Should Telecom put down ferrit?
For the last few years I have watched Telecom pump thousands of dollars into marketing for ferrit.co.nz as the online shopping hub in new Zealand. The problem I see with ferrit is
1. Character they have for it comes across as some creepy, paedophile, lazy jerk so no one really wants to relate to him.
2. The site layout is an explosion of images and links, lacks colour and focus points.
3. A lot of the site content resides under the break and the site's banners and header consume the first half of the page.
4. The retailer fees and commission terms are complex and expensive.
These are just a few of the problems I see with the site. I also find the business model confusing are they a gateway to the brick and mortar shops ? no..
Are they a online mall ? yes kind of but they don’t seem to give retailers a virtual shop.
Do they really offer a good product comparison feature ? not really.
Does their search work ? not very well. The refine search option is nice but easy to miss, a spell checker would be good too.
I guess ferrit is shaping up to be a site to go when you don’t know what to buy, probably a good option for finding gifts but that’s about it.
My guess is they will try again this x-mas season try a change in direction yet again . or they can give me a call to help fix it up 
Change managment ?
Work in a place that has a change managment team that has the functioal proceses of a hord of zombies? then this is for you ...
http://www.zapproved.com/Welcome
I really love the way online apps are going at the moment , now I think if some one put together a web based system that of couse was itil alinged and modular it would probally dominate the market. Include componets like project managment , incident and change.
You could then sell the system in two ways, hosted or appliance based , giving the customer the chance to purchase a 1u web server and intergrating with AD or another directory service. I know what you are thinking " what about company harware policeis and support ? " the truth is be flexiable. if a customer wants to supplt the hardware, thats fine just ensure its speced accordingly so booth parties dont have bad experiances.
Are we running out of dot coms?
When was the last time you had an awesome idea for a domain name only to find out some one has already purchased it and parked it with some random landing page? Thanks to the like of Kevin Ham nowadays one of the most difficult things in setting up a web site is finding a decent domain name to go with it. Allot of people now are settling on other top level domain names like .info .ac and so forth.
So what’s going to happen? At the moment people have it fixed in their heads that a .com is the prime tld name you could have and at the moment this could be argued in the near future as we see this problem grow I assume we will see other tld’s open up and people would naturally be encouraged to migrate to them and .com will lose its weight. About two years ago we saw the pandering launch of .mobi touted as the best domain name for mobile phone browser based sites. Unfortunately there is a really limited amount of people browsing the net on their phone. Generally people who purchased these domains are speculation that it will be the next intertube boom.
I can see that in the future that ICANN will open up more use of tld’s like .blog .shop and so forth. This will water down the .com and hopefully the market will become so wide domainers would struggle to turn a profit and the parked domain names will return to the open market to be used for real ideas, sites and business.
What is Synapses
For the definition of what synapses is click here. Now the reason I chose it ? I hope this blog becomes a place people can meet and make connections to move onto better things. also once it beomes a bit more popular I can use it as a lunchpad for other projects.
makemoneyonline.co.nz Rant
So I rock up to the G machine and search for "make money online" for a little market research and first spot I get http://www.makemoneyonline.co.nz sure that makes sense.
So thinking this would be of some interest I clicked on the link, first impression was this was something leftover from 1996 with tacky graphics and keyword heavy content. Next I noticed it was pumped with ad sense and other affiliate programs. Then I tried to move the mouse to see what other stuff the site had and the mother of all pop ups asking me to subscribe to the site, I click the little X to close the pop up and bang its back again close and bang back for more. Ok I will play this game so in goes a BS email address submit and bang another one asking me to buy some books. Dammit I just want to look the site and if you got something worth listening to sure I will subscribe to your feeds but no you want to play stupid games. Then it hit me, the best fix for this , close the browser window and gone.
Website Goals
Sunday evening I signed this blog up to Technorati. Hopefully this works out to be a decent tool to measure my blog. Currently my blog is ranking in at 3,324,847. My 6 month goal is to get this to less than a million but I am not too sure at the moment how I am gonna get there but I can be sure I will learn a few things on the way. My first commitment to archive this goal is posting daily. Any other suggestions appreciated.
Startup resources
In the last week I have found some nice resources for startups, freelanceswitch.com has a great post to cover 7 key things you should do. Rod has also been working on a series of post's for nzherald based on his experiences, check em out.
