A great quote from Chris Rattue from NZ Herald over the weekend, in a mock Q&A about the Rugby World Cup:
“Why are Australia so confident about their chances?
Gary, Steelers Country.It’s a smokescreen, Gary. Deep down, they are an insecure lot, but they hide it with bravado and by winning a lot of things.”
Too true!
I went along to watch the Wellington Phoenix kick off their A League season at the Westpac Stadium yesterday.
They got a crowd of 14,421 people to show up.
Apparently this is the biggest crowd to ever watch a football game in NZ. The previous record was also at Westpac Stadium when the Kingz (one of the Auckland-based predecessors to the Phoenix) played in Wellington in 2001.
I’m a sucker for the buzz generated by a big crowd, but the atmosphere really was awesome.
The Yellow Fever were in fine voice.
The best chant of the afternoon was easily “Same old ozzies, always cheating!”. :-)
We were all on our feet for the last 10 minutes, when the Phoenix came back from 2-0 down to draw the match 2-2 and then have a couple of close chances to win.
The star of the show was Brazilian substitute Felipe. You can always tell a player is good when they only have one name! I tried to find out more about him, but his player profile on the web is pretty elusive.
As long as they keep playing well, I have a feeling that this crowd record will be broken again soon!
Congratulations to everybody who played a part in bringing the Phoenix to Wellington.
These days most people working on the web understand the importance of word-of-mouth.
It’s cheap.
It’s effective, because people still believe things their friends and family tell them!
It’s also easy, provided you follow a few simple rules.
It’s not quick though, so you do need to be patient. To quote Rachel Hunter: “It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen”. So, don’t burn all your cash in the first 6 months.
But, is “viral” growth enough?
Every week there are memes which spread online like a virus, only to disappear just as quickly, normally never to be seen or heard from again.
If you look at the sites which have been most successful with this sort of approach they have another critical ingredient: something which keeps people coming back.
To extend the virus analogy you need to infect people and make sure they stay infected.
Perhaps we need a different (more positive) way of describing the desired effect?
How about “Blackhole Marketing”? The product needs to draw you in and continue to hold your attention.
The feedback system used by sites like eBay and Trade Me is a good example. Once you’ve done a few trades and established that you are a trustworthy member it’s much easier for you to continue to buy and sell via Trade Me than it is to switch to a different site.
Josh from First Round Capital talked about a similar idea recently in relation to social networking sites: “Catch And Release” Business Models
Apart from eBay and Facebook, what are some other examples of sites that have the blackhole effect?
Garr Reynolds has found a nice low-tech way of staying on task when working at home:
If you do any public speaking and haven’t found Garr’s blog Presentation Zen go check it out.
It’s packed full of advice to help you (or more accurately your audience) avoid death by PowerPoint.
Definitely recommended.
If I could change one thing in Google Reader this would be it:
I want an easy way to delete all of the posts over 24 hours old (or whatever time-frame I choose).
Lately I haven’t been reading feeds everyday. It’s a healthy change. But, when I do find time to catch-up I find I waste a lot of time reading old news.
When you come home from holiday and find, say, three newspapers sitting on your doorstep, you don’t start with the oldest one. You probably actually throw all three away.
But, with RSS feeds the posts just build up. Same with email, actually.
Are there any feed readers which work like this?
Here is a nice (old) post from Sam Ng at Optimal Usability about Ben Goodger’s presentation at Webstock last year:
“Ben Goodger, lead engineer for the Firefox browser, obviously believes in the power of the user interface and credits their ‘less is more’ philosophy as one of the key reasons for the browser’s success. As part of this philosophy, they made sure that the interface was clear, removing words or interface elements wherever they could to increase clarity. They also had fewer and more useful options, only including a configuration option if 15% or more of users were likely to change it. And they worked hard on using smart defaults, like turning the pop-up blocker on. All these small changes created a ‘cumulative feeling of quality’.”
From: http://www.optimalusability.com/post.php?postid=31
Designing for the 80% majority (or 85% in this case) is a great idea.
