Speed in the snow…

One of the many great things about France is the infrastructure. The inventors of the TGV knew what they were doing, so it is easier to take the train anywhere in France than to fly. Here’s what it is like going through a snowstorm at 300kmph or so…

NZ 4th best….

In yet another silly survey NZ is ranked ‘4th best place to live’ in the world.

France is first, USA 5th, Australia 2nd and the Netherlands 3rd. I wouldn’t disagree that these are all great places to live – I’ve spent at least two months in four of them, lived in three of them and am really torn even now between NZ, USA and France as places to live next.

The USA is the place to be for all things business, France for the sheer quality of life (oh the food!) and NZ when you want to get away from it all. The USA suffers from poor food and politics (bad meat and Iraq), France from excessive Frenchness (it is a foreign culture here) and NZ from isolation and sub-critical mass (business or society).

More snow…

As requested, a couple more photos from my travels. I am currently in Paris, having just returned from a week in Val d’Isere, where the snow was great and the sun incessantly shining.

I finally invested in a ski helmet, which is having a bad impact on my “willingness to do something”/”ability to do so” ratio.

on the lift....

Val d’Isere is really 3 ski areas in one (called ‘Killy’). This is the view from the top.La Motte

It snowed 2 days before we got there, but didn’t snow through the week. Still – there was plenty of on and off-piste fun to be had…

cresting

Telecom post Theresa

So Theresa finally retires from Telecom NZ. finally. But sadly not until June. She is proud that there has been ‘almost no involuntary turnover in the top 100 in Telecom’ and is ‘proud of culture of Telecom’.

I wouldn’t be. Sure it was a tough hand-over – inheriting under investment in infrastructure, and antediluvian CDMA wireless technology – but so much more could have been done.

Her salary in 2006 is quoted at $2.9m, which seems extremely low for someone running such a giant company. On the other hand she has not delivered performance, so that’s about what she should be paid.

In a later article, an anonymous analyst is quoted as saying : “Someone is going to have to present a cuddlier face.”

Cuddly is not the issue – competence is. Image is not the issue – getting the operations right is.

The talk is of replacing Theresa with another insider – tell me it isn’t true. Telecom is a classic candidate for a turnaround, and it needs to be comprehensive. (I’d love to be part of an LBO if anyone is interested ;-)  The best way to achieve that is to bring in an outsider, shake up a good chunk of the senior staff and dramatically shift the culture.

Bizarre financial decisions (selling Yellow Pages, doubling up on a bad investment in Australia) must stop, group-think from that firmly embedded highly political top 100 employees must stop, incomprehensible emotionally/personality based decisions (e.g. Ferrit) must be stopped. Colossally expensive glossy branding exercises need to be replaced by a genuine customer-centric culture.

So talk to me and other customers – ask me what I need to happily pay Telecom money. Start by making my internet work like it does here in France – flawlessly and fast.

…and that search for a new CEO had better look outside of Telecom and outside of New Zealand.

eBay UK changes fees paradigm

eBay UK as announced big changes in their fees. Good coverage on eBay Strategies.

Firstly, media (CD’s DVD’s etc.) will attract much lower listing fees (down, for most items, from 35 to 75 pence to 10 pence). However the downside is that success fees have gone up from 5.25%/3.25%/1.75% to a flat 9%. That’s a really high margin for sellers to absorb in what is a very tight margin business. It seems that eBay UK is accepting that CD’s etc. will be ‘store’ items – which are items in stock which are continuously relisted, and that the real money should only be taken when a sale takes place. At 9% it will be hard for wholesalers to compete with high street.

Secondly prices for eBay motors have risen marginally- from £6 to £8 for auctions and from £9 to £13 for 28 day classifieds. Final value fees are tweaked upwards for aucton sales from 0.75% to 1%. The overall low level of prices told me (without looking) that eBay do not own the online used car market in the UK, and so sellers are not willing to pay much. Indeed Autotrader UK has 371,000 vehicles listed and eBay UK just 61,000.  It also seems that classified listings are a new feature on the eBay UK site, which is poor considering the motors market demand for this format. Moreover the eBay Motors UK sell process is horrible – try it. Meanwhile Autotrader UK’s pricing is pretty steep – £17 for 2 weeks (there are other deals as well) and no ‘free until it sells’ offer.

Thirdly eBay UK has tweaked success fees for technology products – lowering them  from 5.5%/3.25%/1.75% to 5.5%/3%/2.5%/2%/1.5%/1%, with the price breaks coming between £30 (3%) and £599 (1%). This affects mobile phones, home electronics and cameras. It’s good to see genuine price decreases for technology products – the theory is that eBay is competing against straight eCommerce providers and needs to give sellers lower margins to compete. We are looking at just £3.93 saving on a £400 item, but it adds up for the huge professional sellers, and the buyers for that matter.

