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 …
Category Archives: Business
Making money from the housing crisis
Call it Sub Prime Crisis, but when mortgage financiers Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae show signs of distress, the entire US housing market is in trouble. Freddie dropped $2 billion in losses in the last quarter, which is scary – as they hold over $700 billion in mortgage assets, at last some of which are …
How to manage your company’s online reputation
Over the months I’ve occasionally said one or two negative things about a few companies. Did I say occasionally? Sorry – I meant constantly. Their range of responses has been interesting, and piqued the interest of Bullet PR‘s Nicholas O’Flaherty, who used the BNZ series of rants, along with Mauricio’s Slingshot posts as examples, in …
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BNZ saga – the card
So my BNZ security card arrived yesterday. Here it is: Now I know where it is at least. BNZ to their credit did initiate yesterday the next transfer request for my rent. We were going back and forward for so long that the rental payment date arrived, and a helpful CS person (another in the …
Free Rice: Addictive, but is it a scam?
Addictive. Very addictive – I’ve managed to donate 1830 ‘grains of rice through the UN to help end world hunger’. However I’ve only managed to get to level 44 – and then only once. There are 50 levels. Here’s the deal. Each time you get an answer right, 10 grains of rice are donated through …
Yahoo Finance New Zealand
Not what you’d expect… au.finance.yahoo.com/investing directs you to Yahoo!7’s Australian focused Finance site, but changing that “au” to an “nz” yields a different result: nz.finance.yahoo.com/investing Not so useful, unless you live or invest in Brasil
10 Questions to Xero’s Rod Drury
Rod kindly offered to answer some questions about Xero during this earnings release phase, so here they are. My questions are in Bold, Rod’s answers in Italics. Rod notes that we are trying to be as open as possible so I’ll try to give you as much info as I can and explain where we …
AFR will not go free, BusinessSpectator launches
Fantastic news – AFR.com.au has redone it’s moronic pricing scheme, which charged readers (whoever they are) anywhere from $25 to a staggering $150 a MONTH. Rest assurred – they have now come back to reality and are charging just $109 for non subscribers, and $45 for subscribers. That compares favorably with the WSJ.com site, which …
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Xero results – first look
First look at Xero results Revenue 1: Xero made $24k from 204 paying customers and 404 users. That’s $117 per customer and $59 per user, but the report states $54 per customer. Perhaps the $54 is the average monthly per customer revenue. Cashflow 2: Xero received $16k in cashflow from customers (“receipts from customers” – …
BNZ: Owning customers on and offline
During my sagas with BNZ I’ve been struck at how unfailingly polite and efficient the BNZ Customer Service Representitives (CSR’s) have been. They may be dealing with obsolescence on their screens, but at least they are nice with it. They. That’s an issue, and an issue that commenter Keith Tan pointed out also happens with …
BNZ – it gets worse for all of us
My own personal BNZ Sucks saga continues, but there is worse news, via a response to my internal emails: From April 2008, all Internet Banking customers will be required to use NetGuard when logging into Internet Banking. I applied for my damnable Netguard card on the 21st of October (which I blogged about in passing), …
Telecom – believing marketing trumps reality
It may not actually be an iPhone, but Telecom is inviting comparison between its latest handset, the Okta Touch, and the much-hyped Apple handset. We don’t have to see the Okta to know the answer to this one. I watched the video. TVNZ interviews David Gray (Grey?) Telecom’s Head of Consumer Marketing, which is just …
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Microsoft Profit up, but Vista sales declining?
Interesting snipet from Slashdot (home of the Mcrosoft vs Apple vs *nix wars) Microsoft is not directly mentioning Vista demand while they brag about how much money they made last quarter, because sales fell. “[Microsoft] shipped approximately 28 million copies of Vista in the latest quarter ended September, or 9.3 million copies per month. I …
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BNZ doesn’t get it. Time to change banks
I’m renting a place here in Fremantle for 3-4 months, and my first rental payment is due. I dutifully (ok a few days late as we had not sorted out dates) send a Telegraphic Transfer request via BNZ’s internet banking email system. This is something I do quite a lot, with the last one being …
Capital One stumbles
Capital One has long had a reputation for employing smart people, and for being the best at segmenting the credit card market – targeting the right products at the right people. Well – not such good news, via the Washington Post: Capital One Financial of McLean posted its first quarterly loss ever, from the expense …
Lance Wiggs 