Sam – this is good stuff, what’s happened to your blog?
I have a VHS tape which I would like to convert to a digital format (not the least because I don’t have a VHS player!)
The sound cuts in and out a bit, so it will need a bit of massaging.
Does anybody know of a service in Wellington that can help with this?
Image from: Scott Hanselman.
Once you’ve been in the sweet spot at the intersection of these three you’ll find it hard to work anywhere else (in my experience).
Earlier in the year Lance pointed to an interesting video:
This animation is based on US data, but the NZ version of this ride would be pretty similar I’d expect. And it should give pause to anybody who is blindly positive about the prospects of the property market.
Back then Lance predicted that the market was “ready to plunge”. It hasn’t done yet but still seems to have all of the signs.
What do you think?
If you accept that it’s just a market, and prices can go up and down (see the above video), think about what will influence the supply and demand over the coming years. Specifically think about the demographics of the participants in the market.
On the supply side there are the Baby Boomers who are heavily invested in residential property and are now looking to downsize their family homes and sell down their rental portfolios to fund their retirement.
On the demand side there is Generation X who are pretty poorly positioned to enter the property market. They (we!) have spent longer in education and so relatively less time in the employment market. And they have a pretty poor savings record – preferring instead to fund their lifestyle. So they have less savings and more debt (credit card and student loans) not to mention a reluctance to settle down and start a family: station wagon and white picket fence anybody?
Yes, I realise these are rash generalisations and stereotypes, but it’s worth thinking about.
Who will want to buy? Who will want to sell? What’s that going to do to prices?
But, what about all the people who have made a killing in the property market in the last few years?
Here is a quote from Mark Cuban:
“A lot people think that if they are picking stocks that keep on going up, its because they are smart. They fail to notice that EVERYONE is able to pick winning stocks when all stocks are going up.”
(actually, while unrelated to property, the whole post is worth reading)
It’s been a buoyant property market in NZ. But this is not normally something that people consider when thinking about the gain they’ve made.
Here is a simple table that shows the capital gain required just to match the market as a whole:
| Year purchased | Return |
|---|---|
| 2000 | 241% |
| 2001 | 227% |
| 2002 | 198% |
| 2003 | 151% |
| 2004 | 130% |
| 2005 | 111% |
Based on QV data to Q4 2006, Source: Reserve Bank of New Zealand (http://www.rbnz.govt.nz/keygraphs/HousingData.xls)
So that’s the baseline.
How does your return compare?
Remember to deduct anything you’ve spent on renovations and repairs first.
So take note next time somebody is bragging about how much they’ve made in the recent property market. The real test of their smarts will come when the market turns.
Or maybe it never will?
You tell me.
I went to hear Danyon Loader speak a while back.
He is an excellent speaker. If you get a chance to hear him, take it.
He had a nice anecdote which I’ve been meaning to share on here…
He said he can usually tell where somebody comes from based on the first question they ask when they meet somebody new.
Interesting!
So, what do you do?
:-)
I’ve always struggled to explain Amazon’s web services, S3 (Simple Storage Service) and EC2 (Elastic Computer Cloud).
They didn’t seem to fit into any existing category.
And their slightly obscure names, although very descriptive, once you understand them, didn’t help.
In a recent O’Reilly Radar post Tim O’Reilly suggests a much better name:
Hardware as a service.
That’s it!
Jim Donovan is ranting about the term SME (meaning “small medium enterprise”) and objects to people calling a company with 10 staff a SME.
He suggests:
Jim, one man’s “small” is another man’s “medium” I suppose?
Here is what the numbers tell us:
Source: Ministry of Economic Development, SMEs in New Zealand, May 2006
So, using Jim’s definition, 99.46% of all enterprises in NZ are small.
But, if practically everybody is going to be classified as “small” doesn’t it make a bit of a mockery of the classifications?
