40,000,000 units sold

At Powerkiwi we have just gone past 40 million units of electricity sold since we launched in February 2009. That’s enough to power 5000 houses for a year, or approaching $9 million worth of power.

Our main product is FlowerPower, and over half of our sales are from top-up packs. We also sell a large amount of the better-value $84.90 packs, along with Green Power and Tree Power.

Our sales on Powershop are growing fast –  so far this financial year we’ve sold just under 33 million units, while in the previous year and a bit we sold just 7 million units. That’s impressive growth, and it mirrors the growth of Powershop itself.

The reason behind the growth is that more and more customers are switching to Powershop. The reasons? Powershop is dead simple, fun and the stories about people saving money just keep on coming.

Join in!

We’ve sold Groupy to Yellow

Below is the press release about the sale of the Groupy assets to Yellow. In short Yellow brings to Groupy the marketing muscle required to expand throughout NZ, while the core Groupy team will hop over to keep things moving at internet speed.

Groupy was founded and led by Scott Kitney along with Andrew Hunt. I was a minority shareholder and advised on all sorts of things, including running the competitive exit process. Our legal advice was thanks to the excellent Sacha Judd at Buddle Findlay, who I recommend especially if you are a early stage company and contemplating a merger or acquisition.

MEDIA RELEASE 24 January 2011
Yellow® buys out Groupy
Yellow Pages Group® New Zealand (Yellow®) has just announced its purchase of http://www.groupy.co.nz, the group buying site that is proving to be a big hit with New Zealanders.
A re-launch of Groupy this week will see a brand new look for Groupy and the most exciting deals ever to be offered to consumers, starting with an amazing $1 Hell Pizza deal.
Groupy features unprecedented daily deals at a hugely discounted price – usually between 50 – 90% discount, which can be purchased online and redeemed with a voucher at a local merchant. It offers the ultimate unbeatable deal on great stuff to do, see, eat or buy in your city.

“Groupy’s a great new start up brand with a bit of cool factor”, says Yellow® Digital Director, Peter Crowe. “We’ll be introducing our advertisers to a new ad solution that will get them instantaneous and significant results if they feature in a Groupy unbeatable deal.”
“Yellow® talks to more local businesses in more places, more often, than any other media business in the country and we’ll be able to leverage the Groupy platform to provide outstanding deals for consumers as well as helping to grow our advertisers’ business”, he says.
The true power of Groupy’s bulk buying will be revealed as the week goes on with more extraordinary deals being offered, further cementing Groupy’s position as one of New Zealand’s biggest local daily deal sites.

Set up six months ago by a couple of Wellingtonian lads, the Groupy business has grown rapidly. Yellow® acquired the business amongst much competition late last year and will keep the founders at the helm to continue to operate the business.

Groupy founders Scott Kitney and Andrew Hunt, along with fellow shareholder and entrepreneur Lance Wiggs are creative, innovative guys with lots of zeal. They’re the talkers of ideas through to fruition and exactly the type of people we want in the Yellow® business”, says Mr Crowe.

According to Andrew and Scott, Yellow® is the perfect match for Groupy. “We have an exciting offering, a great brand and loyal customer base while Yellow® brings its distribution and connections to local merchants to the table and will allow Groupy to serve the entire country. Soon there’ll be no excuse for anyone in New Zealand not to have tried a discounted skydive, beauty treatment or great dining experience”, they say.

Groupy will feature different deals every day. By negotiating bulk purchases with businesses, Groupy is able to get heavy group discounts that save consumers lots of dollars and enable businesses to make large sales and drive lots of new customers through their doors.

This latest initiative is set to make the Yellow® network even stronger, delivering yet more digital innovation to consumers and customers alike.

Yellow® has over 300,000 business listings and more than one million total listings including residential, which amounts to a bank of businesses that will now have the option to join in and offer some unbeatable deals.

ENDS
For further information please contact:
Danette Hunter Yellow Pages Group® Communications Manager 09 580 5183 027 485 2924 danette.hunter@yellow.co.nz

About Yellow®
Yellow® was formed in 1988 and publishes the print, online and mobile directories for Yellow, as well as the White pages® and the Local Directory. Yellow® owns the 018® Directory Assistance Service, has a majority stake in 50-plus website grownups.co.nz, and publishes the Retirement guideTM and New Zealand tourism guideTM, an award-winning online tourism directory. Yellow® aims to help New Zealanders complete their missions and get the Job done®.

Comparing New Zealand to The United States.

