It’s hard, really hard to reduce roaming costs as they are based on agreements between Telcos across the world. Some excerpts:

In the last year 2.4 million people visited New Zealand. Almost all of them own phones, many own data cards attached to laptops or iPads, and almost all were unable to use the data functions.

…

The current data roaming rates are orders of magnitude out. The $7813 per GB that Telecom charges for New Zealand visitors to Australia is almost 100 times larger than the charge for domestic customers on their cheapest plan, $79.95 for 80GB. We can also assume that the $79.95 for 80GB is a much fairer reflection of the true physical costs of delivering data to a handset or data card that is in New Zealand.
…
So here is my proposal for the Australasian carriers and their respective ministers – Steven Joyce and Stephen Conroy. Aim to cap data roaming costs between Australia and New Zealand at $40 per gigabyte, with that price automatically reducing by 25 per cent per year thereafter.

…
Once the results are in, use them to cut bilateral deals with other countries and carriers, letting the eventual snowball effect follow so that we can leave our devices on. It is your chance to change the world.

<update – I found this ad later on – which directs to the above>

I tried it out to see what would happen.

The timer and the question answers are, of course irrelevant. Take your time, select Bill Gates and eventually you’ll see this:

And no – I could not read the fine print – a least not without expanding the font a few times. Here’s a closer look. Suffice to say by signing up you commit to 3 x $3 texts per week.

But that’s not all. This is a particular “competition” drives customers to enter multiple texts to win. It seems the winners are those scoring the most points, and to score points you simply enter multiple times. Each entry, after the first 3, costs 20 cents. That doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable until you think about it. The winner of this competition is probably playing to 100 games per month maximum (at least they have a maximum), which costs $20. The bit I am not clear about is whether each game (“jumble”) requires multiple answers to be sent, which would start racking up those SMS costs.

Regardless. It’s clearly at least somewhat deceitful – given the tiny white on grey text, and it is clearly expensive. Stay away.

The only answer to these is education – as regulation seems to be failing.

A great daily deals experiment by MightyApe kicks off today – a marathon. They selling 3500 items, but deals are valid for only 10 minutes. I assume, and I hope for their sake, that the prices will be ridiculously cheap.

Here is the first installment. Nice simple design.

We shall see.

Check out the GroupyDeals business site as well.

*Groupy Deals was founded by Scott Kitney, along with Andrew Hunt, Fay French and myself.

Groupy Deals is following in the footsteps of Groupon – a US business that has managed to dominate the US market for daily service-oriented deals. They also managed to raise US$135m in 3rd round funding at a valuation of $1.35 billion – a feat which garnered a lot of global attention.

Alas we are not alone.

So it’s no surprise that we were not alone in our idea to copy Groupon. Our competitors include DailyDo – an Auckland based crowd, DailyOffer – another Auckland crowd, and APN/Bradley Media <edited – thanks Shane>  backed Groupdeal, which is yet to launch. We are quite disappointed with that last, err, group, as our business name of Groupy Deals Limited and our business site (GroupyDeals.com) are very similar to their proposed trading name. It was close, but we were first, and we’ve asked them to change. <update2 – they have – thanks Shane and the team.>

Then there are the one day sale sites. First-in was the first one I found a while back, but check out TheSniff and LoveOneDaySales for the lengthy list of sites now.

We think we are going well. Since launching 2 weeks ago we have had some cool deals, and sold 190 coupons for services. The businesses love it as they get new customers to try their services, and customers love getting great deals – and trying those new services.

Our next step is to launch in Auckland and other cities. If you’d like to help, and you can sell, then please get in touch.

So what are the secrets of starting a GroupOn clone?

Well – you need great deals, a good number of fans that are looking for great deals, and a simple to use website.

We have great deals in Wellington, found by our own super sales person – Fay French. We integrate with Facebook well, have our own Facenook pages, such as WellingtonGroupy, ability to like a deal and good conversations. We have also given away a bunch of credit to people referring friends – payable when those friends also buy a deal.

Our website was build by Scott, who as part of the Trade Me dev team just gets this stuff. He’s also spent time at Cannla and Winnla, and gets how to develop for Facebook.

