Barty’s Weblog

Last week I finally caved and bought myself my first ever Apple Mac. I was originally going to buy myself a decent PC laptop to get myself a little more mobile around the house, but I ended up going for a MacBook Pro on a hunch.

My initial impressions are all good. The packaging was first class, the initial experience was excellent and so far the performance has been top notch. I’m mainly using the MacBook for mail, internet and World of Warcraft (which actually helps the MacBook double as a heater — good for winter, not so much for summer!).

My initial fears of running two different Operating Systems have been unfounded as the brain seems to adapt to each environment really quickly (but I’m happy to admit I’m still a complete Mac newbie). Its susrprising how adaptable the human brain can be.

Interestingly, within hours of getting my Mac, I was getting the Mac jibes…  “silly mac users”, “noob” and “mac user haha”.

But I’m already starting to wonder how long my home PC desktop will last… the MacBook is a real pleasure to use. Highly recommended.

There’s something that has been bugging me for a while. Each week the NZ Herald publishes their weekly Timeout Guide which covers new releases and news for Film, Music, Books and Television.

I’ve often wondered why don’t they include video games in this section?

While its nice that The Herald files gaming under their Technology section on their web site, perhaps it’s time that gaming was included in their weekly Timeout publication?

Not only would this mean that the Timeout publication would appeal to more people, but it also opens up avenues for more advertising revenue (todays guide includes a full page ad for a DVD release, a 1/3 page ad for a Film, the usual theatre ads and no music ads whatsoever).

Just how big is gaming getting? The Age posted a news article this week headlined: Video games thrash movies and DVDs

This article highlights that gaming is now a mainstream activity (as if the recent Oliver Newton-John ads weren’t enough of a hint). The article goes on to mention:…

“The video games industry is now double the size of the box office and more than 40 per cent larger than the movie disc industry in Australia, thanks to explosive growth in social games that allow the whole family to play.

The Interactive Entertainment Association of Australia (IEAA) today released figures showing games industry revenue was $1.96 billion in calendar year 2008, an increase of 47 per cent from the previous year.

Sony Computer Entertainment managing director Michael Ephraim said: “It’s clear now that the [games] industry is the nucleus of entertainment – it has come out of the bedroom, into the living room, and on to every kind of device, and we’re going to see another few years of considerable growth.”

Video games are no longer confined to the  bedroom. I believe its time the folks at The Herald get with the times. Video games thrash movies and DVDs…

Get gaming into the Timeout guide!

I must confess that I have a pretty good home theatre set up for video gaming and for watching the odd movie.

The whole set up is powered by a Sony amp and everything (literally) runs through the amp including all the video and sound. Unfortunately one of the down sides with using an amp for video is that TV’s with Freeview built-in are pointless, so last year I purchased Freeview HD to enjoy television in high definition.

But overall, I was disappointed with the lack of HD programs that were broadcast on the Freeview channels. TV3 was excellent, but most of the TV1 and TV2 programs weren’t high definition at all. After a while I began to leave Freeview turned off and just reverted to using the old trusty Sky TV decoder. It just wasn’t worth the hassle of using an extra remote and changing the input on the amp just to watch something in slightly better resolution.

But I recently upgraded our Sky decoder to the My Sky HDi decoder and I’ve not looked back. With My Sky HDi you get SKY Sport 1, SKY Sport 2, SKY Movies, SKY Movies Greats and TV3 in proper high definition. It’s beautiful.. and watching the Black Caps in high definition has been nothing short of brilliant.

On top of the “high def goodness” you get cool features like recording your favourite programs and the live pause (which gets handier every day). You can even record two channels at once and watch a third and I must confess to even achieving that feat once so far.

My Sky HDi is so handy, it has changed my TV viewing habits. I no longer sit down at scheduled times each week to catch my favourite shows. I use MySky to record the series each week and leave it to it.

When I want to watch some TV, I don’t channel surf or settle for whatever is on — I flick through my recorded programs and watch something I really wanted to watch. The result is that I now watch less TV.

Kudos to Sky TV… My Sky HDi is a great piece of technology that makes life easier.

Yesterday Mighty Ape set a new record for daily sales in January… co-incidence I’m sure.

One of the great advantages of being an online business is that we have access to bucket-loads of business data. As an online store we’re able to track things like daily sales, hourly sales, hourly shipped orders, orders still to be picked, stock on hand, etc all on the fly… in real time.

But one of the downsides of real-time is that the excess data can create an addiction to the F5 key. It’s easy to become a little too obsessed with refreshing key statistics to see how the current hour is tracking.

We’re finding that too much real-time data can be distracting. The “F5 addiction” can develop to the point where observing the data serves no real decision-making purpose… other than satisfying some curiosity.

If data is not going to be used to help make good business decisions then does it really need to be viewed at all? Lately, we’ve started reducing our real-time reporting in an effort to reduce data distractions.  While its nice to be in touch, knowing how hourly sales are tracking is actually not very useful!

Is real-time data too fast? I think it often can be, and as an online businesses, we need to be careful we don’t swamp ourselves with valueless data. Yet another lesson learned…

The only surprising thing about Telecom’s decision today to pull the pin on Ferrit is how long it took.

Telecom blames the current “retail environment” for the failure, yet this isn’t reflected in our own experience. Since relaunching in September, Mighty Ape has broken all sorts of records over the last two month and our January sales are tracking well up on last year (up over 45% so far).

And I’m sure Mighty Ape isn’t the only local web site enjoying success over the Christmas period. So with Ferrit,  maybe something other than the “environment” has gone wrong. The business model perhaps? The web site?

I’d suggest the following as the reasons Ferrit failed to deliver (in no particular order):

The web site failed – the web site while “pretty” on the outside, did not present the content well, nor did it work as a comparison site. The difficulty Ferrit faced was that all the retailers had their own product data, so price comparisons where merely a bunch of (sometimes random) search results. Then there was the old stuff presented as new… cold presented as hot …  a lot of basic mistakes that retailers wouldn’t make, if they were choosing which products to feature in their own stores.

Weekly content fails – Ferrit lacked good sticky content — there was no reason to come back tomorrow or the day after. The front page was changed once a week and the category pages are changed less often. Sites like Trademe are very sticky — i.e. it’s worth visiting often. I still remember pricing mistakes with some of our products on the front page of Ferrit… and we literally had to wait a week for the next site update to get the prices fixed. We were incredulous at the time.

The combination of a poor web site and stale content meant that Ferrit had to heavily advertise to get traffic to their web site — people did not come back of their own free will.

Business model – then there was the business model. The infrastructure needed to support a web site like Ferrit is substantial and when coupled with the very low commission model, it was always going to be very difficult to break even. To make matters worse, New Zealand is small, so they had to penetrate the market very well to just break-even. I’d suspect that the maths were pretty basic for Telecom in the end.

Overall, I think the main reason that Ferrit failed was that it just wasn’t very useful. People didn’t really need it.

We were retailers on Ferrit up until September 2008, at which point we decided that we didn’t need to compete with our own web site. I remember the last sale we participated in, we heavily discounted music… and Real Groovy discounted games. That typified the problem for retailers. Why bother to help something grow so others can compete with you? For us it was purely a business decision.

Speaking of which, I believe a pretty sensible economic decision has been made… finally.

I do have to say that in our dealings with Ferrit, while we’ve had to deal with some pretty “awkward” systems (being awfully polite), the people have always been great! We’d like to pass on our best wishes to all of Ferrits staff…