Jonathan Cusick

Lookaly is a new service that has been developed in order to act as a gateway for people based in Belfast and Northern Ireland to share their experiences of goods and services provided by local businesses.

When you first visit Lookaly the first thing that will standout is the design, this has clearly been taken very seriously and a lot of thought placed on making the user experience as smooth as possible through a clean and well structured interface.

The businesses that are available for browsing have been placed into a range of categories which include:

Automotive
Eating, Drinking and Nightlife
Financial and Legal
Leisure and Sports
Public Services, Education and Careers
Travel and Transportation

Once you have located the business you are interested in you can simply view all the reviews, photos and contact details that are associated with it. If you own a business or have an experience you want to share I would highly recommend adding it to their directory, so far it has helped me several times on choosing where to go for lunch in Belfast.

Lookaly also provides a blog which covers topics such as local events, products and of course businesses.

Another nice feature from Lookaly comes from utilising the social networking platform Twitter, they will often tweet a summary of reviews that have been posted, so it is a good idea to follow @Lookaly if you are a Twitter user.

Overall I think Lookaly is an extremely useful service and I am looking forward to seeing it grow as more businesses are added to the directory.

The cause for this years Twestival Local in Belfast was Camphill NI and in an effort to raise as much money as possible, local Twitter users took over the Bunatee Bar in the Queen’s University Students Union. With quite possibly the best pub quiz ever thrown (well it was pretty good), pint glasses for donations and raffle tickets an enjoyable evening was had by all.

Everyone was very generous with all their donations and it was great to see some familiar faces in addition to meeting some new Tweeters. I am looking forward to catching up with everyone again soon.

For some excellent photos from the night be sure and check out the Lookaly blog.

This weekend was the annual N.I. International Airshow which took place in Portrush.

A wide range of aircrafts took to the skies including the largest passenger aircraft in the world, the Airbus A380.

The RAF Red Arrows, an RAF Eurofighter Typhoon, the Blades Display Team, an RAF Hawk, and a Royal Navy Mk4 Sea King all made an appearance along with many others.

Unfortunately I missed the Red Arrows display but the rest of the displays were a joy to watch and even the weather managed to hold out.

During the day I also bumped into local photographer Phil O’Kane, keep an eye on his blog for more photos from the day.

I didn’t manage to get many good photos but this one turned out not too bad:

I did take more photos which I will post on Flickr.

Yesterday I was fortunate to attend the first leg of the FOWD (Future of Web Design) Tour which started in Belfast.

A great line up to speakers who are all experts in their respective fields included:

During the day there was also time for 25 minutes of ‘Speed Networking’ where you could quickly hand out business cards and meet people working in the same fields.

Overall it was a great day and I hope FOWD makes an appearance in Belfast again next year.