A nice little site neatly sums up many of the reasons why I left the USA to come back home. Sure you can make more money, but pretty much everything else is worse.

Add into that the knee-jerk responses since 9-11 that make getting stuff done and moving around oh-so-painful, the general atmosphere of partisan politics and the food.

Meanwhile in New Zealand we get to take our annual leave, go to the beach, get outside into the bush and live in a stunningly beautiful place.

I do miss the USA though. For all the progress we are making in NZ, and for all that our economy is still on its feet after some pretty good hits, the USA is still the best place to do business. The opportunities are more abundant and the ability to expand is limitless.

Top eleven for 2011

Let’s have a go at fortune telling – no cookies involved.

  1. eBooks will become relatively normal. It will begin to feel a little silly to purchase products that require cutting down trees, chemicals, huge plants, toxic inks and expensive production and shipping. eBooks are cheaper, fast to obtain and just as easy to read, except in the bath. New Zealand will lag on this one, but the switch will gain huge momentum in the USA.
  2. Pacific Fibre will be financed, and prices for capacity between Australia, New Zealand and the USA will continue to fall.
  3. The Apple AppStore will precipitate an app revolution, with the best applications migrating to, and many appearing exclusively on, Apple Macs and iOS devices.
  4. Rowan, Koz and Amnon will do something amazing – though I have no idea yet what it is, and probably neither do they.
  5. There will be some significant wins in the Copyright battles for those that want less draconian protections. The lobbying from the entertainment industry owners will continue to backfire as consumers and their advocates fight for what they want.
  6. The iPhone 5 will blow our socks off, and I and millions of others will buy one to match our new iPad 2.
  7. The split US Congress will actually deliver some good legislation to be signed off by President Obama.
  8. National with John Key leading will easily win the NZ election and form a coalition  government.
  9. Powershop in New Zealand will go mainstream – and people will begin to wonder why they ever received paper invoices from their utility
  10. There will be no major success from the attempts of large generalist newspapers to charge for content online
  11. The All Blacks will lose the World Cup. Admit it – we have gone into every other World Cup looking as strong as we are now the season before, but when it comes to the crunch each players in every other team lays their individual life on the line to beat the All Blacks in the World Cup knock out stage. It’s essentially impossible to play three or four must-win games in a row with opposition like that. (Clearly I’m very happy to be wrong on this)

Want to write? Get a $1345 Webstock package

AllAboutTheStory.com is offering a full journalism scholarship to the biggest and best web event in New Zealand – Webstock.

Webstock’s cool – and has a host of awesome and famous foreign and local speakers. In their own words:

Webstock 2011 will be the mostest bestest scientifically proven amazingest conference ever. In the history of the world. Fact.

Register Now!

The Allaboutthestory.com Media Scholar will get to attend Webstock 2011 (value $1195), interview big names from overseas tech companies (value: priceless), write at least 3 articles from the event (with career enhancing national and international interest in the topics and people) and swan up to the Onyas on Saturday night (Value $150, bring a camera for glamour and alcohol – always an entertaining mix)

You’ll need to prove your worth, writing:

  • Why you would like to attend Webstock 2011
  • Which speaker you most want to interview – and why
  • Which publication you write for, or intend to pitch any Webstock-related stories to
  • How the scholarship would help you in your career
  • Why you’re the right person for the scholarship

You are a writer – so this stuff should be easy right? Email it to Julie Starr – julie@allaboutthestory.com – by January 30, 2011. More over at her blog

AllAboutTheStory matches work from quality writers with editors. It was founded by Julie Starr, who is assisted by a cast of co-owners including Rowan, Koz, and Amnon, Joshia Vial and Ensipral, Natalie from Decisive Flow and myself. We think it is almost as cool as Webstock, so if you are an editor or writer – head on over.

Quotes from the ACMA business model report

A few choice quotes from the Australia Communications and Media Authority’s “Report 4— Changing business models in the Australian communication and media sectors: Challenges and response strategies”

It’s worth reading the report – at least for your industry.


“At June 2010, there were approximately 3.5 million mobile broadband services in operation, an increase of 71 per cent since June 2009.”

“The number of mobile telephone services increased by only one per cent in the same period (from 22.2 million to 22.5 million).”

