I am sympathetic:

You can contact me using:

Email:
david at eedle dot com

Skype:
davideedle

Telephone:
+61 419 876 942

Fax:
+61 3 8677 9933

IBM has an ad in today’s Financial Review for special offers on some of their servers. I’m interested in a new web server, so paid attention. The ad is headed ‘uptime comes standard’.

There are two contact channels, a web address and a 1800 telephone number.  So I go to the web URL. It has a bunch of offers – but they are old ones expiring 31 March. Not the new ones – someone’s not updated with the latest to coincide with the print campaign.

So I ring the 1800 number. It’s answered with the usual canned voice, ‘all our operators are busy please hold’ then it goes click beep, and a voice says ‘there is no voice mail service please contact the main number for this location’ (or somesuch) and hangs up.

So instead I ring the 1800 number (different to above) on the web site. I get a voice mail saying I’ve rung the marketing response centre and pre sales department, please leave a message and they’ll respond within 3 business hours.

IBM’s servers may have uptime as standard, but their marketing and
sales systems just have downtime. Makes it pretty difficult to buy
anything from them….

We were box dropped with this DL flyer today at home:

Cool! A free home appraisal. Why not give it a go, so I pumped the URL into Firefox. I dutifully ‘click here’ on the home page and arrive at a form to fill out. Straightforward, name, email, phone and address of my house. But cynic that I am I click the Privacy link rather than the submit button. Hmmm, you have to read the policy most of the way down to find:

“By providing your personal information you consent to us and our sponsors and service providers using your personal information to provide you value added services. Based on your preference, this includes contacting you by telephone, mail or e-mail to discuss products and services. You also consent to us, our sponsors and service providers, offering you products and/or services which you may agree to purchase, and this extends to goods or services from us or any third party.”

OK, so by submitting the form I’m agreeing to be spammed by phone, email and mail, by homeguru and a whole bunch of other people (‘sponsors and service providers’) – none of whom are named. So how can I agree to that – I don’t know who they all are. How can I reasonably consent to something when I don’t know what it is?

Interestingly the How it Works page says:

“HomeGuru will search its database and match your requirements to property information and a qualified real estate professional in your local area.” Which kinda confirms that we’re going to get a call from a local real estate agent busting to help us sell our house. So clearly lead generating for the agent – presumably they’re paying for the referrals.

If you  dig all the way to the bottom of their terms of use page, in the absolutely last paragraph you find:

“HomeGuru has sourced and reproduced information published and compiled
by Australian Property Monitors Pty Ltd, ACN 061 438 006, ABN 42 061
438 006, PO Box 1300 (Suite 6, Level 2, 32A Oxford St) Darlinghurst
2010 NSW (Publisher).”

Suddenly everything makes sense. APM is a business that collates property sales information and sells, you guessed it, property valuation reports – they get a big run on the Fairfax sites. In fact their web site has Fairfax digital all over it.

Registrant    Australian Property Monitors
Registrant ID    OTHER 061 434 006
Eligibility Type    Other
Registrant ROID    C3001750-AR
Registrant Contact Name    Admin Contact Fairfax Digital
Registrant Email    domainnameadmin@f2.com.au
Tech ID    2784822163
Tech Name    Tech Contact Fairfax Digital
Tech Email    hostmaster@f2.com.au
Name Server    ns2.fairfax.com.au
Name Server IP    203.5.59.241
Name Server    ns1.fairfax.com.au
Name Server IP    203.26.177.241

HomeGuru.com.au has something different:

So the HomeGuru site is produced by massmedia.com.au, a Sydney-based web dev company (APM is also Sydney based)

Conclusion. Either a) homeguru.com.au is a little enterprise that is essentially making  money by onselling APM reports and agent referrals. Or b) it’s actually APM with a little smoke and mirrors marketing – creating a new brand, spamming the letterboxes of the suburbs with a standard bait campaign – promise ’em a freebie (probably just a little subset of data from one of the normal paid reports) in return for building a mailing list.

A little poking around brings up this YouTube video.
Ahha, homeguru is a lead generator for real estate agents. Presumably
an agent pays for the marketing campaign in their area and receives a
database of everyone who responds.

