Month: May 2008

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Crikey: eBay Australia: Who? Us? Anti-competitive?

Crikey logo

[This was me in Crikey yesterday.]

Thank the gods I don’t work for the ACCC! The poor sods have to read 700+ public submissions on eBay Australia’s plan to force sellers to use PayPal — which they own. As Crikey reported, this could breach the “third line forcing” provisions of the Trade Practices Act.

Being a lazy geek rather than a tireless public servant, though, I can skim for juicy tidbits. They reveal a widespread fear of eBay bullying.

Continue reading “Crikey: eBay Australia: Who? Us? Anti-competitive?”

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Here’s episode 4!

Well the new computer certainly helped!

Replacing the obsolescent PowerBook G4 with shiny new MacBook Pro meant there was enough processing power to run everything for Stilgherrian Live Alpha episode 4: audio without breakup, a separate monitoring mix, drop-in videos, vision mixing… and even a two-camera shoot!

Content? Yeah there was content…

I talked about Mobile Content World, the gayness of Eurovision, Miranda Devine, the Politics & Technology Forum and the nature of broadcasting. And there was a fantastic song at the end.

The live audience reached 34 people at its peak, I think. It adds an interesting dynamic, though I’m still suffering from information overload trying to keep track of the chat and doing my own vision switching.

I’ll post some further thoughts some time in the next few days.

Episode 5 will be live on the Internet on Thursday 5 June at 9.30pm Sydney time.

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Episode 4 tonight

Yes, episode 4 of Stilgherrian Live Alpha will happen at 9.30pm tonight Sydney time. Will it be as disturbing as last week’s? There’s only one way to find out… well two, actually, ‘cos you could just ask someone. That shows how silly that stock advertising phrase really is.

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At Mobile Content World tomorrow

For my sins, I now have a media pass to the Mobile Content World Australasia conference at Sydney’s Star City Casino. I missed Day 1 today, but from the programme Day 2 will be more interesting from my perspective. Centrally-planned control-freak TV organisations and telcos try to control what’s on mobile phone screens. Fail. We control what’s on our screens, thank you very much! From one clueful attendee today, “Folks all seem like deers in the iPhone headlights.”

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eBay responds to 700+ submissions to ACCC

When the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) decided to investigate eBay Australia’s plan to force its sellers to use PayPal for their “protection”, there were more than 700 public submissions. eBay has responded by dismissing the objections.

I’ve written about this at length previously, both here and in Crikey [1, 2], with plenty of interesting comments from readers. And I’ve just written a piece for Crikey today, to be published around 2pm Sydney time.

Meanwhile, you can read some overview pieces at Auction Bytes and The Sheet. And you can see eBay’s full 15-page response at the ACCC website: it’s the second submission on the page, from “Applicant”.

To make things just that little bit more interesting, yesterday Telstra’s Sensis division announced a free auction site at Trading Post.

[Update 1250pm: The story will now run in Crikey tomorrow (Thursday). Busy news day, apparently.]

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Eurovision at the Pub succesful, but a failure

Eurovision 2008 logo

Last Sunday’s Eurovision at the Pub was a fun night, but it didn’t go as planned. We couldn’t get the Uconnect free wireless Internet access extended past 8pm, and my computer died anyway. So no live audio commentary or even Twitter from me. I also shot some video which will be edited into some semblance of… something… on the weekend. The Snarky Platypus explains the concept of The Mid-Tempo Gap.