It’s easy to take advantage of today’s doom and gloom, but you need a stiff will and plenty of freed up capital. Here is the first of three ideas. 1: Baby Business Bank It’s hard enough these days to get finance for a house – but it has always been hard to get bank finance …
Continue reading “Three business ideas: 1: Baby Business Bank”
This story of busting a $15m poker scam by and Australian is fantastic – and is a wonderful demonstration of the benefits of being open with your customers. The full story is on poker community site twoplustwo, and has been going on for a while. Customers of Canadian tribe owned AbsolutePoker and UltimateBet analysed poker …
There has been lots of commentary on the Paymex debacle, and today I see that Paymex’s site is up, and there is a comment on this news entry from the “new owners”. Some advice, for free: 1: if you want us to trust you, please tell us who you are 2: If you want us …
Continue reading “Paymex is back, but why would you trust them?”
Markets have them all the time, and it is finally here – judgment day. The day when lousy economics and fundamentals get confronted with harsh reality and bright lights. Prices plummet, businesses fail and jobs and economies fall. My portfolio was hedged against this day – indeed it even went up, though not to the …
Dumb: not letting me set up auto pay by credit card when I got my iPhone Moronic: being unable to pay my Telstra bill using the iPhone Archaic and lacking in security: paying using DTMF tones via mobile phone. Still – Telstra staff (handpicked?) in Perth store where I got the phone were excellent.
My “personal jury” is still out on TheWest’s new website design. It’s a website aimed at big screens and broadband connections – this is a screenshot of the site above the fold on my MacBook Air. The main picture/story is huge, and rotates through four stories, the rest of the screen is dedicated to a …
We are going through the Lingopal design process at the moment for various products (J2ME, Website etc.). It’s all heating up as launch approaches. This is the worst nightmare result – design by committee: (via Slashdot’s new idle.slashdot.org) Above all the video demonstrates what happens when you have lots of people inputting and yet no …
A little while back my US portfolio got whacked – it was judgment day. But while the volatility of the US stock market took its toll, the positions I held are now coming through, and the portfolio is essentially back to where it was a few weeks ago. That’s when the Citibank short position and …
It seems that if you sponsor the Olympics then you get thousands of TV advertising spots thrown in. So – for those companies that sponsor the Olympics this is for you: STOP By now I now dislike your company, your products, and most especially your advertisements. It’s only day 4. By the end of the …
Not PC bemoans the highly paid Government sector. So does anti-dismal. I disagree. The alternative to highly paid bureaucrats is lowly paid bureaucrats. Lowly paid bureaucrats are far far worse than highly paid ones. Here are three resons why: Lack of talent – why work for Government when you can get more money working in …
It’s the big one – the one that moves industries, creates new ones and destroys old ones. Just how much time are people spending on the internet versus other forms of media? You see when the news finally hits that people are switching off TV, newspapers and magazines and switching on to the internet full …
Continue reading “Internet still reigns as the cheapest ad dollar spend”
It seemed like a great idea at the time. Sign folk up to mortgages, sell the mortgages to another financial player who then bundles the mortgage with thousands of others and sells various risk based slices. It failed in three different ways – two of which we know about, but one which is just emerging. …
Continue reading “If nobody owns your mortgage note then you are in luck”
I was long on Apple when it went up, shorted Citigroup (Citibank) as it went down, and was recovering my portfolio YTD returns to the heights of a month ago. Then came judgement day. Judgement days do come in stock markets, and more often than people think. The SEC changed the rules, and banned naked …
Nielsen Net Ratings latest press release shows that shopping wannabe Ferrit was third in the online shopping traffic rankings behind 1-day.co.nz. At 2.96% of the weekly unique browsers of Trade Me, and still offering a bunch of shopping categories, Ferrit continues to be irrelevant. Second placed (but still tiny) 1-day is interesting – they specialize …
Continue reading “Ferrit beaten by who? Torpedo7, that’s who”
<cynic mode firmly switched on, with apologies to Rachel> Via Mauricio, it seems from this, that Vodafone are using data warehousing techniques to drive customer retention. I’ve had a go at interpreting the abstract of “The Customer Retention Journey at Vodafone New Zealand” below. Speaker Rachel Harrison is the Vodafone Lead Analyst who is giving …
Continue reading “Vodafone and data warehousing: A translation of that abstract”
Lance Wiggs 