My problem with all this is that it’s bordering on sneaky. The print brochure makes no mention of APM, or a paid property report. It has headlines like ‘Your free online property report awaits!’.

The web site is the same. The registration form makes no mention that by signing up you’re giving permission for a whole bunch of nameless businesses to contact you. Well, you would know, if you clicked through to the privacy statement and read every paragraph carefully all the way down.

And finally, if this is actually an APM ‘front’, why not just be up front and say so instead of hiding behind mirrors.

Interestingly, if you Google homeguru you get an AdWords ad:

 Homeguru.com.au
Accurate, Up-to-Date Sales Data,
Rent Returns, Growth, Title Search
MYRP.com.au

MYRP is a Queensland based business doing the same as APM – collating property sales data and selling it as valuation reports etc. One would have presumed they are a competitor to APM. So, do they own homeguru (and are buying data from APM) or are they doing a naughty and buying the names of competitors on AdWords?

Outstanding! After all these years online I’m finally being targeted by those dreadful Nigerians, they’re trying to scam me on an eBay auction. (Disclaimer: I need to be careful not tarnish Nigerians as a people, my parents lived and worked there for several years, and my big brother was born in Nigeria).

I had a cleanout of the cupboard the other weekend and came up with a box of computer bits and pieces, so I’ve been selling them on eBay. Today I listed an O2 Atom PDA phone. Bought it a year or so ago while in between Blackberries, but wasn’t my cup of tea, so stashed the box in cupboard.

Imagine my excitement when eBay notified me this evening someone had clicked the Buy it Now within hours. Yay, money in the bank. The successful bidder is sandracollins0022222222. Their profile says Queensland (I listed the item only for Australia).

Then comes a message from sandracollins0022222222:

"Dear Seller,
I am interested in paying for this item so i will want to know its present condition and also i will and paypal or Bank deposit are most Preferable and okay by me I am sending the item to my One and lovely Husband in Nigeria as a gift kindly rapped it well.I don’t mind if i will pay you for the shipping cost to Lagos Nigeria,so i would like you to get back to me with the shipping cost because i want you to ship it to him in Nigeria immediately please kindly get back to me with the total cost including the shipping cost plus insurance cost, So i can transfer the funds into your account now And i will also be offering the Additional Amount of $50 the Shipping Cost so as to get the Item shipped fast to him in Lagos,Nigeria I Await for your Urgent Response asap.
Thanks Again.
sandracollins00200@yahoo.com"

And another:

"Here is the shipping address where you will be sending the phone to:
Name: Adetayo Olayinka
Address: 40D, Ayilara Street
         Off Ojuelegba road
         Surulere
         Lagos
         Nigeria
         23401.
Get back to me as soon as possible to know the total cost altogether including the shipping cost as well.
Thanks,
Sandra."

Hmmmm, my excitement has abated. Me smell a rat. I checked out the eBay forums and quickly found many people who’ve sold to someone like this, they receive an email from PayPal confirming payment, so they ship the item off to Nigeria. The payment confirmation, of course, turns out to be fake. Goodbye phone.

Closer inspection of the buyer’s profile shows it was registered today, and has no other transactions, and no feedback ratings.

I’ve sent a note into eBay asking for help.

Having seen some many of those ubiquitous Nigerian scam emails go past and resisted the temptation to grab a 25% share of some deceased oil minister’s zillion dollar estate, I  finally I reckon I’ve struck lucky!

Once in a while I’ve wondered about having a go at the 419ers. One of my favourite sites is 419 Eater where some seriously talented, and funny, dudes try scamming the scammers – often with completely unexpected and hilarious results. Including getting one scammer to read the whole of the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to an audio file, and others to make a short film of, wait for it, the Dead Parrot Sketch. The latter surely will have you rolling on the floor in pain. Ah Nigeria, so many scammers, so much hilarity.

On a more sober note, I should probably just note that unfortunately many people have been taken in by these scams, and have lost money – and in some terribly sad instances, been physically harmed. It’s not always a laughing matter.

In the meantime I’ll wait on eBay and see about relisting my phone.