“Telstra reported that the number of its PSTN lines had decreased by 358,000 over the year to June 2010”

“…and it estimated as many as 12 per cent of households are now ‘mobile only’ for voice, up from around eight per cent a year ago”

“Financial results for 2009–10 show that all mobile operators have enjoyed significant increases in data revenue. Telstra recorded non-messaging data revenue (handheld devices) increases of 21 per cent, VHA reported data and non-voice service revenue increases of 43 per cent and Optus reported that mobile services were a key contributor to growth, with mobile revenue accounting for 63 per cent of total company total revenue during 2009–10″

“Research undertaken by Gartner, indicates that the number of mobile application downloads will grow from 2.5 million in 2009 to a predicted 21.6 million in 2013.” (Actually Apple iTunes right now shows overall app downloads approaching 10 Billion, so Gartner’s headline of “Over 50 Billion Applications Downloads Generating Over $72 Billion From 2008 Through 2013″ is already well out of date. Overall those Australian numbers seem highly anemic.)

“… 27 per cent of adult internet users in Australia identified the internet as their most trusted source of news and information, in comparison to 20 per cent for newspapers, 17 per cent for television and 12 per cent of internet users identifying the radio as their most trusted source of news and information.”

“..only 39 per cent of adult internet users in Australia described newspapers as an important or very important source of information, compared to 34 per cent describing them as somewhat important and 27 per cent describing them as not important”

The challenge for Fishpond

Here’s Fishpond‘s latest email to me. I like the company a lot, and they are justifiably doing well, but I find it difficult to buy anything from them as I’ve moved increasingly into an electronic world.

In September last year I purchased the latest Kindle, which is smaller, faster and a lot lighter than my A4 sized Kindle DX. More importantly it actually works in NZ (over Wifi) to instantly download purchases, and so I have purchased over 40 books from Amazon USA between then and now. In the same time I’ve purchased just one regular, paper, book – and that cost $1 at a second hand store in Echuca, Australia. I struggle to justify spending money on other paper books as the Amazon prices for Kindle books are usually much much cheaper compared with NZ prices for paper books, but more importantly the e-books weigh nothing, are able to be purchased anywhere and are always with me on one of my many devices. Each book purchased gets downloaded to one of three Kindles (two of us read them), an iPhone, and iPad or, extremely rarely, a computer.

It’s the same with music – it’s very rare that I will buy a CD as it’s much simpler, faster and cheaper to buy on my iPhone through iTunes.

In each case the decision to buy and the download is concurrent with the purchase itself, and usually seconds after I have discovered the book or music. The discovery of the book could be through a recommendation from a friend, or through browsing through the physical books in a regular bookstore. It’s probably one of the reasons that Barnes and Noble is in so much trouble – there is little rational reason for having huge stores full of popular books when a virtual store with infinite inventory is everywhere.

This probably means the death of most bookstores – at least those that cannot make the switch to electronic media. There will be very few winners as we will most likely end up shopping in the same place. This year we will continue to see buyers of books switching to electronic media, and this will make it even more difficult for those stores with marginal economics. Fishpond and their ilk are better off than physical stores, but they are in a dilemma – can they switch their business to electronic delivery if the publishers won’t play? How can they make the Australian and New Zealand markets attractive to publishers without invoking the giant Amazon giant to actually get its act together downunder?

Overall I now see no reason why the physical book isn’t doomed. It makes no sense to spend so much money on the printing and distribution of physical books when an electronic purchase is available so much more conveniently. Yes we will still love the smell of books, and reading a Kindle at the beach or in the bath is perilous, but these are small problems in the scheme of things.

Fishpond, rather smartly, have diversified away from books and CDs into other products.

Sadly the same thing is happening to games and DVDs as happened to music.

Movies are large, and so in New Zealand and Australia our constrained bandwidth (along with the small markets) has meant that purchasing and downloading movies is still small. But in the USA the legitimate movie downloads have been huge, with both movies and regular TV increasingly being delivered over IP. Meanwhile the prices of DVDs are just silly, and it’s difficult to justify the time spent viewing a $40 or $20 DVD with the time spent playing a decent $1.29 iPhone game. Meanwhile I’ve sharply reduced the amount of time watching the TV, be it movies or otherwise, as I’ve switched to using other more engaging media.

Apple has transformed the games industry by making it oh so easy to buy Mac or iOS games using their app stores. Steam has done the same on several platforms for games. So it’s hard to justify buying a shiny disk that won’t arrive for days, and it is especially hard to justify spending $50 to do so. All this gets worse for the sellers of shiny things as the data capacity and download limits available to us increase.