In the spirit of open competition, and fairness, here is the site along with some annotations. Please – if you are a competitor I am sure you can do it better your way. Really ;-)

And tweak they will need to do. Sadly for me the site has taken a giant leap backwards. I enjoyed reading the blog, but now all that lovely content seems to be buried and scattered. Buried in that only the first sentence of an article is directly visible, and scattered in that the content is spread amongst the sections. The scattering shows up interest’s problem – their daily content for each area is thin, while their content itself is rich. So I feel the news site approach is not the best for them. A good case study is Kiwiblog, which releases about the same (and this is a wild guess) number of articles each day.

I like the tagline for interest.co.nz -”helping you make financial decisions”, but the site could do so much more to do so. If I go to, say, the insurance section, then I want to see a combination of general information, widgets that help me select a provider and, say, a mother-in-law guide to insurance clauses. The possibilities are endless.

So this review in pictures is pretty critical – sorry Bernard – but the real work starts now, with constant improvements promised. I’m looking forward to where it is going.

<update – pictures now click through to larger versions>

The Home page leaves me confused to interest.co.nz’s purpose.

News. This was quite disappointing, and where I expected the blog content to be. If I want short snippets of news then I’ll go to Stuff or NZHerald. I come to interest.co.nz for more insights, which is why I’d like to see the words.

Property seemed vacant

Borrowing is all about what could be done in the future

As is saving.

So many obscure terms – I wonder what they mean?

Interest.co.nz should be the definitive guide to NZ financial institutions. It’s not (yet).

Insurance

It’s WSJ Professional Edition – and which professional cannot resist having their employer pay the $25 extra per month to get these extras:

Frankly those extras should be included with the WSJ subscription, and this is simply a way to price discriminate. But I confess an admiration for the way the upsell works. Included is a more powerful search feature, which covers multiple sources – some that are also subscription based.

a better company search..

and – well that’s about it. This is a new industry page, but really there is not much here that shouldn’t be here already.

The clever thing is that the WSJ is the business paper of record, and many readers will feel obliged to upgrade. It’s easy for those readers to spend their company’s money, but still totally optional so that readers like myself will not feel too left out.

So now there are 3 levels of price – free for a few articles, $155 for online only subscribers and an extra $300 per year to make $455 for Pro subscribers.

So – will other online media move to offer readers to Go Pro? Who knows – but the industry will watch eagerly.

I do think it is important that the WSJ is adding functionality without anything taking away from ordinary subscribers (I hope). It’s also good that the WSJ has something valuable to sell and readers that need no excuse to spend more money.

Not many have. Just 6500 visitors a day visit Autotrader, a lot less than the over 140,000 per day average that visit Trade Me Motors.

Autotrader lost because everything was just too hard and too expensive. Their business practices were inherently expensive and unfair to dealers, and the process was painful to sellers and customers versus the ease of Trade Me. They were unable to adapt to the arrival of the internet, and when Trade Me deigned to pay attention to the market they soon faded away.

Ticketek is in the same situation. They sell 10 million tickets each year across in Australia and New Zealand, and do so in a way that seems to make people hate them. I certainly resent ever having to give any money to Ticketek – they seem to go out of their way to make the buying experience painful and expensive.

You represent a band. Go ahead – get Ticketek to represent you. Start with the website.

I can’t find a way. It seems Ticketek signs venues not acts, but even as a venue I can’t find a way into that site. And there is plenty else wrong with that page, even if you like a lot of blue. The logo refers to Ticketek.com, which is a gateway site – ther eis no real site at Ticketek.com, just some faded dreams.

The links at the top of the homepage are over two lines and with two different designs. Moreover they link to MSN, Bing, and, incredibly, Autotrader.

The buying process is disingenuous. First there is the note underneath ticket pricing that states “service fee may apply.”

What it should say is “We should include our outrageous fees in the advertised price under NZ law, but this little sticker says we don’t have to. Oh – and we’re kidding when we imply that fees may apply – fees always apply”

The first fee is delivery fee, which you have to pay as there is no online option:

Because it costs $8 to print a ticket out and put it into a stamped envelope. Automatically. And it costs  $8000 to hire people and print tickets for the 1000 tickets that people pick up at the venue.

Finally there are all the other fees. I declined to find out what they were because I had to register to continue – and was confronted with this screen of transaction death:

Enough.

Ticketek dominates the space because they have the contracts with the event holders sewn up. Their usability and values can be horrific but if their venues get the acts we want to see, then we will suffer accordingly.

