Category: tech

Gerry Harvey (and @harveynormanau ) has become the visible target of the online shopper recently with his comments regarding GST and a ‘level playing field’. Technically, he’s correct, but his approach and methods work best for a certain demographic on shallow, sensationalist popular television – in the faster moving, better informed blogosphere, he’s experienced a massive ‘suicidal‘ #fail.

I’m not going to add much to the comment that hasn’t already been said better already by others [1, 2, 3]. However, I will try to add a little insight from my own perspective.

About 18 years ago, I worked for a company that prepared film separations for print (crumbs! only 18 years ago – do film houses still exist?). It was highly skilled and exacting work, and the company, Show-Ads, was the acknowledged leader of the industry in Australia. Some of the work we produced was simply superb.

Anyway, we could see the internet was going to have a huge impact. We also had really close ties with the major ad agencies and direct links to the several major retailers (Target, Myer, Coles, Kmart). We produced all the artwork for the catalogues these retailers stuffed in your mailbox, and we held digital image files of all their product (we photographed much of it ourselves). In short, we were really well placed to give these retailers a huge head start into online sales.

So, in 1995, the company spawned a new division called Marketspace. It was going to be soooo cool – it was a virtual shopping mall where a visitor could enter, choose a retailer, browse products, and … well, they could browse products. To be fair, looking back now, it sounds like crap, and it kinda was (frames, animated gifs etc.), but 15 years ago, believe me, it was the shizzle!

Funny thing though, the retailers were dead scared of it. They didn’t want to get involved, they didn’t want the risk, the didn’t think it would work, they didn’t want it to work because that would mean people wouldn’t visit their stores. It was an attitude that, even then, marked them as dinosaurs, trudging reluctantly down the long road to the tarpits of extinction. And here we are today, more then 15 years later, and we’re still hearing the same arguments!

So, Gerry (and your ilk). It’s too late. Not just a few weeks too late, not just a few years, but 15 bloody years too late!

Amusingly, one of the brands I remember from the Marketspace days was Myer’s failed venture into electronics: MegaMart (remember those?), and 15 of those stores were sold off to Harvey Norman! So, Gerry, you really did have your chance 15 years ago! Hilarious that now you can go to harveynorman.com.au and search/browse product, but not buy! Sure, there’s no animated gifs, but it’s still that 1995 mindset.

OK, a second post about #MoMoMelb. I’ve already had a bit of a moan about Monday’s event so you might think I’m dead against them. No, wouldn’t want to give that impression – consider this constructive criticism 😉

One of the generous sponsors of MoMoMelb is Blackberry, all these events have their sponsors – it just wouldn’t work without them. And the sponsors have to feel like they’re getting value for their dollars. All I can say is that they might need to adjust their message a little…

We were to be treated to a ‘sneak peek’ of the new Blackberry tablet, the Playbook. Since Apple’s release of the iPad, there’s been a steady stream of press predicting a range of usurpers… so far the predictions have failed to come to much. Anyway, Blackberry is a pretty solid player – a much more worthy adversary in this space than a bunch of OEM hardware makers cranking out cheap tablets and slapping Android onto them, and given the audience, we’ve all heard the reports and speculation, so there’s a fair bit of anticipation in the room.

So, with this captive, tech-savvy audience, what do they do? They play the promo video that accompanied the launch more than two months ago and talk through some specifications which were also released at the same time… that’s it! That’s the Sneak Peek! What a missed opportunity! To be fair the hapless company rep probably had no more information than that – the device isn’t scheduled to ship here for at least another 5 months – if they meet their targets!

Anyway – I had a little laugh to myself about the optimistic predictions they have for battery life, on a device that runs flash, probably in the background! Ha ha! seems I wasn’t the only one who didn’t swallow everything at face value.

Anyway, I don’t know about tablet computing – it’s one of those things that you’ll either find a space for in your life or you won’t. I’ve used an iPad a fair bit, and I love it for a few things; news browsing in particular, over breakfast! But you’re not going to carry one in your pocket. I certainly won’t be buying one. iPads are the darlings of the senior staff around our place, so I suppose there’s going to be a healthy take up of PlayBooks amongst people who don’t pay for their own hardware.

Actually, on that subject there was another hilarious moment when someone asked who had a Windows 7 phone – a surprising number of hands went up. The question was followed with “who bought it themselves”, ummm no-one! After all, IE7, what were they thinking?

These days, web developers tend to use a lot of hosted services. It makes sense – you don’t want to have to re-write everything and host it locally. Unfortunately, at the same time you hand off responsibility, you also hand off control. If the remote service goes down or has problems, you have problems! … and there’s nothing you can do about it.

The latest culprit I’ve noticed is typekit.

I wondered why the site I was loading was so unresponsive, page load was 30-40 seconds. A quick look in the status bar told me…

Frustrating!

I love SBS, Australia’s second ‘public’ broadcaster. I have thoroughly enjoyed watching the World Cup, and am now settling into enjoy the Tour de France.
During the World Cup, I’ve found the free ESPN Soccernet 2010 iPhone App just brilliant. It does what you need, scores, reviews, stats… an exceptional example of a sport app. So when the Tour de France rolled around, I thought there’d be some great free app that I could use to keep track of the big event…

I have to admit, I was a little surprised to find hardly anything, however, the only app that looked promising came from our own SBS – they do such a great job of the TV coverage and website, that I thought the app was bound to be good too. There was a free one to try and a paid version if you feel the need for extra features… at least that’s the way these things usually work, isn’t it?

The disappointment starts…

The free app seems to be nothing more than a ‘rich’ ad. I can’t get anything useful out of it. Every screen is dominated by a huge ad, which doesn’t matter that much given that the app doesn’t do anything anyway! This is wrong, I don’t pay for many apps, but free apps aren’t supposed to be useless, they can provide a cut down experience, but they’ve still gotta work!

OK, so maybe the paid app is better. Ouch!! $5.99! it’s going to have to be a LOT better, might read the reviews first… Uh Oh, those are not positive reviews. Seems like SBS have a problem on their hands. I have never seen such a low rating on a ‘serious’ app before, so far they have 1 positive rating out of 51. Stay away from this app! To be fair, SBS is not the developer, it’s some dodgy crowd called Participant Sports who seem to have no website – both the developer and support link lead to some facebook page that I can’t even load. How can Apple let something like this go by?

I’ve just been on a team that developed an iPhone app, so I have some insight into just how complicated it can be – not the app itself, but the whole back end supply of feeds and resources. So, I’m not going to harshly judge, but they are going to need to pull a massive rabbit out of the hat to get the whole thing working and save face. It’s a disaster!

I’m thinking the rabbit might need to look like: a refund to all paid users, a real fix for the app, drop the paid app and release the full app for free, and all of this in no more than two days. Not asking too much really 😉