I came across an interesting read today about how traditional media companies (mostly newspapers) are adapting to capture and monotenize the web audience.

The concept of a newspaper subscription will change completely.

Instead of throwing a paper over your fence we will offer you:

- a much more sophisticated package of print and electronic content

- incentives for loyalty

- and tools that allow you to conduct transactions with our advertisers.

We will make our content suitable for the next generation of smart phones  devices that are still in their infancy with potential to deliver news, information, entertainment and shopping in HD with full interactivity.

The old parish pump reporting on local news will be reinvented as hyperlocal coverage of real time events such as

- Where to find the cheapest petrol

- How to avoid roadworks and traffic jams and

- The best retail offers available in your suburb that day
You will even be able to evaluate the performance of local schools

I can’t help but get the feeling they have been terribly slow to embrace the internet, and adapt their model to tap into the vast audience at hand. Internet audiences will pay (or learn to pay) for unique quality content that is of specific interest to them.

I myself would be happy to pay a subscription for a service whereby a team of IT journalists provided quality original content that far exceeds in terms of depth, the information freely available on blogs and via other sources. I don’t think online journalism is about giving away news for free – its about embracing the internet as a medium to target niche markets.

See the full article here.

Opera clearly has ambitious ideas on its mind with the release of Opera Unite.

It is essentially a way for you to share files on your PC, over the internet, and turn your home PC into a file server.

While the concept is not original by any stretch, what they are proposing has a certain freshness and simplicity about it that means it might just work.

Traditional servers are clearly still the solution to high volume file sharing and web hosting, and peer-to-peer networks certainly are not in any danger. But this really is about giving everyone, of varying technical abilities, a simple and easy to understand way to share files across different locations.

For someone like myself who already has access to several datacenter servers, and knowledge on how to use many of the web storage solutions already available, this is probably not something I will find a use for; but I would certainly still like to see it really take off and evolve.

At the end of the day for me I would like to host servers in my own home, and while I understand this means I miss out on datacenter features like fire safety, security, guaranteed power supply and connections, the biggest drawback is from home is the available bandwidth.

Lets hope the Fibre to the Home next gen broadband network in Australia truly liberates home and small business to operate at higher capacity.

A few years ago I started using Quicken to manage my business and personal accounting.

At the time it was a great tool to manage my tiny cashflow  – I was a poor student, and delivering pizzas  for $8.50 an hour plus tips a few nights a week. I had to be ultra careful with my spending because my non-discretionary expenses must’ve been in the magnitude of 95% of my income. I had a credit card with a limit of about $1,000 and a bank account to my name.

Back then, the thing that peeved me off was the amount of manual labour involved in keeping the various account transactions up to date. Certainly I made it harder for myself by tracking even petty cash, but the banks had virtually no support for automated synchronization. Once I graduated from my course and started earning enough not to worry about financial implosion, I gladly laid my Quicken data to rest.

Fast forward 4 years and i’m starting to think in terms of buying a house, new car, and even live and work abroad.

So I had a look at a nifty web service called Buxfer. I was quickly impressed at the simple, application-like interface, and even more impressed at the promised synchronization with my actual banking data. Within minutes I had an account up and running. Not surprisingly, none of my Australian financial institutions were listed in the supported banks, but then I discovered a Firefox addon that supposedly would retrieve my data in a semi-automated way.

Cool! Or so I thought. But alas, as it turns out, the addon is not capable of logging in and retrieving any of my banking data. And its not really surprising, given the mine field of javascript and security precautions the banking sites have in place, they are specifically designed to block out such a “robot” accessing my data.

I quickly turned my frustration from the Buxfer service to the financial institutions themselves. They know that many of their customers are using internet capable applications and services to track accounts – why not establish a secure international standard (RSS + HTTP Authentication comes to mind) that allows software to access such data?

This is clearly a function that millions of tech-savvy people could utilize – why not let us opt-in to access our own data?

I should point out that it seems that much of the US and Canada have various services supporting this very functionality – so its just our aussie banks dragging the chain then.

Following the recent article on No Reserve Auctions:

On the other hand you could list an auction starting at $1 with a reserve of $20, and until a bid matches $20 or more, the item will not sell. In Thomas Multimedia’s auction platform, the reserve price is hidden from the buyer – in other words they have to stab in the dark until they find the starting price.

