dumb idea – why do I want to type 2 more letters for some dubious security benefit? Phishers can get by this pretty easily using their existing techniques, while meanwhile everyone would have to change their links, and the .nz domain would be doing something that is non-standard. Once we get .bank.co.nz we may as …
Category Archives: NZ Business
YahooXtra: inauspicious start
What can you say…. “A 17 year-old Ponsonby youth who caught internet giants Xtra and Yahoo flat-footed last year by beating them to register the website address yahooxtra.co.nz won’t say whether he was paid off or arm-wrestled into relinquishing the web address.
Telecom pathetic: cannot provide telecomms
Would that Telecom could get the basics right… I don’t want money back, I want usable internet service. Being back in NZ means being back in the primitive ages of the internet. My (“max-speed”) access here at home is pathetic compared to France, UK and USA. It is too slow and unreliable for YouTube. How …
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Ferrit as a price comparison engine – not good
Adam points out the Ferrit serves a purpose as a price comparison site, and Peter Wogan chimes in and agrees in the comments. Unfortunately Hitwise numbers (which I am the first to admit are not the most reliable) show that Ferrit is ‘far behind’ price comparison leaders Pricespy and Smilecity. Those sites are both, as …
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Ferrit – $36m flushed….
I missed the money quote… “Mr Brayham says Telecom expects to spend about $12 million on Ferrit in the next financial year, matching its contribution for the past two years.” That’s $24m dropped on a site that delivered $12,500 in revenue in the busiest shopping month of the year. Alternatively that $24m dropped on 2,700 …
Ferrit – It’s worse than I thought
Some interesting Ferrit stats from this article (thanks Q). Firstly only 1.2% of the visitors in December bought anything, secondly Ferrit makes “between 4% and 8%” of each sale. (Let’s be nice and say an average of 6%). Thirdly the average order size was “more than $100”. Let’s call it $110. So in December 2,700 …
Online retail: Ferrit sinks
Let’s see how the online retail market is going…. After a dip over Christmas/New Year Trade Me is back on track, while all of the other players are still not making any impression…. Ferrit’s pre-Christmas promotion gave a leap in traffic (this page impressions chart has two scales), but January and February to date are …
Food miles
New blog Celsias makes a point about food grown locally being more beneficial to the environment as it reduces ‘food miles’. A catchy phrase, but one that avoids much of inputs into the energy or carbon balance of providing food, as he alludes to. To be fair to farmers in NZ, for example, the total …
Is Yahoo!Xtra Australian?
As Mauricio Freitas points out Yahoo!xtra has a page up for a sneak preview, but with nothing showing just yet. I noticed one other thing- the url: http://au.docs.yahoo.com/xtra/ and the copyright message at the bottom, which is “© 2007 Yahoo! Australia & NZ Pty Limited. From this can we (over-)read that NZ is being run …
Vista promo video
Geekzone and Microsoft NZ are runing a competition for Kiwi’s to create a video on “what you like most about using Microsoft Vista”. Here’s an idea – what about running another competition in parallel – “What you like most about using OSX” and judge responses not just on the quality of the submission, including production …
Waiting room TV
Great ideas are obvious in retrospect – and this is a doozy. Health TV will show targeted health programing to people waiting in doctors waiting rooms. With an average wait of 20 minutes that’s an opportunity to hit an audience with some juicy advertisements along with that content. Sadly for HealthTV’s international prospects this isn’t …
txtstation signs a great deal
Interesting deal that Kiwi company txtstation has made in the USA. They are working with Fox TV and the NBA on mobile-interactive TV, allowing Americans to answer questions posed on the small screen. While the USA is well behind in TXTs (and well ahead in mobile email), I wonder whether the success of American Idol, …
Trade Me purchase is paying off…
Fairfax’s purchase of Trade Me* is paying dividends – at least in the headlines of competitors APN’s NZ Herald: “Fairfax stagnating but Trade Me making progress”
Game over for Online Real Estate
People in New Zealand looking at real estate sites online spend 73% of that time on Trade Me Property (incl Trade Me Flatmates). That’s a staggeringly high percentage of traffic, and indeed Trade Me Property has been leading the way for some time. To work this out I took Domestic Unique Browsers x UB Frequency …
Dragon’s Den VC
So Bob Jones reneged on his Dragon’s Den deals – surprise surprise. The companies hopefully understood that the investment was the least they would gain – the publicity and the possibility of a genuine investor (of which Coleman seems to be one) being attracted via that publicity were the real benefit. Meanwhile we may now …
Lance Wiggs 