Great: AirNZ runs a giant charity Auction each year Dumb: using Sellmefree as the vehicle. Here, for example, is 2 month’s worth of Business Class travel for two people. It was added 3 days ago, and should be attracting a bunch of traffic. The value of this to the right buyer is big. It costs …
Author Archives: Lance Wiggs
How to launch a succesful blog
It’s simple. First – Use the giant NYTimes as your blog vehicle, and be part of an existing blog Second- Be a well known and followed writer – Pico Iyer Third – Pick a topic we all love to hate – Airlines and finally – start your blog by telling a bunch of Americans that …
The vote is in: Housing prices are overvalued
I know internet polls are unscientific, but it seems that Stuff poll voters are pretty clear on housing prices these days: I agree. Just check your rent versus buy numbers. Over here in Perth I’m paying rent of a third of the mortgage payments required to buy this place. I should know – it is …
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eBay re-enters Japan
As with New Zealand, eBay failed to make an impact in Japan, and exited the market after Yahoo! established the dominant auction site. (eBay still talks about NZ as an eBay market though, which is pretty amusing) Now eBay and Yahoo! have announced that they are linking forces to give Yahoo! Japan auction members access …
Fairfax Digital – new head
MEDIA RELEASE 6 December 2007 FAIRFAX MEDIA APPOINTS NEW DIGITAL HEAD Fairfax Media has appointed Stephen Smith to the position of Group Head of Digital. Prior to accepting the Fairfax Media position, Stephen headed Vodafone’s media and entertainment operations. Stephen will be responsible for Fairfax Media’s Online division, which includes stuff.co.nz, rugbyheaven.co.nz, and the online …
Is Road Safety a value for our Police Force?
Dave Moore writes on the motorcycle vs Police Car crash in the Buller gorge. A police car did a three point trn on a narrow incredibly curvy road to case a motorcycle, and 2 more crashed into him. There is a systematic safety culture failure that really scares me here. First – what made the …
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The mobile web is irrelevant
Deserving of a separate post I think – those mobile browser stats show one important thing: Nobody cares about the web on mobile phones. The top 3 mobile browsers added up to a paltry 0.16% of web traffic, which for most Websites is approximately nothing. Of course if you are Google it’s a lot of …
Why the iPhone matters: Mobile internet that works
It’s simple – just look at the stats. After just 5 months on the US market, the iPhone browser is showing a 0.09% browser traffic share. (and that’s with 2.5G not 2G) Compare that with Windows Mobile devices – rating 0.06% of the market, with about 14 times the number of handsets out there. Why? …
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Online ads over $60bn by 2010
ZenithOptimedia has just made the prediction that global online ad spend will be 11.5% of all media spend in 2010. That’s the average – they reckon online will acccount for over 20% of media spend for Denmark, Norway, Sweden and the UK, which is already at 15%. However they also predict that most of the …
Goodbye payphones…
At least in chunks of the USA. AT&T is getting rid of them by the end of next year. The USA had 2.6m payphones in 1998 and about 1m now. Apparently, the story goes, AT&T (or someone else) commissioned McKinsey years ago to determine the demand for mobile phones. The answer that came back was …
Why Slashdot still rocks – Earth as a billard ball
Digg, Reddit, kiwi wannabe Scoop and other news-commentary sites may come and go, but the forefather of them all is Slashdot. Here’s a post that may go somewhere to explaining why Slashdot appeals so much to the nerd community. Bear in mind these are small differences: if you could make a perfect scale model of …
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Wanted: A CTO for our well-funded start-up
My cousin here in Perth is launching his mobile application start-up in earnest, with solid VC funding all but finalised from a group that has a successful track record of delivering mobile start-ups to market. The mobile application itself complete, and it is currently being tweaked offshore for the hundreds of phones out there. Now …
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Kiwi botnet creator – criminal mastermind or bit player?
The WSJ – famed conservative organ – says the following about the Kiwi lad Owen Walker interviewed for his alleged internet deeds: The arrests make good headlines, but will have little real impact. Over the last several years, cyber crime has become organized. Arresting the guy who writes the code or who sent the emails …
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once again The Onion speaks the truth
Entire blogosphere stunned NEW YORK—In what is being called a seminal moment in Internet history, a rare weekend post by 25-year-old blogger Ben Tiedemann on his website bentiedemanntellsall.blogspot.com rocked the 50 million-member blogosphere this Saturday. The landmark post, which updated nearly every member of the global online community on the shelf Tiedemann was building, was …
US housing crisis – more evidence
The October US new house sales statistics were revised after official release from 735k to 727k, and the September ones from 770k to 716k. Those are big differences, and signs that all is not well in housing land. So via the WSJ blog, a few tasty tidbits about the stats: It isn’t just the bottom …
Lance Wiggs 