if you want to see what Al Gore could be like as a US Presidential candidate, then look at this camera phone video. He is passionate, and calls Bush on the blunders before 911.
It’s an utter transformation – the cumulation of the change that we partially saw in An Inconvenient Truth. Has the Nobel emboldened him? Is the timing right for some Democraic backbone? Or is the world better off with Al continuing to evangalise on global warming,
via Celsias
Via wired blog, and from Renault, the car ad we’ve always really wanted to see:
Also check out the making of:
The BNZ please just pay my rent saga continues
Now they are asking me to sign up for the stupid security card (which I had done 2 dats prior) and to send a confirmation fax to get this particular payment through.
Nope. International faxes are just too hard these days. I don’t even plug my landline in, let alone own a fax. A photo of a document via email is normally accetable, just not to the BNZ. and yes – there are no doubt a host of internet faxing services, but I do not know or trust any.
So I am reduced – my beleaguered mother will execute this transaction for me, and BNZ loses even more karma. There is not a lot of BNZ karma left I can tell you, though no doubt my mother will have an excellent personal banker experience in Wellington.
So my search for a new bank continues – thanks to everyone that has commented, ASB looks the likely candidate.
I’m renting a place here in Fremantle for 3-4 months, and my first rental payment is due.
I dutifully (ok a few days late as we had not sorted out dates) send a Telegraphic Transfer request via BNZ’s internet banking email system. This is something I do quite a lot, with the last one being the deposit and bond for this place on the 12th of last month.
I get an email back:
I’m in Perth right now, and so to get a NetGuard card would require 3-5 business days (and there are only 4 this week in NZ) PLUS the time taken to get the card to me in Australia. Moreover, I’m guessing that BNZ won’t send or allow you to send this stupid card internationally (try couriering credit cards).
So the alternative to to use the handy ‘branch locator’, which I do:
That’s right. No BNZ in Perth, and no BNZ in Australia. This seems crazy to me – BNZ is a huge bank, and there are hundreds of thousands of Kiwis in Australia, including out here in Perth. (Mining pays well these days)
So maybe I’m just going about it the wrong way. So – another approach:
But that gets me this:
So I try bnz.com instead:
Not that useful.
So… why should I trust my money to a bank that can’t even own its own domains?
Why should I trust my money to a bank that requires me to carry around a card for online security?
What happens if I lose my wallet with credit card and stupid online card? – yup, I’d be locked out.
I looked back, and sure enough on my last TT request there was the following in the confirmation email:
“Lance, I would like to take this opportunity to advise that from 1 October all TTs will require you to have logged into Internet Banking using NetGuard before we will complete your request.”
Sadly it was beneath the fold (line 26) of the confirmation email, which I browsed quickly just to make sure the payment went through. So the first time I saw this was today. Yes – perhaps I should read my emails completely.
Banks have you locked in
They say that banks have 4 opportunities in life to get you to switch to them: At birth/christening, when you are about 10 or so (pocket money), when you leave home/start university (student loans), and when you get a mortgage.
They also say (ok I’ve observed through consulting) that losing banking customers is actually really difficult to do. You really have to go out of your way to annoy them, or lose serious credibility, before customers will leave.
For me BNZ has provided great personal service at the various branches in Wellington, but has failed, and failed consistently with its IT – online and back end.
BNZ has failed with their Credit Card product
– My credit card limit is a trivial % of my annual income, despite repeated requests for (mostly granted) increases.
– My BNZ credit card bounced my Perth motorcycle purchase transaction, while my infrequently used Amex worked just fine
– Indeed it’s not the first time or even second I’ve failed to buy a motorcycle with a BNZ credit card, and succeeded with Amex.
– I received more than one offer to ‘upgrade’ my Mastercard to a visa with identical features and higher cost.
BNZ has lousy Customer Service
– BNZ’s after hours (and it is always after hours from home here) help desk is completely unable to help me, which is sad because I recall being able to speak to a very helpful night banker, who made magic happen, from the UK when buying a motorcycle back in 1996. What has happened?
– The products offered to me (usually in a TT email) are completely irrelevant to my situation.
Don’t talk to me about use BNZ for money Transfers
– I cannot send an international transfer without recourse to email.
– I now cannot send international transfers at all.
– It takes a day for transfers to go from from my BNZ check account to my BNZ credit card account
– It takes a day for transfers to go from my BNZ account to another BNZ account
– It takes a day for transfers to go from my BNZ account to any other NZ based account
– I’m charged $25 for a NZ to Australia TT transfer
NONE of this is acceptable in this era.