In a comment to my post about My Football Club, Steven Kempton (a.k.a. The Asia Pacific Headhunter) makes an excellent suggestion:
“I’d prefer NZ did something to try and buy a rugby club in the UK. I’ve been telling anyone who’ll listen for years that it’s in the NZRU’s best interests to try and purchase a UK club to extend the AB’s brand and also to give the players an option to play overseas but return, same with coaches. You’re in Wellington Rowan, walk down the road and give Jock Hobbs a word for me…”
Interesting idea! The NZRU model is to contract all players to the national union. This makes for clear priorities: All Blacks, Super 14, then NPC (there is a bit of confusion where the Sevens team fits into this, but I’ll overlook that for now). The European model is quite different. They seem to prefer a football-style setup, where the best players from all over the world are contracted to the European club sides (at massive salaries) and only “released” to play for their national teams at the clubs leisure. As a consequence they are more than happy to pay top dollar/pound to contract the best players from NZ, and really don’t care that the NZRU policy means that these players are then not available for international selection. And it means that international sides that tour NZ in their off-season are often missing many of the top players. One thing is for sure: we don’t have much influence sitting down here and trying to tell them what we think they should do. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em! There is lots to like about Steven suggestion:
So, you tell me: why couldn’t this happen? Mr. Hobbs?
The big news in the blogosphere this week?
The disappointing but probably inevitable outing of Fake Steve Jobs.
In related news: we’re looking for somebody to be Fake Sam Morgan.
If you’re interested please forward your resume and salary expectations.
My email address is on the sidebar.
;-)
Wesabe, which is a personal finance community site, have been doing some really interesting stuff lately.
Here are two recent announcement which have caught my attention:
The first makes it much easier to get your bank data from your bank into Wesabe. The second makes it easier to get your bank data out of Wesabe and into whatever other format/software you want to use.
Put these two things together and Wesabe have effectively provided a complete API for bank transaction data which works independantly of the banks. You could argue it works despite the banks!
This is interesting. Wesabe take the customer-centric view that your data wants to be free where as the banks take the view that your data is an asset that they own and should try and protect and in some cases even charge for.
At the end of the day, whose data is it?
Marc Hedlund, the founder of Wesabe, talks more about this in a recent O’Reilly Radar post:
“We’ve gotten a lot of interest in the Wesabe API in large part because the bank and credit card industries are so tight-fisted with their data.”
“Other companies have done well with their APIs by owning a large set of data and letting people at it through the web; we’re doing well by liberating data from the Phantom Zone of the bank web sites, and making it available to the people who already own it — the banks’ customers.”
“It’s easy for us to offer value to our API users since the companies that currently store financial data do such a fantastic job of putting up barbed wire around it, in the form of archive access fees, download fees, obsolete data formats, and just plain bad programming. Making all of that data available, consistent, and free is value enough.”
From: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/07/making_the_web.html
Of course bank transaction data is a core part of Xero too. One of the benefits we have over traditional software which is installed on the customers computer is that we can easily interface directly with the banks and import the customers data directly into Xero, saving them the hassle of visiting their internet banking and downloading an export file and then importing it into their accounting software.
Each of the banks have responded to this opportunity differently. Some are happy to provide free access to the data. Others want to charge us a big fee to develop the interface. Others want to clip the ticket on every transaction that gets transmitted. All of them insist on clunky offline registration processes.
The fees are especially surprising given that all of them provide free access to the same data via their online banking websites. I would have thought that they would welcome the opportunity to take load off their servers, but apparently not.
All of the banks have adapted, eventually, to the Web 1.0 world and have taken cost out of their business in the process. It will be interesting to watch as they make the transition to Web 2.0. Those that don’t might find that services such as Wesabe and Xero route the customers around them.
What other examples can you think of where traditional businesses profit from the fact that their data is hard to get to, which keeps you going back to them and allows them to clip the ticket each time? As Marc points out this is where opportunities exist for start-ups.
UPDATE (20-Sept): Fred Wilson, a VC investor in Wesabe, adds his own thoughts on this topic.