It’s going to be very hard to be an electronics manufacturer this year. Cameras are now a part of cell phones, music players need to be iPhones or iPods and the market moves wildly quickly, while the standard for design is relentlessly high. Apple dominates an increasing number of categories, rendering much of the rest to be commodity products. Even watches are barely required today when we have so many digital devices that tell us the time.

But selling stationery and kitchenware is a good extension for Fishpond, as it’s hard to substitute these for electronic versions. It’s a sign that they are determined to be the Amazon of down under, and good for them.

However the proverbial elephant for Fishpond and their competition MightyApe is that substitution by electronic media, and they would each do well to ensure that the domestic industry has an answer that serves us all well.

Too much menu NZHerald

There are menus and then there is this ridiculous half page affair from NZHerald.
For people browsing by scrolling down with a touchpad or scrolling mouse the menu bloats out over the article text as the mouse pointer hits the menu bar.
It’s particularly annoying when the reader is using a relatively small screen, such as a netbook or Macbook Air.

The menu itself was not useful – I didn’t look at it until now. The bloated menu can be avoided by positioning the mouse above either the Home or Shopping tabs. Or by reading Stuff instead.

Lock in a 36% price increase from Mercury Energy

I’m actually shocked that Mercury energy have the cheek to do this scam. They are sending out notices to people (families) offering to lock in electricity prices for the next three years. They also say you could win free power for 3 years:

 

 

The problem is that people will be signing up for a staggering 36% increase in power.

Put bluntly – the average family in Auckland would move from paying $1940 per year to paying $2640 per year, a $700 increase. That’s $13.46 per week.

Meanwhile only ONE family will win that free power, and no suggestion of what your odds of winning actually are:

And of course there is an extra surprise in the fine print – a $150 early termination fee. At least you don’t have to pay it if you move to another place (most people move within 3 years) – so long as you choose Mercury as your supplier.

Although sadly Mercury do not supply the whole country – missing out Gisborne, Nelson, Invercargill as well as the much more popular “overseas” or “I now live in another flat or with someone else”

Shame on you Mercury Energy. You are offering to lock in customers for years, making them pay a huge increase in price, and giving essentially nothing in return.

Your competitors (and perhaps yourselves) are offering large cash bounties to those who threaten or do switch, but you are making people pay to stay.

My advice to everyone is to switch electricity suppliers often to make sure you are getting the best prices. You may even find that you get a phone call from your current suppler shortly thereafter – I’ve heard of people being offered $300 to stay.

Disclosure

I am a co-founder of PowerKiwi, which is a electricity retailer selling FlowerPower and other products on Powershop, so yes, we are in competition with Mercury. We are tiny in comparison of course, and even Powershop itself is tiny versus the other retailers. Click the flower above to sign up and get $50 of free credit. I cannot talk about how much you will save, as we don’t know and each case varies, but the stories we have heard are impressive.

How to be an Angel

This is exactly what Angel investors should be doing

No lengthy agonising, no distracting the team with over-indulgent due diligence and no inch thick documents and  negotiations through lawyers.

Simply find a great idea with a solid team and put the money on the table.

My ambition is to raise a fund to do this – making extraordinarily rapid funding decisions,  using  standard approaches to documents so that the teams can focus on building the business rather than raising money. I’m not allowed to ask for money for this without writing a proper prospectus however, and that is not going to happen until Pacific Fibre is financed.

Speaking of which – our Pacific Fibre investors have all acted like the Swedish chap in the video – making very rapid decisions and backing a strong business case and team. It’s been an absolute pleasure to work with them.

Give prisoners the basics at least

Inmates in 10 prisons in the Georgia, USA coordinated a strike that lasted a week, and inclusive of all of the usually conflicting groups (Bloods, Crips, Muslim brotherhood and so forth). While the article in deathandtaxes raises the point that the mainstream media missed this strike, the, well, striking thing to me is the reasonableness of the prisoner’s demands:

 