But the big question is can any other bank offer better? I’m going to look around, but do let me know if your experiences elsewhere are better.
Want to get deep inside Trade Me’s engine to understand how it works?
Then apply for Trade Me’s Manager – Strategy and Analytics role, and you will know all. Well – you’ll be exposed to the data fire hose anyway, and you’ll use any insights you find to help grow Trade Me. This was the area I wallowed in (when I wasn’t helping with valuations and the sale) at Trade Me, and if you are the sort of person that loves business, data and a cool work environment, then go for it.
– Ongoing modeling, budgeting and financial forecasting for our business lines. You would know intimately how well the different areas of our business are performing, and have strong opinions on their potential.
– Formulating and presenting ideas about how we can make more money. This includes internal opportunities, and the evaluation of potential acquisitions, joint ventures etc. You would manage the conversations we have with these external parties.
– Oversight the day-to-day running of our operational data and analytics operations, including all the numbers we use for decision support, performance indicators, and the measurement of site changes.
– The management of a growing and dynamic team to help you accomplish the above, and, if you’re up to it, senior management input at the exec level for the company.
PaidContent seems to think so, though the price WordPress reportedly will command ($150-300m) seems cheap for what is the dominant platform for serious bloggers.
So now we know what you are reading (it’s all about teenage love calculation), but how are you coming to this blog?
Well – here are the top search terms used over the last year to find posts on this site:
1: “xtra mail” (yup. I can’ believe it either)
2:”calculate the name of your perfect lover” (It’s a scam people)
3: “lance wiggs” (An answer to #2 perhaps? Not for teenagers I hasten to add.)
4: “crush calculator”
5: “love calculation”
6: “tvnzondemand”
7: “burger fuel”
8: “love calculator”
9: “burgerfuel”
10: “shipbuktu slow”
So there you have it. I’m not sure what it all means, but do feel free to comment.
So – this blog has been around for almost a year now – the first post was on November 9th last year. It’s been a fun journey, and although statistics are fickle things it seems that about 2-300 people are visiting each day.
That’s pretty amazing – I had no idea I had that many relatives.
It’s interesting for me to see which posts attract traffic, and which posts don’t – and perhaps it is for you as well. Scary, but interesting.
Here are then, from the last 300 days, the top 11 posts, and the bottom 3. The stats capture the clicks on to a specific blog entry.
The top 11
1: Love Calculator – Vodafone and Google sh
2: Remove yourself from love lover and crus
3: ASA pings Love Calculator – but it is st
Yes – sadly the top three posts on this blog are trafficked by… teenagers searching for love.
4: BurgerFuel: value or not? (turned out not)
5: About me (it is all about me it seems)
6: tvnzondemand – streaming works on OSX (yes it does, but no downloads)
7: Gareth Morgan’s Kiwisaver calculater (apparently even bad spelling didn’t stop the pageviews)
8: More Fuel for the Burger Fuel fire (smoke, no fire)
9: psst – Want to earn over $100,000 per ye (Have a Doctorate, live in Gisborne)
10: xtra mail customers are going to Yahoo! (yes – they did. and oh how badly)
11: After xtra: Which email should you use? (linked to #10 – Google is the answer)
The Bottom 3
With just 7 direct hits, these didn’t get any click-through love:
His masters voice.. (Doesn’t anyone care what the world’s 3rd richest guy and best investor says?)
Ferrit. Incompetent (Am I wrong? relatives not relatves)
Holy advertising enormity! (An obnoxious ad format from theWest.com.au)
It’s an interesting journey, this blogging.
I’ve just added a couple of links on the top right to make it easy to subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed.
What’s RSS? Well here’s a fun low tech explanation of what RSS is, and how to use a reader, such as Google Reader.
it does get a bit long, but it’s worth seeing the first bit anyway even if you are an RSS junkie.
Capital One has long had a reputation for employing smart people, and for being the best at segmenting the credit card market – targeting the right products at the right people.
Well – not such good news, via the Washington Post:
Capital One Financial of McLean posted its first quarterly loss ever, from the expense of shutting down its mortgage lender, and warned of additional challenges in the credit card and auto finance businesses.