UPDATE

eBay to their credit responded within hours. They cancelled the account of the scammer, cancelled the bid, and refunded my listing fees. I relisted the phone and it sold after a few days to a real person paying real money. So all ended well.

We’ve just added a page of marketing ideas on our Facebook Ticket Seller application. It’s designed to give people selling tickets via the application some thoughts on how to promote their event to the Facebook audience. It’s deliberately been kept simple, to make sure newbies can use it, but hopefully there’s some thoughts in there was well for more advanced users.

Just went to www.victrip.com.au, the train/tram/bus timetabling system, to check a train time for this afternoon, to be confronted with the following message. Ooops, the Government must be on pre-pay and has run out of bandwidth.

Bandwidth Limit Exceeded

The server is temporarily unable to service your
request due to the site owner reaching his/her
bandwidth limit. Please try again later.

If Telstra ever wondered why it gets such a bad rap it need look no further than its own phone answering system. It’s one of those stupid computer voices – ‘tell me in a few words how we can help you’. So you tell it, and it promptly either tells you ‘I don’t know what you mean’, or transfers you to the customer service equivalent of Siberia.

Take today for example. I needed to renew an ongoing redirection on a phone number. Should be easy. The arrangement’s been in place for a couple of years, we just need to speak to Telstra each year and authorise another 12 months. Easy?

Call the business line. Get the dreaded ‘voice’. I say ‘extend number redirection’. It  says ‘so you mean call forwarding?’ Fool that I am, I say ‘yes’. It then transfers me into an endless loop system of pre-recorded information on how to configure call forwarding on my phone. Which bears zero resemblance to what I am seeking.

So hang up and call again. This time I say ‘no’ to the call forwarding question. And back into ‘so in a few words, tell me how we can help….’. Well gee, let me tell you how you can help – THROW THE STUPID COMPUTER VOICE OVER THE NEAREST CLIFF!!!!!!!!!

On a whim, while listening to more endless computer voice nonsense I try pushing 0, because so often on these automated systems that gets you the operator (not that the computer voice tells you this). Hey presto, I’m through to a ‘consultant’. Incidentally, when did call centre grunts suddenly become ‘consultants’ by the way? Have they all joined McKinseys, Boston Consulting or Ernst and Young? Consultants wear Boss suits and pull down $500,000 a year implementing Six Sigma. Not earning $15 an hour in a call centre answering customer service calls and asking permission to have a pee.

‘Consultant’ listens to my request, but of course can’t help because he’s not in the business area. So he tries to put me through – four times it fails. Including him ringing me back twice, then trying to transfer. His diagnosis – the ‘business’ area must be ‘down’. Good lord, inspires confidence that the nation’s dominant telecommunications company’s entire business services division is off the air. How can you help not have confidence in their products when an employee of Telstra is unable to transfer your call to another Telstra employee because of their phone system is ‘down’?

To the bloke’s credit he did then try and work his computer to see what could be done regarding my request, but he didn’t have the access.

In the end he gave me the direct number of the business division. Which, thankfully, I didn’t have to call because it’s transpired that an earlier fax sent to Telstra about the matter had been actioned – despite them saying they couldn’t action the fax and needed an authorised account holder (eg me) to call in person. Another hour of my life wasted.

Wonderful sand sculptures on the waterfront at Frankston, with all the imagery drawn from fairytales and fables.

I was one of the guest panel at the first
Melbourne Facebook Developers Garage last Friday. I thought I might try and jot
some notes about what I said. As always I ran out of time – trust me to
disappear off on a tangent.

I deliberately took a slightly cynical tack
to start with. But I feel justified. As far as I’m concerned with Facebook, the
goldrush is still on. We saw some early land grabs – and a few of those who hammered
in their stakes early on have made good money. And there’s a small group of developers
who are making ok money. But it isn’t a diamond mine quite yet. The early millionaires
have been minted, the rest of the world is still casting around for a business model.

A reality check would be good:

1. New features cannot remain viral indefinitely. “It is likely
        that as more and more companies develop applications for Facebook, the
        signal to noise ratio will become overwhelming for the users to spread
        applications by word-of-mouth.” (Monetizing Facebook Applications)

2. Totally dependent on Facebook. Their Beacon advertising system
        showed their inability to always understand their operating environment.