However once the reserve price is matched or exceeded, the current bid will stand at the reserve price. In other words, if Joe placed a bid of $100 on an item with a $50 reserve, his bid effectively would stand at $50, and provided no-one else bids, he would win the item for $50.

If however a second bidder entered the bidding, the system would automatically place a bid on Joe’s behalf all the way up to $100.

About 11.3 million Australians use the internet. Ninety per cent of them are aged 18 to 44 – that is, consumers in their prime.

According to the Australian Communications and Media Authority, the internet is now the most trusted media source in the country. Ninety-five per cent of small-medium companies use the internet.
source

Is your business maximizing its online presense through a website or web software that would allow you to work more efficiently?

Along with a host of tweaks to improve the accuracy of search results, TM Auctions search pages now suggest categories based on the entered keywords.

This is a great way to get buyers looking in the right section right off the bat. Click on the image below for an enlarged version.

“More than 13 million Australians have access to the internet, and online consumer sales are expected to grow by some 24 per cent annually with predictions of over $30 billion in 2011.”

This article quotes some research indicating that online shopping is set to grow exponentially over the next few years -  the indications for Australia at least are that age and location are proving no barrier to purchasing online – what a good time to start up your own e-commerce auction site!

This post in the first in a series of tips we will be publishing to give web auction site owners and auctioneers some pointers to making their auction site a success. Whether you use our web auction software TM Auctions or another web auction platform, the first hurdle is always engaging your buying audience.

No Reserve auctions, particularly $1 No Reserve auctions are a simple concept – the auction has a pre-determined minimum bid, and any bid matching or exceeding that minimum bid will result in a sale. So if you start an auction with a minimum bid of $1, and only one bid is placed, the item will sell for $1.

You might think this is a huge risk on the part of the seller, but its much more of a calculated risk. Obviously you should avoid listing something you think you would lose money on. So does that mean you should list junk items in the hope of gaining some feedback/reputation? No!

In fact the No Reserve $1 category should contain only quality items. Just take a look at the items listed in this $1 No Reserve category. Any day of the week, we can confidently say that the more expensive looking items will attract the most bids – whereas the cheap stuff is probably rotating without a single bid.

Not only do quality no reserve auctions receive the most bids and deliver the most profit to the seller, but they increase the site’s popularity. If you put on your buying hat, would you be comfortable bidding $1 or $100 on your very first bid? Buyers will often test the waters in no reserve, and quickly gain confidence with the system and with the sellers.

See also our article on Reserve Auctions.

If you have never picked up a hammer, would you build your own house?

Having worked in the web industry for the last 5 years or so,  I always get a laugh at the DIY website building crowd – that is, people who have no real experience or knowledge in web design, development and web marketing.

I don’t know about you but I would love to have a dollar for every time I have heard “my cousin John can build websites”.

Sure there are dozens of tools that are designed to empower non-technical people into being able to publish their own content – in fact that is the aim of my online auction software and other excellent systems like Wordpress. So I don’t mean to create a barrier to entry that non-technical people cannot contribute and thrive online – just don’t try and build the system!

For those who think that they can produce something adequate based on their desktop publishing skills alone (such as Word, Powerpoint) – please consider that the web industry is easily as involved as any other profession, and only true experience can produce results.

In fact I would argue it is more involved that many professions, based on the rate of change, and the vast array of technologies to grasp.

Here is a simple test – if you don’t know the meaning of any term on this list, don’t build a professional website:

• HTML
• CSS
• standards compliance
• FTP
• SEO
• Server side code
• Client side code

Believe me, this is the tip of the iceberg – the list will double in size as soon as you want a functional website.

Give your business / idea a real shot at success by employing the services of a web professional.

You’ve probably already heard the famous quote by Benjamin Franklin:

“The only things certain in life are death and taxes”

On this bombshell, we decided we better introduce some taxation controls into our web auction software, TM Auctions.  From the seller settings page, sellers can now choose whether to apply tax to buyers in the same country, and enter the applicable percentage rate. The tax component will then be added onto the order value.

This new feature will work nicely with the vast majority of international taxation systems such as VAT and GST.