Capital One reported an increasing number of delinquencies and defaults in both the credit card and auto finance sectors
however
The credit card business remained profitable for Capital One, with earnings up 21.5 percent from a year earlier. The company said rising delinquencies were largely a result of changing credit policies. This summer, Capital One told some customers that it would raise the interest rates and alter the grace periods on their credit cards.
but
“Consumers for a while were using their housing as ATM machines,” he said. Now they have increasingly turned to credit cards as a source of money, he said. Consumers already have considerable debt and may not have room to borrow more.
and
“If [credit card issuers] were to cut back significantly, that would have the potential to be a blow to spending,” he said.
This is a really bad sign to me – if these guys are getting it wrong, then it implies that many others are in a much worse situation – which means, well, incipient doom for a bunch of US households.
Good news, from the WSJ blog:
Ted Truman, a former top Federal Reserve and Treasury staffer now at the Peterson Institute for International Economics think tank in Washington, with a scoreboard that ranks 32 sovereign wealth funds from 28 countries on 25 elements in four categories — structure, governance, transparency and accountability and behavior. His bottom line: New Zealand’s Superannuation Fund ($10 billion) and Norway’s oil-fueled Government Pension Fund-Global ($300 billion) score the highest. The Qatar Investment Authority ($50 billion) and Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (estimated between $500 billion and $875 billion) score the lowest.
Sadly the Super fund is trivially sized in comparison with those others, but hey – perhaps they can follow the Yale model and turn out 20% year after year?
Expedia – the world’s largest travel agent, and a site I used a lot, err, last century, has finally arrived in New Zealand. Here’s a quick review.
That’s a mere 11 years after being founded by Microsoft in 1996 – nice to know we are important. It’s a classic case of the big boys discounting our small market, and allowing the likes of House of Travel and th airlines to take the market.
Anyway – is it worthwhile using Expedia.co.nz?
Well – for internal flights it looks like Expedia does better than the airline sites:
versus AirNZ:
plus
That’s $178 from the airline combo, and $145.91 from Expedia. Impressive. Very impressive – are Expedia operating on loss-leader margins?
But what about House of Travel (I hear you ask). It’s not a site I use, so I ran the same test.
On the one hand I got a cheapest fare of $157. (Less than Q+AirNZ, more than the $145 of Expedia).
On the other, actually choosing the same flights though gave me the same price as the airlines.
and on the other other hand – hitting Continue killed the process. (each time)
So – back to Expedia. As we could guess, the site is still very much skewed to the US traveller:
She’s not from here
Those aren’t our top hotel destinations
We don’t care about Honolulu (not at $2227)
Those aren’t our top rental car destinations.
So Expedia seems to lump us with Hawaii in some sort of ‘US South Pacific’, but hopefully the site will be tweaked as use becomes clear.
Overall – I fully expected the site to be totally US centric, and it is, but I certainly did not expect the cheaper fares that we see here. It’s a very interesting entrant to NZ market.
So Office Max (enterprise value US$4 billion), subsidiary Croxley Stationery, wins a NZ anti dumping case against 15 stationary importers from five South East Asian countries.
Apparently selling stuff in New Zealand for cheaper than other markets is bad.
The law is an ass – I’d rather have that cheaper stationary thank you, and I’d rather the US conglomerate competed fairly against it’s competitors without recourse to what is a woeful law.
Does the MED really think that 15 companies are COLLUDING to bring in stationary for less than it costs them overseas. Wouldn’t a rational mind think that perhaps we have a more competitive market here than they have in their home, and that all but one company in the NZ market are competing on a level playing field?
Companies will sell their products at the profit maximising price in any constituency. That means if there is healthy competition then the prices are lower, and if there is an oligopoly or monopoly then the prices will be higher. New Zealand has worked hard at free trade, at fair trade – and this sort of distorting decision puts us alongside, at least for stationary, the appalling trade laws in the USA.
what a difference a headline can make.
Both Stuff and NZHerald went with “NZ is 13th most taxed country in the OECD”.
The OECD has 30 members – something that took me – oh – about 15 seconds to find. Or you could look at the handy chart int he NZHerald article.
eBay reported a loss of a huge $936m – due to the recent huge write-down of Skype value. However otherwise theu showed some good signs, and some not so good signs.
Good – PayPal made $470m of revenue – up 35%
Not so good: Auctions (marketplaces) listings fell 5%, and GMV (the value of stuff that sells) rose only 14%. That’s a really low figure in this space.
and – signs of panic. eBay USA/Canada is reducing listing fees by 3% from now until November 5th. (50% if strt price is under $1).
This seems to go against their desire to reduce the amount of stagnant listings from huge sellers.
Lance Wiggs 