3. Who’s to say the platform won’t change? Facebook might change
        its policies regarding affiliates, referrals and advertisements by cutting
        in on the profit, or even worse, deciding to develop their own competing
        applications. We’re seeing this already with Facebook’s own social ads,
        they’ve got their own advertising inventory to sell. Or their move in the
        past week or so to throttle the amount of invites an app can send to each
        user and eliminating the practice of forced invites. Hopefully measures
        like this will force apps to sharpen their focus, and weed out the poor
        ones.

Based on our experience, success is derived
through long term, recurrent transaction history with loyal customers.

I was always cautious of the early
generations of social networks – I called them stepping on your friends for
personal gain. Then again, I thought virtual gifts were stupid.

 “There is a fundamental flaw in the overall
state of Facebook applications. The issue as I see it is that for a venue with
as much potential Facebook, the apps built on its platform have no real use
(other than diversionary). It seems as though almost every Facebook app is
something irrelevant, some way to compare friends or some ridiculous game
(there are some exceptions).” (Facebook Platform: The State of the Apps)

“Half of Facebook applications have under
350 installs. There are 16,000+ apps. So only half get any kind of minor
traction. When designing a Facebook
strategy for apps you need some very compelling reasons to make users CARE. It
needs to do something for them that they find useful, entertaining, share
worthy or compelling. Most apps are missing 1, 2, 3 or all 4 of these critical
aspects. Thus they effectively remain in the dustbin of application minutia on Facebook.
Lack of strategy guarantees lack of performance.” (Half of facebook apps have
under 350 installs)

There’s a time and place for everyone for
everything. The problem with sites like Facebook is they want to intersperse
themselves into many parts of peoples’ life. You can’t change human behaviour –
well, it’s blinking hard. Have we conditioned users so much to the time wasting
and silly, that it will be hard to sell them real value? And is Facebook the
environment in which to do it, given their propensity to use it as a
work-avoidance mechanism?

FB caters to the now generation, but I’m
not convinced about the next generation – my ten year old will write her own
Facebook, not want to work within the confines of an imposed structure.

Facebook will have negative cash flow in
2008, despite projecting doubling it’s revenue – because it’s going to have to
double its cash flow, and spend $200m on infrastructure. Hence it was kind of
handy having some venture capital injection. (Chatty Zuckerberg Tells All About
Facebook Finances)

Here’s where I think the opportunities lie:

1. I’m fascinated at the concentration on advertising driven apps,
        and not transactional. Everyone seems focussed on page impressions and
        advertising networks. Yet we can’t even rely on the official statistics.
        Why aren’t more people selling stuff? Even if it’s the eBook rubbish, it
        would be a transaction. Personal services – outsourcing your PA to Mumbai.
        Information and content subscriptions. Job seeking. Sure you can make
        money from advertising. But you need a big, constant audience. And only a
        few FB apps have that audience. Unless you’re happy scrabbling around
        making a few hundred a month on Google Ads or Adonomics.

2. Developers need to focus more on augmenting the methods in
        which Facebook members connect, rather than simply creating workplace time
        wasting diversions. You still really only meet people via the original
        Facebook invite system. (Facebook Platform: The State of the Apps)

3. Games – real ones, thoroughly thought out, requiring actual
        player input. Just avoid copying brands (Scrabulous), make them socially
        addictive, and socially looping.
       

But hey, I’m a Gen X, what would I know. I’m
completely the wrong demographic:

 “There are 2 distinctive 2.0 audiences –
Gen Y social networkers and the older mostly male geeky TechCrunch reading 2.0
audience. One is scalable and foreshadows future behavior while the other will
try anything 2.0 for 2 weeks and maxes out at somewhere around 300K users. The
Facebook crowd is the former.

They don’t read techcrunch

They don’t blog

They don’t use most of the 2.0 apps out
there

They’re mostly female

They’re mostly 18 – 24 and 25 – 34

They live on Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, etc…

They don’t hang out on Linkedin”

(Web 2.0 has 2 very different audiences,
only 1 is scalable)