Overall these price changes will increase the complexity of the already horribly complex eBay UK pricing model, and also is making sellers across the Atlantic take notice.  Question to eBay – if your fees are too hard to understand, do you really think people will trust you?

shill bidding on eBay

Shill bidding on eBay is, anecdotally at least, a big problem. eBay’s recent decision to hide the ID’s of other bidders has not helped the community policing. Slashdot has some interesting comments on the issue – including one chap that has the following advice:

1) Never bid on camcorders, computers, automobiles, or any other high dollar item.
2) Always do an extensive check of the seller’s feedback.
3) Don’t bid early or get involved in bidding wars. Snipe instead.

#2 is good advice, but #1 will result in you playing much more at the stores, and #3 is an anomoly of eBay that Trade Me just does not have.

High tech electronics (camcorders, gaming machines, cell phones) may attract more than ther fair share of fraudsters, but the Trade Me community is excellent at sniffing these out and dealing justice. Cars, at least in NZ, are an especially safe purchase, as the physical transfer of the vehicle is typically face to face.

Sniping (last second bidding) is big on eBay, as they do not have the auto-extend feature which is on all Trade Me auctions. If you want to be sure to buy the item you want on eBay (without buy-now) then you’ll need to enlist a sniping tool. Those tools really subtract fun from the buying experience.

One aspect of the problem, it seems, is shill bidders placing bids until the auto-bid of the next highest bidder is exceeded, then removing the highest bid. It’s not so easy to get away with high-bid removing behavior on Trade Me – the relatively small size of the site, the trust and safety measures in place and the Kiwi ethic of being treated fairly all contribute to a much more honest playing field than that of eBay USA.

France…

A snapshot of France.. I’m wirelessly surfing the internet in a bar, vin rouge beside me, very polite French folk around me also sipping wine, dogs playing in the middle of it all and right outside in the hallway a patisserie with perfect coffee, croissants and baguettes for breakfast…

Outside are huge mountains (this is Val d’Isere) covered in snow and incredible infrastructure – including two funiculars, several gondalas and countless chairlifts, along with a T bar and a few pommas….

Life here is good

eBay stock options

eBay paid (page 6) $75m in stock based compensation in the last quarter, and $317m for the year. That’s 5.4% of Gross Profit or 4.3% of revenues. It must be wonderful to have a company with margins like that.

With the 12,600 employees in 2005 that would be $25,000 in options granted this year per two year tenured person – which is about right as long as almost everyone is getting a piece of the pie.

Somehow I doubt that, as CEO Meg Whitman has 22m shares, worth about $660m and founder Pierre Omyindar has 190m shares worth about 5.7bn. With total insider ownership at 233m shares, that means there are 21m shares for all of the other insiders. Those 21m shares divided amongst the 12,600 tenured employees gives 1667 shares each, or about $50,000. Again that number is an average, with sharp skews at the top and bottom ends.

NZ online traffic rankings from alexa….

Very cool summary of NZ site rankings from Projectx, or you can just look at the laest results on Alexa

1: Trade Me isn’t that far behind Google. In the USA eBay is number 5 after Yahoo!, Google, Myspace and MSN.

2: 6Park is bigger than Skykiwi, which was news to me. It has all happened fairly recently
3: Wikipedia beats NZHerald & Stuff

4: cricinfo, with no PR whatsoever, has snuck onto the list. It’s been one of my go-to sites since 1999, but I really wish they’d get rid of the brickwall redirect page and just send you straight to the main page.

5: oh – and Bebo is bigger than MySpace.

That said, Alexa is notoriousy unreliable as their sample is skewed and small. Hitwise also track international site traffic, but they are also skewed, (and expensive), while Net Ratings only tracks local sites.

Telecom overvalued?

Yes says Goldman Sach’s local branch, but if you use the “what’s it worth to a takeover buyer?” approach (see Marty Whitman)  then Telecom is probably undervalued. Imagine the extra value that could be dredged from Telecom by an operator that understood where the internet is taking telecommunications…

Online Dating – at $3,500 a year

Match.com’s new Platinum service is not a bargain at $3500 a year. They promise personalised matching with  Match.com members and (eventually) with other Platinum members.

The high end of the dating market really is limitless – personal net worth is not really material when it comes to meeting and marrying the perfect partner. The USA has over 7.5m millionaires (in 2004), so it doesn’t take too many of them to be single to make premium match-making services work.

Meanwhile New Zealand’s market is too small (and poor) to support the super-premium services – there are only so many wealthy people, and besides, it is still very uncool for Kiwi’s to flaunt wealth.