Category: Business

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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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2 Web Crew at CeBIT with Jason Calacanis

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (0.3KB)

Did people really think I’d end up brawling with Jason Calacanis at CeBIT last week? Sure, I called him a prick and wrote about the evil cult of the Internet start-up. But he does actually have good points.

I met Mr Calacanis when I found myself recording the 2 Web Crew podcast on my borrowed video camera. Since I was concentrating on getting good audio, the vision’s a bit shaky, but at least you’ll see what it was like during those hectic 16 minutes.

I may disagree with Calacanis’ priorities in life, but that’s hardly unique to him. He does do business transparently, however. He makes sense and calls a spade a spade. And he’s certainly been a successful entrepreneur.

He’s also a tireless promoter — of himself. Now that’s not a bad thing when you’re trying to build hype around a new business. But it’s a character trait that Australians reckon is bad — which is perhaps why we so often fail to market our own innovations.

I was also amused to see the swarm of Calacanis fan-boys and girls buzzing around him “like flies to a dead sheep”, as I said on Twitter. Guys, a little less cult of personality and a little more independent thought will work wonders in your lives. Success is not achieved through frottage with the successful. Unless you’re a hooker.

So, Jason, here is the promised blog post saying that you’re not as much of a prick as I thought you were.

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Crikey: Australia’s web 2.0 wipeout on the wave of the future

Crikey logo

[Note: This is a slightly edited version of an article I wrote for Crikey this morning. The main difference is a bit more linkage. There’s more CeBIT / Transaction 2.0 material to come.]

In 1980 futurist Alvin Toffler wrote The Third Wave. Following the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, he said, we’re now experiencing the Third Wave, or what might be called post-industrial society. Australia’s surfing prowess means nothing here, though. We’re still pissing in the shallows, barely held up by leaking floaties.

Why is tech-literate, well-educated Australia so bad at marketing and profiting from its own innovation, from the fisheye lens to gene shears? We do innovate, you know.

“Australians expect the government to do everything for them — but the government’s clueless,” explained journalist and evangelist Duncan Riley at yesterday’s Transaction 2.0 conference. “The Australia 2020 Summit is a classic example. The Internet was seen as an ’emerging’ industry. Emerging? We’ve had it for 20 years! In the US alone it employs 7 million people.”

Continue reading “Crikey: Australia’s web 2.0 wipeout on the wave of the future”

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How will I cope with the looming Geek Week?

Next week is packed! How can I get the best value out of CeBIT Sydney and the associated Transaction 2.0 conference, as well as Microsoft’s ReMIX 08? What should I record or broadcast? What should I write about?

CeBIT Sydney logo

CeBIT was always on my agenda. Despite being disappointing last year and despite annoying me with a flood of email, it’s still the biggest IT trade show in Australia. It’s worth going just to see who’s confidently spending money on promotion, if nothing else.

I’ll be touring the trade show floor on Wednesday 21 May. If you want to meet up, let me know. Maybe I should even do a Stilgherrian Live Alpha from the bloggers media room? Whaddyathink?

If you still haven’t organised your free pass, you can register online using my promotion code: stilcs08.

On Thursday 22 May I’ll be at Transaction 2.0, with an interesting set of speakers. Again, it’s a matter of choosing the priorities. Who should I talk to? Should I pick a fight with Jason Calacanis?

ReMIX 08 logo

But I kick off the Geek Week on Tuesday 20 May with ReMIX 08, where Microsoft says I’ll “experience all that is new in Silverlight 2, Expression 2, IE8, Live and a host of other great web technologies… You will also see how local Australian innovators are creating the next generation of engaging websites and unprecedented user experiences for the web.”

Provided they build it with Microsoft’s tools, of course. 😉

That’s unfair. Microsoft is changing. It’ll be interesting to hear what they’re up to.

Now my only challenge is working out how all this fits into one week, while still leaving room to do some billable hours for clients.

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Twitter flattened by China earthquake, indirectly (not)

Hugh MacLeod stylised cartoon of a twittering bird

While I’ve become a heavy user of Twitter, its main problem is that it’s simply failing to cope with its own rapid growth. Today’s Twitter outage is doubtless caused by a sudden rush of interest following mainstream media coverage in the context of China’s earthquake.

‘Twitters’ beat media in reporting China earthquake, said AFP, and the story ran everywhere. I guess there might be two or three dozen people wanting to know what’s happening in China, maybe even more. Twitter fall down go boom.

Now scaling-up a service like Twitter isn’t easy, I guess. However they compound the problem by failing to provide meaningful information about their outages. People use Twitter for moment-by-moment personal communication — and many of them are the global digerati! When something goes wrong, updates need to happen frequently, and need to contain meaningful information. Perhaps you could use that Internet thing we keep hearing about?

Twitter, you face a grave danger. Someone could replicate your service but with better engineering. You must recover from this outage much better than all previous ones.

[Update 11.10am: Twitter says today’s outage doesn’t have an interesting explanation. “Part of our caching service required an unscheduled restart. That means a slow rebuilding of data.” If so, then their systems architecture needs serious work, I reckon.]

[Credit: Cartoon Twitter-bird courtesy of Hugh MacLeod. Like all of Hugh’s cartoons published online, it’s free to use.]

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Tax changes work against innovation

Two tax changes announced in Tuesday’s Federal Budget actually work against business innovation. Businesses must now depreciate their computer software over 4 years, not 2.5. This pulls in $1.3b in tax but discourages upgrading. (However it might be good news for vendors of software as a service and proponents of open source software.) Similarly, Fringe Benefits Tax rules for laptops and PDAs given to employees have been tightened, discouraging a more flexible, mobile workforce. I thought we were meant to be building for the future…