A little birdie sent me through the rest of the article (along with some rather serious complaining from a couple folk about the inadequacy of theline) Some choice quotes “Brayham believes the success of TradeMe will rub off on Ferrit. “TradeMe is probably one of the best training grounds for Ferrit,” he says. “ eCommerce …
Category Archives: Business
Bad rep on the net? it can be fixed – maybe
It seems, says the WSJ, that we already seeing companies spring up to help you defend your online reputation. Or maybe that is to remove your online reputation. ReputationDefender was founded by a Harvard Law grad in October, and they will politely (then not so politely) ask websites to take down references to you. Sometimes …
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How to hire the best people you’ve ever worked with..
Actually that’s a title of an entry of Marc Andreessen‘s new blog. He’s the sort of guy that gets 48,562 pageviews in his first 4.5 days of blogging. I imagine Sam Morgan would get a similar (NZ scaled) response if he started blogging. I agree with Marc’s criteria for hiring good people – (Intelligence,) Drive, …
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AFR.com.au
Someone (at Crikey.com) has finally written about the usability travesty that is AFR.com.au. The article is pretty entertaining, but the points about the usability of what should be the wsj of this region are right on: The article starts with a bang… “The AFR’s new multi-million dollar online push is in serious trouble, with the …
Should you buy Crocs?
I had no idea that Crocs was a $3bn enterprise value company. The Gross Profit margin of 60% and operating margins of 25% I can believe. Their shoes are elegantly simple to make, (mold, foam, boom) and shipping would be cheap – by volume not weight. Apparently they’ll be the next Nike. (says bloggingstocks) But …
Xero – to invest or not – again
There has been some good discussion around the traps about Xero’s IPO. As I whizz to my plane I’d like to pop some more things into the mix: 1: The emphasis on SAAS to me is missing the point. The USP of Xero is its promise to reinvent the usability and the approach to processing …
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 …
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 …
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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Amazon logistics: single shipping
I ordered 21 books from Amazon the other day, choosing, as I always do, ‘expidited international shipping’. The books normally get shipped in 2 or 3 boxes, but this was my email inbox this morning….. Has Amazon figured that it is actually cheaper to ship items by piece to NZ than in a few bigger boxes? …
Underpaid Kiwi executives
There are a few million dollar earning executives in NZ – and the Herald’s Owen Hembry believes that we are now on par with Australia, but that there is a gap underneath that. While we have a handful of CEO level people being paid well, there is a big payment hole in the next two …
Sunday Star Times 2, NZHerald 0
First the Sunday Star Times publishes a great editorial lamenting the NZHerald’s decision to outsource their core editorial competency – the sub editors. The outsourcing, for my mind, seems to be a dumb decision made by an MBA not a newspaperman. “Subbing factories will turn out factory newspapers…. Then the Sunday Star Times also publishes …
Fairfax Digital
I’ve just been appointed Acting Head of Fairfax Digital, (Stuff), which will last until a full time appointment is announced. You’ll continue to see posts on NZ online media on this blog, but as I am now an insider at Fairfax, as well as Trade Me, I’ll be very circumspect in commenting about both institutions. …
Lance Wiggs 