It’s good to see eBay fraud dealt with in the USA – though the scale of it boggles the mind. A jewellery company placed an amazing 232,000 ‘shill’ bids on their own auctions in just a year… …and got caught. That’s the problem with committing fraud online – you leave a very easy trail to …
Category Archives: Internet Business
The NZMusic fade to black
It’s sad to see the gradual demise of NZMusic.com – a site that once had a commanding grip on the music scene in New Zealand. Traffic has almost totally dried up over the last two years to just 13% of record UB’s and PI’s. The forum, once the place for musos and fans, has been …
Maestro and Triplejump – more work required
Rod Drury points us to start ups Maestro and Triplejump. Good to see these new sites up and running – well done… But please – go buy the book “Don’t make me think” and apply the learning to your websites: Let’s start with Maestro: now – quickly. What are you meant to do? What does …
Continue reading “Maestro and Triplejump – more work required”
eCommerce is slow to launch in Australia
Right on cue (after the last post graphically showing the lack of a non-Trade Me eCommerce industry) comes a quote from the head of eBay Australia lamenting the same issue in Australia: eBay Tells Retailers To Focus On Online Operations “Major Australian retailers are falling behind their counterparts in other markets in the area of …
NZ Retail stats: How is Ferrit doing?
I’ve updated the New Zealand Retail site daily stats referred to in a previous post. Once again it is Nielsen NetRatings data, for domestic traffic. First and foremost- Trade Me is still the only online retailer in New Zealand (aside from airlines) Let’s look at that by hours spent on site – this is Unique …
Xero’s IPO is successful
Well done to Xero – who managed to raise the $15m targeted in their IPO. That will see them out for a year or two. It seems that investors got the first 5,000 shares asked for, and half of the rest. That’s for the ‘public pool’, which was, as far as I can make out …
Truemors
Truemors is a cool fusion of news and rumors, and perhaps a new word we need to learn. It was launched by Guy Kawasaki for just $12100, although he also has an enormously popular blog and a huge following. I’m not sure it is useful yet, but one thing I do like is that I …
April is shorter than March
I just have to quote this Dow Jones wire article – via the subscription walled WSJ. “Yahoo! UK Web Sites’ Vistors Dn 3% On Mo In April – ComScore’ Yes – that’s the real headline, complete with 3 shortened words. “DOW JONES NEWSWIRES May 29, 2007 6:02 a.m. LONDON (Dow Jones)–Unique visitors to Web sites …
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 …
IE7 spoof site checker is.. compromised
Paypal and eBay fake sites are meant to turn IE7’s address bar red – but it appears that this feature has already been bested by the black hats. I can’t say I am shocked – the scammers are pretty good at this stuff, and Microsoft… well what can you say.
Amazon shipping… more thoughts
To close the loop on earlier posts – the last of my 19 packages containing 22 books arrived shortly after the rest. Isn’t that a sight? They all came from the same US address, albeit a different one than the other books. None came from Germany – which has happened often in the past. Actually …
Local coverage from afar: Outsourcing journalists
From Rodney Van Meter via Dave Farber’s IP list, here is news that could make local news reporters nervous: “The website Pasadena Now, a local online news source, has created a stir by hiring a couple of reporters to report on Pasadena City Council meetings. Why the stir? Well, the reporters live in Mumbai and …
Continue reading “Local coverage from afar: Outsourcing journalists”
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 …
Lance Wiggs 