  • A LIVING WAGE FOR WORK: In violation of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution prohibiting slavery and involuntary servitude, the DOC demands prisoners work for free.
  • EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES: For the great majority of prisoners, the DOC denies all opportunities for education beyond the GED, despite the benefit to both prisoners and society.
  • DECENT HEALTH CARE: In violation of the 8th Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments, the DOC denies adequate medical care to prisoners, charges excessive fees for the most minimal care and is responsible for extraordinary pain and suffering.
  • AN END TO CRUEL AND UNUSUAL PUNISHMENTS: In further violation of the 8th Amendment, the DOC is responsible for cruel prisoner punishments for minor infractions of rules.
  • DECENT LIVING CONDITIONS: Georgia prisoners are confined in over-crowded, substandard conditions, with little heat in winter and oppressive heat in summer.
  • NUTRITIONAL MEALS: Vegetables and fruit are in short supply in DOC facilities while starches and fatty foods are plentiful.
  • VOCATIONAL AND SELF-IMPROVEMENT OPPORTUNITIES: The DOC has stripped its facilities of all opportunities for skills training, self-improvement and proper exercise.
  • ACCESS TO FAMILIES: The DOC has disconnected thousands of prisoners from their families by imposing excessive telephone charges and innumerable barriers to visitation.JUST PAROLE DECISIONS: The Parole Board capriciously and regularly denies parole to the majority of prisoners despite evidence of eligibility.

While we need prisons, the evidence of these demands is that society is not at all interested in rehabilitation, and that the prison system, public or private perhaps, has the inventive to keep inmates locked up.

It’s not acceptable. People that do bad things should be punished through removal of freedoms, but let’s help them become better people and productive, happy and caring members of society while doing so. It starts with the basics of food, education and health care.

Poorly surveyed

 

I got this email just now, it’s so ugly I thought I’d follow the link to see how bad the survey was. I took the extra time to take pictures and write comments.

The landing page as not too bad, except I couldn’t care less about adding to my nano collection, and suspect many in the target market feel the same way.

The first questions were broad. So I own lots of devices – but which ones do I view news on? The categories of apps are so broad. Perhaps it wold be better to focus on media apps, and even ask which ones I have and which ones I use. (NYTimes.com is the only one I use, and even then not very often)

The questions stayed bad – it’s actually really hard to design a questionnaire, and I suspect that the answers from this one will not be that useful. The feature list forgets that the most interesting thing is content. The payment question could lead to someone thinking that $10 per month is ok, when we all expect to pay $1 for the app and that’s it. And even the publications question – the answer it I’d probably look at all of them if they were in one app, but more important is the link to their online content.

I like the open question about what a mobile app would look like, though answers could be quite fun.

Finally the survey makes the basic mistake of enforcing the question asking for my email address and phone number. This is a great way to reduce response rates and increase bias, as evidenced by my not hitting the respond button.

So to summarise:

– We want to help, and while some people are motivated by winning prizes, most are not. So don’t make us give you our email address and phone – it feels like spam and we probably won’t.

– Focus the survey on the topic – which is a iPhone/Android/iPad app for your magazines

– Write the report that you want to result from the survey before you write the survey. This means that the answers you get will be the answers you need to fill the holes in your report.

 

How readable is your site?

Google has a new readability feature, so why not check a few local sites?

Here are some, in decreasing order of ‘Basic’ readabilty.


Proving something about left wing academics, tough I am not sure what. Overall very consistent in readability – not too simple, not too hard.

Complex matters, again presented consistently.

Seems right – Kiwiblog writes about complicated matters, and so the most basic language won’t work a lot of the time. However the lack of advanced language means the site is very readable. Well done.

Pretty good overall result – the basics are easy to read, but the complex is there as well. Appeals to a wide audience, or off-putting for the mainstream?

Hard to differentiate here, as always. Our mainstream media are more readable than the Economist and WSJ (2% and 8% basic respectively), along with the NYTimes (9%). However while MSNBC (44%) and USA Today (31%) are higher, it’s somehow disturbing that Fox News has about the same readability level (23%).

Entertainingly these two Aussie Fairfax Media papers have more difference between them than NZHerald and Stuff do in NZ.

News sites that focus on the new news, and not features – so you’d expect the easier readability.

Do Trade Me sellers define the best mix of language that sells? A strange coincidence that Rowan’s blog and this blog are about the same as Trade Me in readability.

These two group buying sites (I’m involved with Groupy) provide more evidence that simple sells.

The girls have it.

This is dangerous NZ Police


This is an unsafe act. The police officer appears to be standing in a part of a lane that is closing off while traffic is whizzing by at 80-100kmph. He is behind his bike, which will turn into a projectile if hit by a vehicle that is leaving it just a little late to merge or by a vehicle that is squeezed left by the rest of the traffic.

Moreover his presence may come as a surprise to vehicle drivers, who may react by braking or steering suddenly.

All in all it’s a bad situation waiting to happen, and this photo should cause instant concern in Police HQ.

I’m not against the idea of videoing bus lanes – but please use a fixed video system. There seem to be plenty of poles available to place a camera.

 

<update – thanks to Glen Barnes for this graphic: