kills less than 30 Australians each year - on a 10 year average. Almost all of which were on Indonesian soil in the 2002 Bali bombings.

• Yet tobacco companies are lawfully allowed to use their products to get young people addicted, extract a lifetime of profits out of them… and then kill them – one way or another – in almost every case.

Smoking KILLS thousands of Australians every single month… and has been doing so for decades!

Two of these above-mentioned ‘dangers’ are illegal, and condemned as grave dangers to our society… The other is completely legal and available to anyone over 18 years old, from a retailer located within 5 minutes of where you are right now.

For a limited time only, all proceeds go to The Shane Warne Foundation, and all banners created give you the opportunity to win 2 tickets to The Joe Hachem & Shane Warne Charity Poker Tournament.

Use this app to create an inspirational, funny, satirical, or supportive banner for your team – or your most hated team! You can even upgrade the app to be able to add a photo of yourself – using the camera – or of anything else you can find using the built-in Google Images search feature. Perhaps your favourite – or most hated – player may appear on a banner, along with your thoughts on him?!?!

The Vortilla Digital team have worked very hard to bring this great product to you, so if you like the app, please take a moment to provide a 5-star rating in the app-store, and share your banners on Facebook & Twitter to spread the word.

Happy banner making!!!

The story (below) implies that all you need is a great idea. WRONG! You need a great idea, and a willingness to take that important first step and partner up with an experienced developer.

If you have a great iPhone app idea, head over to Vortilla Digital, send through a website enquiry and the team will give you a call to help take it to market.

In short, the theory says that for a business to be truly able to measure it’s success, it must look at more than just it’s traditional (financial) bottom line, and make a contribution to the environment and society as a whole.

I strongly believe in the merits of the theory and very recently I have started implementing strategies for achieving triple bottom line success into our iPhone app development business and our air conditioning business.

We are very proud to be working with the Department of Health and Ageing in Canberra, to create an iPhone application for their Drug Awareness Campaign. Amongst our team, we all feel strongly about our responsibility to use our skills and resources to help ‘at risk’ individuals avoid using drugs, and avoid putting themselves in situations where drugs may be present.

After some analysis of our current business practices, we also realised that our air conditioning business could – and should – be doing more to assist the environment. In short we have implemented measures that will significantly reduce the amount of wastage, and chosen to only stock the most energy efficient air conditioning units.

We expect these decisions to have a minimal negative effect on our financial bottom line, and the additional ‘good’ we do will certainly offset any small losses.

Tiger's last victory was at the 2009 Australian Masters, here in Melbourne.

I am a golf tragic. I am the  guy who gets up early every Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday morning throughout the USPGA tour season to watch Australia’s coverage. I play Yahoo Fantasy Golf with some mates here in Australia and North America, and every chance I get I hit a course in Melbourne to hone my limited skills.

Like all other golf fans, I am asking the questions… When will Tiger start winning again? What  changes need to occur before this can happen? Will he ever win another major? Is he THAT much worse than he was, or is everyone else THAT much better?

I’m no technical golf expert, so I am not going to insult my readers’ intelligence by attempting to describe the subtle differences I have noticed in his swing over the past 18 months.

I believe that Tiger has to stop apologising.

3 weeks ago in Dubai he was fined for spitting on the course after missing a putt. He apologised to the press, the Euro tour and even offered a rare tweet to apologise to all of his fans.

Last week he was terrible in his first round loss at the Accenture Match Play, he apologised for losing his temper.

Why go to such an effort to let us all know how sorry he is? Does he want to salvage some respect from the world between now and the end of his pro career? Does he want sponsors to love him again?

Newsflash… none of this matters if he start winning again!

Tiger, just do whatever makes you feel invincible, like you used to. Superheroes don’t spend their days apologising, treading lightly, kissing babies or helping old ladies across the street! At least Tiger Woods the superhero didn’t.

I’d like to see Tiger grit his teeth, thump his chest, give his haters the finger and kiss a blonde porn star before teeing off on the 1st tee next week… WE DON’T CARE! If it will make him feel invincible and larger than life like he used to… then I want to see him DO IT!

Bottom line, I believe that a lot of his issues are in his head. He has lost the feeling of being the invincible man of steel, and until he believes he is a winner again, he won’t be.

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The marketer would have expected that customers would visit their website, and if they had a well designed site, they would have attempted to capture the email details of each visitor to enable ongoing email marketing.

How times have changed!

Now we want our customers to find us on Facebook. But why?

1. Most internet users spend more time on Facebook than they do anywhere else on the internet.
2. We don’t have to ask for something as intrusive as a traditional ‘opt-in’, where we ask for a name, email and/or phone number.
3. We can communicate as regularly as we like and we know that our communication WILL BE READ as it will appear in the news feed of our customers… unlike the thousands of unread emails that must be sent to get one person to open it.

Don’t all go out and destroy your websites just yet… but keep in mind that a combination of social media with traditional online marketing will get you better results.

Oh, and don’t forget that internet users are real people… so the ‘Real World’, offline or analogue marketing techniques that have worked just fine for hundreds of years… still work!

Basically, it’s an online service that allows you to watch all NBA games live in HD streaming over the internet. It cost a bit over a hundred bucks (Australian Dollars) for the whole year, and then around an extra hundred bucks to upgrade to the premium pack and also to include the playoffs.

Check out the awesome control panel, and how easy it is to switch between live games!

Warning, do not let the poor quality of my video put you off this service. The quality is absolutely perfect HD streaming footage, and the video just looks crap because my Sony Bloggie is an absolute piece of S#@T! But that’s a topic for another day.

If you want to check it out, you can do so here https://ilp.nba.com/nbalp/secure/registerform.

Regardless of the team, the state of play, the consequences of the game or the popularity (or lack thereof) of the players involved, he brings an unconditional state of enthusiasm to everything he calls.

In round 22 this year came a classic Bruce moment.

The lowly placed Richmond was taking on the – also lowly placed – Port Adelaide Power in a game that had no consequence on the outcome of the season for either team. It was Ben Cousins’ last game of AFL footy and his mighty Tigers were getting one of the all time floggings.

Down by 10+ goals in the second quarter, there seemed to be no way back… however, as the signs of a famous comeback started to emerge, Bruce got very excited.

Unbelievable goal… They’re roaring now the tigers!

Even this alone was classic Bruce enthusiasm in a match that not many people cared too much about… then came an almighty…

Rooooaaaarrrr!!!

Great stuff Bruce! Keep it up!