Ok that doesn’t really make sense .. but we made posi 51 in the Anthill Smart 100! Almost in the top 50 .. we’ll keep an eye out to see who we can knee-cap for next year. It was a fun night at Life Labs in Digital Harbour. The event was last Thursday and I’m a bit late blogging about it .. I had hoped to give you a run down on who made the top 10, but I lost my pre-release Anthill mag somewhere in between that glass of red and more beer.

Needless to say .. we’re all stoked here at team APPLEBOX. Well done Sare, Mara and Andrew! We were in esteemed company .. the top spot went to a team that has pioneered early detection of breast cancer through hair analysis (ok ok .. maybe we should have been #2 then).

I had to check another of the top 10, Cone-head, ’cause I couldn’t believe Dan Aykroyd was in the house .. nope .. Cone-head is a new-style shock-absorbent liner for bike helmets. Clearly the health and safety angle was a winner so I think our new APPLEBOX angle is reduction of VE shock. Yes, Video Ezy shock. A coma-like induced state that some experience when visiting their local Video Ezy. Disorientation from endless wandering, flouro-induced memory loss, hearing tinnitus from blaring DVD-loops and a general bad-interior-design-101 induced psychosis. Very horrible and I’m pleased to announce we at APPLEBOX have discovered a cure.

Well done Anthill for putting on the show & congrats also to Colmar Brunton who did the analysis and came up with the rankings. If I had a wee little crit for the night it would be that we weren’t given any info on what the smarts of the top 10 were. As the winners shook hands a two liner on what they did would have been welcome .. we had to hit the mag later and speak to others to work out exactly what they did.

When we get hold of the next edition of Anthill we’ll bring it into the shop for all to see!

Back in July, a publication called DVD Industry noticed us, got in touch and we did an interview. You can read it here. This was the first time someone from within the DVD rental industry had spoken to us .. which is great. Doing something like APPLEBOX is very much a challenge to the old guard. We’re young upstarts, who’ve never run a video store before and yet we’re telling everyone they’ve got it wrong! They’re out of touch and they’ve got to change. Understandably, nobody wants to listen. Whilst there might be a sense of coming change in the DVD industry, the traditional video store is still the undisputed heavy weight, and the industry leaders .. Blockbuster and Video Ezy .. are sitting back pretty much doing nothing. Ok, they are messing around the edges with a vague and ill-defined kiosk and VOD strategy .. but we say they’re experimenting in all the wrong places.

The article is pretty good .. except our inventory has suddenly grown. We don’t quite have 58,000 DVDs, it’s around the 6,700 mark at the moment .. but we’ll get there!

Yes, it was a great night, with sore heads all around the day after. Here are a couple from our posed winners shoot!

Now, in our ‘crazy’ shot, Andrew doesn’t look entirely comfortable as he sorta stretches out. Sarah reckon’s I’m about to spring out of the page, ready to go toe to toe with Dexter. So that leaves our 2 naturals in the middle, Mara strikes out with purpose, resolute in our achievement and Sarah’s already rehearsing for later on in the night!

A few weeks ago we made page 13 of the local Leader here in Northcote. That far in, I was amazed at how many people read it! Goes to show mainstream media still has it’s readership.

What look do you call that Sare?

City Of Darebin is our local council and they’re running a ‘Love Living Local’ campaign to get residents enthusiastic about their local neighbourhood. Local business, local activities, walking, cycling, public transport .. it keeps us clean and green, fit and healthy. YEAH!

Local is big. We live in a global interconnected world where I can skype a mate in Ireland for nothing, scour the web for any and all detail I want on flatworm mating habits, satisfy my hankering for icelandic folk music and read The Age online when I’ve got a ‘mo. But, I still gotta get the milk, enjoy a weekend cooked breakfast, indulge the local barista. And lo and behold, stretching the legs, moving around and doing these things is good for me!

Local will never die and local activity will never die. Good local businesses will never die. Corollary: APPLEBOX will always have a place. Bring on downloads. Let Quickflix become a mega success. We’ll be part of the mix because local will always be strong.

And so it was über nice to get profiled in the Love Living Local mag that the council distributed to a couple thousand local residents. You can read the full mag here, and here’s our little bit:

Many thanks to Kim Heras of Technation. He’s written a great piece about us. There’s a spot on competitor round up and Kim has really cottoned on well to what we’re doing. Technation is covering startup action here in Australia, which is great because there’s lots of juice once you look around!

Anyone notice our bold advertising campaign we’ve been running about once a month in the Northcote Leader? Well here’s the easiest Where’s Wally you’ll ever get. It’s somewhere on the front page

As I mentioned in my last post, Vishal Sharma is running a startups carnival that I was unfortunately late to register for. However Vishal has kindly profiled APPLEBOX as a surprise late entrant, even though we aren’t eligible for judging. You can read our profile here. It will give you some background on our wee little startup and is worth a read. Thanks Vishal!

Woot! Heres the article: Watching This Space.

Way to go Adam, thanks for the write up! My doors opened not quite 3 weeks ago - so it’s fantastic to be given this visibility. For anyone wanting a better view of the space, check out these hi-res photos:

1. Inside 1
2. Inside 2
3. Inside 3
4. Dusk

David Johns the neighbourhood gallery owner - snapped these for me. I’ve been meaning to incorporate these into the website, but yikes, trying to find development time at the moment is well nigh impossible. Working 7 days a week in my store is soaking up quite a bit of time - but I’m loving it

Hey - made the front page of Builder AU!! You can check out the article here. The lead in:

Simon Gilligan’s attempt to breathe new life into the neighbourhood video rental store, called applebox has become an unlikely showcase for Web 2.0 technologies.

The article was written by Brad Howarth. Many thanks! Brad gives incredible coverage of the Australian IT sector - from IT initiatives to go green, the state of play with VC and emergent companies through to architecture and development strategies that small companies (like me) put into practice. Its one helluva spread that pretty much guarantees a seat on any discussion panel you can think of! It’s great that Brad has an ear to the ground and is willing to speak to the small players .. one day we’ll be big gov - honest!