What a great product – Virgin America promises to shake up the US airline industry. It’s a shame the forces are conspiring against them – in spite of compliance with the law the department of Transportation just knocked back VA’s application. Enter VA’s grass roots campaign, along with a substantial restructuring in the ownership of …
Author Archives: Lance Wiggs
myspaceNZ
MySpace is launching a New Zealand site. Not a bad idea, if a little late. Three comments: 1: This is NZMusic‘s loss – they failed to make the transition from cool Muso discussion board to cool social networking muso space. 2: Bebo already owns New Zealand, except last time I looked their ads were not …
Sleeping your way to the tourism dollar
Rob Fyfe mentions some airlines are toying with economy class bunks. It is something that AirNZ has to make work if we are to attract increasing numbers of tourists to New Zealand. The space of an economy class seat is used poorly right now, but a combination bunk and perhaps stand up seat for landing/taking …
Housing is expensive. Again.
It seems that it take Kiwi’s much longer to buy a house than it does for those living in the US, Ireland and Canada. (Australia is worse off). The measure used is average price of a house over average income in the region. Three points from the great article: 1: It’s not the lack of …
Impact of comcom chasing Credit Card MSF’s
NZ credit card interchange fees, which dictate the minimum merchant service fee (MSF), are under attack by the commerce commission. That seems to be a great thing – these days the infrastructure and transactional costs should be trivial. The ComCom is also chasing merchant rules that prevent merchants from charging surcharges to credit card users …
Continue reading “Impact of comcom chasing Credit Card MSF’s”
Real Estate online
Bid4Assets is bragging that they sold $239m in California real estate online since 2000, and $40m in 2006 alone. gee – right now there are 27,930 residential properties listed on Trade Me. At an average price of $300,000 per house that’s $8.379 billion worth of real estate listings. Kinda makes that US$239m in 6 years …
mia rose – youtube launching new artists..
Mia Rose – could she be the next big thing – and thanks to youtube?? It seems that youtube is beating this year’s US American idol for creating recording artists. The music industry is seeing that our media use is moving online – it’s just a matter of time for advertisers to follow…
A better deal fails – DFS online sales
DFS is perplexed (see the photo caption) why not many people take advantage of their 20%-off offers for online or phone shoppers. The aim is to avoid the up to 40% commission that the airports charge on duty free sales. I’ll give them 4 starter reasons: 1: I’ve never seen an online ad for DFS …
AirNZ fare cut
Good news – I’m a huge fan of value based flights, which increase volume of travel and thus reduce the dependance of the airline on the wealthier segments of business and society. It’s not for nothing that the two biggest discounters (Jetblue and Southwest) in the USA are the two most profitable (and liked) airlines …
geni
geni is pretty cool – they want to build a family tree for the world. Check out the demo. It’s basically social networking family style, and has real potential. But why on earth did “Australasian” Gen-i not own the .com domain name? Is it because they are now owned by Telecom New Zealand? or because …
eBay – new trust and safety measures
eBay are having a big month in Trust and Safety They are bringing in “SMI“, which hides member nicknames in bid histories. This is to try to prevent the booming trade in bogus second chance offers. The downside is that it removes the community’s ability to detect dodgy bidders, though eBay says that it has …
eBay no longer fun?
One, two , three interesting posts from the eBay eCommerce forum, happening now. ebaystrategies is live blogging from there, and the linked posts are from a presentation by Meg Sloan on consumer research. Some snippets: Meg’s team divide buyers into four categories: – Shopping driven passionates – Convenience driven enthusiasts – Price driven value finders …
Google checkout – aggressive promotions
Google express is aggressively recruiting buyers: Sign up and get US$10 free – which you can spend on anything (excluding post and packaging) from some pretty major retailers – including Buy.com and Toysrus.com. Meanwhile retailers get free processing unti lte end of this year. This is exactly what the wannabe online payments players in New …
eBay Feedback 2.0
Officialy pre-announced: eBay is splitting feedback up into 4 sub categories: – Item description – Communication – Shipping time – S+H terms They will also expire (archive) old feedback, and you’ll only be able to see the last two years of results. First to test this will be (at least) three international sites – Australia, …
Brains and Beauty
Only in the USA. Actually no, but only in the USA would this be so blatant: Wealthy men meet beautiful women event Men are allowed to attend based on meeting income (age adjusted) or net worth requirements. e.g. $500,000+ if you are my age. Women are allowed to attend based on beauty – they submit …
Lance Wiggs 