Surfarama

I’m sitting in the Christchurch airport waiting on a flight delayed over an hour…thankfully AirNZ did the right thing and gave us Lounge passes, so I’m chillaxing with a Stella and free WiFi.

Browsing a list of expiring domains I noticed that layby.co.nz was coming up and it occured that there could be a business in providing online layby facilities for retail stores. Not sure if layby is a concept widely used around the world, but lots of retail stores in NZ will let you ‘layby’ an item over some period of time, say 3 months or so. Over that time you pay off the layby and then collect the goods. Honestly, I’m not sure why people do that…why not just save up and then go and buy it, but it seems to be popular in fashion retail especially so I suppose it is people who must have an item and are worried it will sell out before they can save up.

Anyway, why not handle all this for the retail stores? It would work like this:

1. Consumer goes into store and requests to put an item on layby.
2. Store clerk takes their email address and logs into the web site, adds detail of the product, and the cost.
3. Consumer gets an email with a link to confirm their acceptance of the layby terms (configurable by the merchant), and then to submit payment on the item via card or paypal. They can then return at any time and make payments. The system would probably also issue reminders periodically.
4. Once paid off the store is notified and the consumer given a receipt to take into the store to collect the layby’d item. At this point we pay the store less our 10% handling fee. If it worked it would be a wonderfully cashflow positive business.
5. At anytime the store would also be able to get reports of all items on layby and the status of payments etc.

There’s no doubt other moving parts to this, but I’m on Stella #2 so that will have to do. As I type this it also occurs to me that most layby is probably done by teenage girls who don’t have credit cards or paypal accounts which might be a fatal flaw. Oh well, I got a blog post out of it.

pic by Brave New Films

Sometime early May this year Trade Me opened up a little and made available XML feeds for auction listings by user. Not long after that Facebook launched their developer platform, and since then I’ve been thinking about putting the two together.

I finally got around to getting it done with help from Allen who designed a simple application page, and the result is the imaginatively titled TradeBook. If you are a Facebook user you can jump right in and install the TradeBook app on your profile. The application will automatically update your Facebook profile whenever you list something for sale on Trade Me.

Now, I have no clue how many people will use this (lots I hope), but I figure the overlap between Trade Me users and Facebook users has to be about as big a segment as it gets for this kind of thing. Every man, woman, child and their dog in New Zealand uses Trade Me. While Facebook is the social network du jour, and has certainly got more traction than MySpace ever did amongst the people I know anyway…

So we’ll see. There’s a few more things that could be done, but right now TradeBook has all the obvious features:

• Displays your Trade Me auctions on your Facebook profile (with title, thumbnail, current price and end date)
• Choose how many listings to display
• Automagically updates your profile whenever it detects a new listing
• Pings the Facebook newsfeed API whenever it detects a new listing

If you are so inclined, I’d love to hear any feedback you might have.

Visit the TradeBook application page on Facebook.

That’s right, you can now buy links to Surfarama.com for just $100 a piece.

For $100 I will send you the ‘HTML’ code to put on your webpage so that people looking at your webpage (aka ‘web surfers’) will be able to ‘click’ on the link and automatically be routed via the internet to this website. Don’t worry if you are not a techie I can help you understand the ‘HTML’ code.

And to make it extra useful to people looking at your webpages you can choose any one of several hundred fascinating articles or ‘posts’ on Surfarama.com for your very own internet link…the options are almost limitless.

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Credit for this idea has to go to the geniuses at whereis.com who charge $100 for a link to a map for a specific address…I mean how cool would it be to have a link on your business website that links to a map showing your actual address. OMG, $100 per link is cheap when you consider that customers will now be able to find you.

…oh wait, you can do that on just about ANY map site in the entire known universe, except whereis.com for free.

I’ve been conscious recently that I quite often tell Flynn to “be careful mate”, and I am worried that I might be being overly protective and that it will have some lasting impression on him.

I don’t think I grew up overly protected. My brothers and I all smashed our front teeth doing one stunt or other. Adam was skating, Sam was playing rugby, and I was attempting something incredibly stupid, but that’s a whole other story…

The point is that I don’t want Flynn to grow up afraid of doing stuff, but at the same time I don’t want him smashing his teeth or breaking an arm and I wonder where the balance is. Do I let him climb up the back of the sofa and jump off worried it is likely to end poorly at some point, but not wanting to squash his enthusiasm and sense of adventure?

These were not questions I ever imagined myself asking, but I have definitely developed something of a protective streak and I’m wondering about the balance between being protective of Flynn and letting him explore and learn for himself as a young guy should.

I am I the only one who thinks iTunes really bites as a client for subscribing to podcasts? With all my commuting these days I am getting through more than a few podcasts and audio books, and I have reached the conclusion that iTunes is really bad as a podcasting client.

Dropped downloads, missed episodes, error messages…I’ve been getting a lot of this for a while now. When I go direct to the source to download the mp3 file and then import to iTunes manually it all goes fine, but when I subscribe to a podcast feed from outside iTunes store I have constant problems with downloads, not to mention how slow it seems. At first I thought to blame the publishers and their invalid RSS, but I don’t think this is it because I am consistently having the same problems from multiple publishers, and a big part of the issue is iTunes seeming inability to manage downloads effectively…I don’t know how many times I’ve had some error message in iTunes, but on restarting the download it all seems fine. And it honestly seems wayyyy slower when downloading in iTunes compared to just visiting the site and right clicking.

Bloody frustrating. It’s almost as if Apple doesn’t want me getting my podcasts from anywhere other than iTunes, and so forces a poor performance. But that couldn’t be it could it :)

It has to be said that I’ve never been much into exercising for exercisings sake. I’d much rather sweat it out on my bike at Woodhill or get some schralping in on the mountain.

That said, a child, a busy day job, and assorted personal projects make it harder to get out there like I used to so I have taken to (occaisional) jogging. It’s not enough, but better than nothing.

To make things more interesting I got one of those iPod/Nike gadgets to track my (ahem) training progress and last time I ran I got a pleasant surprise when Lance Armstrong chimed in over the top off my warm down track to tell me that I had clocked a personal best for the mile…nice touch.

Now if Jessica Alba would just speak up occaisionally to remind me how much she likes her men to be fit, toned, and bald, then I might just be encouraged to get out there more often.

photo by marko