But Autotrader used to have all of the motor vehicle dealers sewn up as well. Trade Me, through Autobase, had to approach every one of them – and slowly they moved away until the floodgates opened. They moved away because Autobase and Trade Me were easier to deal with, cheaper and a lot more effective at selling cars.

Enter EventFinder. They have been around for a bit, and it’s a friendly experience to use their site as a buyer:

They charge just $2 service fee for this Phoenix Foundation gig.

However they still want me to register, though the screen is not so intimidating.

So I gave up as well. I won’t get to see the SF bath house just yet.

A quick aside – a while ago I wrote about not making customers register as they go through the buying process, using Ascent as the case study. Well MightyApe actually tried this out after reading that article, and saw sales rise by a significant percentage. (Dylan said I could not quote the actual percentage, but it was a good one).

If you’ve read this far and you have a register screen on your site before allowing customers to buy, then why not A/B test this? Give it a go, and do let me know down the track how it works out for you.

I suggest the folks at EventFinder try it as well. The trick is to ask only for the details you need to deliver a ticket, and to do that at the last possible moment of the transaction. Get my email address for sending the voucher, my street address for the credit card authorisation and that’s it. When all is done you can whether I would like to add a password to save details for next time. Don’t call it registration though. You can separately ask whether I want to be spammed, I mean, added to your email lists.

Anyway – the feel of EventFinder is a lot lot better than Ticketek, but the real news is that they have made it dead easy for event providers to sell tickets. Introducing EventFinderPro, which is at the url of SellTicketsOnline.co.nz for now.

It feels right. It feels fair.

It seems the sites are providing a better service to sellers, lowering the costs of delivering that service and providing a massively better customer experience for buyers. (They syndicate the event listings through several other sites) They are aiming at the smaller sellers first, but getting increasingly professional. Sound familiar?

They charge sellers $1 per ticket sold. I have not reconciled that with the $2 that the customer is charged for the Phoenix tickets though. Will they still charge customers that fee?

They are implying that Ticketek is taking money from sellers in a variety of ways, and not all of them pleasant. Meanwhile EventFinder is front and center about their value proposition to sellers and are attacking Ticketek at the point of customer pain:

On EventFinder free means free. I hate to think what comped tickets cost on Ticketek.

EventfinderPro also seems to have lovely tracking charts for sellers, and pay the next day. They also appear to be able to ramp up their product for bigger venues – with scanners and the like available. I’d use them if I had an event to sell.

So Eventfinder seems cheaper, faster, simpler and a darn sight more fun to deal with than Ticketek.

While Ticketek has the venue market now, they have been treating buyers and sellers poorly, and the tide of frustration is getting ready to break. If Eventfinder plays this right, and Ticketek, as I suspect, are institutionally incapable of changing, then it is just a matter of time. They can rect, but that reaction will need to be to move to where EventFinder alredy is, and they will see a loss of revenue as they do it. The alternative is to hang on to a business that slowly fades away.

Ticketek has just 225 venues across Australia and New Zealand, and it will get progressiviely easy to switch those venues over to EventFinder as time goes by. EventFinder will need a strong sales effort and patience to make this happen.

EventFinder’s cost to serve venues is lower, and they take less money from customers and venues and their website makes it easier to buy and sell tickets. If they win they will help reduce the real cost of tickets for customers, put more dollars in the hands of venues and acts and fill the clubs and stadiums. And wouldn’t that be a good thing.

At some stage the economic model of Ticketek will collapse, they will thankfully disappear, and we can all start going to concerts again.

I didn’t know I had a relationship with Techday and neither was there an address of the sender included. So I clicked the Unsubscribe link and arrived here:

It’s a website that I have never been to before, and I certainly don’t want to login or register.

Now I did get a registration at Netguide a number of years ago (you needed to do so in order to vote for the Netguide awards – my user name was “whyregister”) but I certainly did not recall giving permission to receive spam from Techday, who seem to own Netguide now. Nor do I feel it is right that my login has moved across to the Techday sites. I’ve searched through my old email and see nothing explaining all this.

So  I suggest that the folks there read this and familiarise themselves with the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act of 2007.

You never know which direction sites will go – and we were pleasantly surprised to see several cartoonists sign up early to syndicate their content. Cartoonists you see each day, including Garrick Tremain and Malcolm Evans. We added a cartoon section and expanded the size of pictures just for them.

Our next challenge for us to to get the sales moving. The content on the site is looking pretty good and we are encouraging editors to take a look around and start buying from now.