Some Stuffies Newspaper of the year – again And my favorite – The environment portfolio award, sponsored by….. Shell, and won by Sandra Mu with (stunning) photos of… duck hunting.
Author Archives: Lance Wiggs
Qantas media awards – protest by APN Sub editors
At the Qantas media Awards last night there was a very polite protest from 3 APN sub editors (I assume). They are protesting against APN’s decision to outsource sub-editing. When someone turned the mike off the calmly walked off the stage, making a brief appearance on the dance floor later on. Very well done. Watch …
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Xero – projecting numbers
Jim Donovan’s En Avant suggests that picking Xero’s customer number is the same as picking Trade Me’s. Not so. Picking Trade Me’s potential customer base was not that difficult. Trade Me is in a winner take all geographically constrained C2C game. Once they were ahead it was pretty easy to make assumptions about how many …
Xero – to invest or not
Everyone seems to be talking about Xero – and I’ve been fielding a lot of ‘should I invest?’ queries. So here is what will now be my standard reply: Do your research. This is a low dollar early stage investment that would normally be offered to an Angel or Venture Capital investor. That means the …
Infratil stock split
Why does Infratil need to split their stock at $6.52, when everything I buy on the US markets is above $30? Meanwhile it is good to see Morrison and Co. staff being rewarded with a $14m payout. That is difficult to do in the society, but essential if you want to attract and retain the …
eBay firefox extension toolbar
Just to add some more fuel to Rowan’s on-going discussion of a Trade Me API and gadgets, a group of Stanford design(!) students releases a Firefox eBay toolbar (actually a hacked version of Firefox) with big implications. The toolbar does the basics, but also removes all paid advertising and shows photos for all results of …
Drop off stores – will they work here?
Thinking of opening some Trade Me drop-off stores? After all – there is a gap in the market right? Drop off stores are big in the USA – they are places where you bring items for sale on eBay, and they list and sell them on eBay for you. The stores necessarily take a huge …
DPReview falls to Amazon
DPReview is the site for checking out the latest hotness in digital cameras. I’ve been using the site for years as I tend to lose, drop, vibrate to death or otherwise attempt to destroy the digital cameras I own. Strangely enough they don’t totally die (I look for robustness), but they are broken enough so …
People will click on anything it seems
Didier Stevens purchased this lovely little google ad – that offered to download a viurus to your PC. and 409 people clicked on it. That explains the traffic to this blog…
White pages being stolen?
A strange press release from newly independent Yellow Pages, who are: “approaching a number of large New Zealand businesses and government organisations believed to be misusing information from White Pages online.” They are saying it is part of an “industry move”, with quotes from IAB’s Josh Borthwick and Keith Norris from the Marketing Association. So …
The end of newsprint is nigh..
..well it isn’t nigh, but the first signs of the end of newspaper are out there. Yesterday saw the announcement by LG.Philips of the first A4 colour e-paper. The ePaper is a flexible panel that is as thin as paper and is best used to display reading material. It only uses power when the page …
Improving airport security efficiency
NZ recently started demanding that travellers remove laptops from bags when flying. This has been happening for a while in other countries, so you’d think it was no biggie. (I noticed the change as the first time it happened to me I happened to have two laptops in my carry-on.) Unfortunately the screening system has …
Amazon continues to make me think..
The other day I was surprised that Amazon was going to ship my order of 21 books in 19 different packages. On Friday night I picked up the first round of arrivals from Amazon. Over two days five boxes had arrived, each containing one book. Four of the books were identical (photo), and all of …
Netguide, Stuff, Trade Me, Pimp my plane…..
On the one hand I am not a big fan of the Netguide awards methodology. On the other hand Stuff managed to glean two awards (Best media site and best homepage), while Trade Me took home three more. Thanks to everyone that voted for us – both Trade Me and Stuff. It was a huge …
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Comparing Trade Me and eBay by the numbers
I’m not sure how many people realise just how good Trade Me is. Let’s look at some comparative public numbers against eBay. There are plenty of reasons behind the differences, and I’ll write about the publicly known ones sooner or later. Auctions Here’s an excerpt from a reply I made to this great post on …
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Lance Wiggs 