Ye Olde Search Engines

For those with long internet memories – here’s what those old search engines looked like back in the day. Here’s a taste – Google in 1998. It’s amazing how even then they didn’t quite get to the completely barren screen. And Yahoo! back when the 96 elections where it. I recall watching the election (Clinton …

Internet still reigns as the cheapest ad dollar spend

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 …

Four more factoids from the NZ Internet Report

At the bottom of the Wolrd Internet Project – NZ Report are some nice cross tab charts. I find these interesting not just for the internet data, but also for some of the other insights. 1: Wealthier people spend more time with their family, Pakeha spend the least time with family, Males (self reported remember!) …

Top ten findings from the Internet In New Zealand 2007 report

The World Internet Project New Zealand report came out. Worth a look as it is part of a great world-wide project, and will hopefully provide great trends going forward.. Sadly the data is old. Really old in internet time. The WIPNZ survey was conducted in September-October 2007. Why does it take 8 months to analyse …

Is Cuil the new Google?

Cuil.com is apparently the new new thing in search engines. They claim to scan more pages than Google, and they present their results in a lovely, though heavy, format. In addition to looking at the popularity of a Web page, Cuil also analyzes the concepts on the page and their relationships — grouping similar results …

Twitter is suffering, and the scammers don’t help

Are Spammers killing Twitter? Despite constant upgrading, Twitter is more often down than up. Spammers like this one don’t help – “she” was following over 1000 people when she started following me. “She” has just one entry. It links to a scam website that sells the concept of Water as a power source for your …

Vodafone and data warehousing: A translation of that abstract

<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 …

Chocolate fish, bloggers and a tragic death

Horrible news from the inquest of Chocolate Fish landlord Adrianus Johanus Vlug, who the coroner found committed suicide after feeling pressure from “rather uninformed bloggers” about the rent increases at the chocolate fish. From that point onward, a series of Facebook blog articles appeared mostly condemning the landlord for having a ‘greedy’ attitude with respect …

Excellent Samsung viral campaign

I was surprised to hear about my togs stealing exploits – but kudos to Samsung and their agencies for an excellent campaign.I received a link to a fake NZ news site…. Cleverly my details are inserted into the video, along with the name or the perpetrator that dobbed me in. It all links back to …

Telcos: stay out of the content game

Via Stuff, and the SMH, a headline that seemingly spells bad news for the iPhone in Australia: “iPhone not so multimedia friendly in Aust” The article goes on to say that the iPhone is unable to play many of the Telco giants mobile offerings, such as Vodafone Live, Telstra’s Big Pond TV or Optus’ ringtones …

The IRD’s SME website

A great thing. The IRD is going to set up a website to guide SME’s through their tax obligations at various stages of the business. They are outsourcing the work, and it will worringly include a bunch of Flash as part of the “interactive tool”.  We can hope that it doesn’t turn into another Mission-on. …

Mission On is…Off

So I read Bernard’s eviseration of the Mission-on Website, and the debacle of spending over $10m on a useless flash monstrosity. The best part was his daughters quote: “Oh My God,” she yelped. “It’s all in Flash. I just never use Flash sites. You can’t navigate them, they’re usually just so crap. My browser is …