hitting the wire*

Daily deals. One day wonders?

You’d have to be deaf and blind not have noticed the daily deal companies popping up like mushrooms of late, all trying to get a slice of the “Groupon” action. A quick google of the phrase “daily deals Cape Town” gives me :

www.citymob.co.za
www.ubuntudeal.co.za
www.cityslicker.co.za
www.mycitydeal.co.za
www.couponline.co.za
www.dealson.co.za
www.skoop.co.za
www.zappon.co.za
www.dealio.co.za
www.alldeals.co.za
www.wicount.co.za

… the list goes on.

I’ve so far bought R800 worth of Exclus1ves vouchers for R200, R390 worth of Burblepix photo album for R190, a R190 car valet for R90, and that’s where my buying spree has more or less fizzled out. Reason being that most of the offers are for spa & beauty treatments, dinners in places I’d spend as much in diesel to get to as saving on the sushi or steak. There are no definitely no power tools, grocery items or Eskom vouchers on offer!

Groupon's recent IPO fueled the “next tech bubble” rumor which has been rumbling for a few months.

If you’re running a service where your profit is highly dependent on traffic through the door and your costs aren’t highly geared to volumes, this could be a decent marketing and promotion option for you. If you’re the owner of a coffee shop and you want to make more people aware of your exceptional value for money, and you know that once they’ve tasted the good stuff, they’ll be back, maybe a daily deal will work for you. If your tagged market are internet savvy… Maybe… If.

If you see it as a once-off, loss-leader, promotional shot in the dusk. If your target market are likely to be lurking on Twitter, Facebook and a daily deals mailing list. If people are likely to keep coming back after the first purchase. If your margins can take a serious hit on the promo price.

That last one is where it dawned on me why most of the stuff floating through my mailbox is not something I’d buy, and why daily deals are not sustainable for any operation whose margins are not somewhat excessive in the first place… I mean “hello?! - who can afford to discount by the obligatory 50% to 75% needed to get in to a daily deal promo and still run a sustainable business?” Apple? (ah yes, but they don't need it - too many of us idiots falling over ourselves to buy their good stuff at inflated prices anyway)

I can see those daily deal players that secure contracts with luxury goods and services companies managing to stick around for a while, but I’ll not be surprised if I google “daily deals Cape Town” in a few years and find very few of the names above still there. It’s fun while it lasts, but I’d rather buy the odd bargain than buy shares in any daily deal company.

Here, there and everywhere!

Despite some rather obvious encouragement from Joe across at SwimGeek, I've not found my muse for "the wire" again just yet.

I have helped Craig Byren get a post together on the ViaData blog called "Have we been ripping off our customers for years?" - ouch!

I've blogged at Umoya's site on "7 good reasons to use VSAT".

I've joined the crew at The Mac Blog to see if I can add value there - first post was "10 reasons I love my Mac" - somewhat corny, but it was interesting to try and quantify exactly what it is about this piece of technology that gets under your skin like it does.

quo vadis - SA Blogging?

The SA Blog Awards Friday last week was an interesting evening.

Heading for the Storm Joburg quarterly staff function and following Ryan’s emphatic directions to what I used to know as Randburg waterfront (ridiculous, but at least memorable name), now called something else (less memorable) I ended up at Zoo Lake. Thanks Ryan - wrong pond mate! Then, after spending the late afternoon attempting not to get wall-eyed as the down-down crew (names withheld pending blackmail payments) plied me with booze, I proceeded to get hopelessly & bladder-stretchingly lost somewhere in Fourways trying to find Cool Runnings. Capetonians navigating in Jozi… hopeless, even without someone running interference!

The evening was pretty casual, loud, a bit insular for a newcomer, but good to be there. Jon Cherry tried to attain some sort of order, the sound system contended with generally rowdy bar noise and its own feedback, the manic Joblog crew did their thing, and blogger type folk of all walks of life generally milled about, sharing yarns.  Thanks to everyone who put effort into making this happen!  The video can be found here.

It was great to put faces to names and in some cases to voices on the phone. Too little time and too much noise for much meaningful conversation apart from catching up with Henk from Skyrove. It was not funny to find that Tertia who won the Mac was back in Cape Town and I had to lug the damn thing back to the Mother City with me. C’est la vie – should have called Jon before should I not!?

Worthy winners in all categories I could say I was vaguely au fait with. Amusing to see the Joblog guys accepting the award for “most humorous post” on behalf of 2Oceansvibe – the irony was not missed. Mike Stopforth won the “tech” category – hey, well done Mike, and of course Tertia of “So Close” walked away with the “Best of the Best” – well done Tertia (you don’t really want this MacBook Pro, do you? I rather think it likes me ;)

With no idea what would be expected of me, I had jotted down a few words earlier in the day, just in case somebody demanded that of me. Fortunately, no one did, but for the hell of it, I’ll share them here:

“Today, Tim O’Reilly called for bloggers to come up with and adhere to a bloggers code of conduct. This follows the hullabaloo after prominent US blogger Kathy Sierra of Headrush received death threats from other bloggers. And now as it turns out, she is not the only one – others are claiming similar harassment. The FBI are involved. Bloggers vs FBI…wtf?!?

The blogosphere - an interesting place, especially to a Mafikizolo like me (a Johnny come lately). Twelve months ago I was aware of weblogs (those personal online diaries) but never read them; I had “better things to do”.

Bloggers I find (or those I’ve come across of late) seem to be a fairly “tight-knit” community. The danger of elitism lurks, and although there is no open dissing of those who are not as “tech savvy” or "blog-sussed" as you, there is an aura, of needing a password and a secret handshake to fit in here. This is bollocks I hear offended bloggers mutter, as there is none! That is so, but that aura remains. Let’s face it, it is natural for camaraderie to raise some sort of delineation.  And most of the people I know are approachable, friendly folk - it's the collective that seems unapproachable somehow.

In a poor area of the Cape Flats called Philippi, Storm are involved in a CSI project to uplift the community, primarily with support for people affected by Aids, but more specifically we’re providing Internet access to a community centre and stimulating entrepreneurship.

Only 10 to 20% of the people there know what the Internet is and to some degree what it does. Email is for them a marvel. And here we are grappling with online terrorism and cyber-bullying and debating how to (or not to) judge the SA blog awards.

Before next year, I’d like to see some clarity for myself on what we are rewarding, what are we encouraging, what we want to look back on in a few years time and say we helped create.

I’d like to challenge us all (and I give myself a well placed KITA here) to step out of our comfort zones, walk across the room, engage others of unlike mind and encourage the use of the so-called “web2.0” world to a build an open, inclusive, collaborative community who draw others in. I’d like to challenge you to share your knowledge and skills to encourage and uplift others. Ensure the aura of exclusivity is not reinforced.

Blogging is about communicating – it is a wonderful tool to enhance and stimulate conversations – we should wield it wisely. A bloggers code of conduct is not a bad idea – I’ll give some thought to what I’d want in there.

So from me, a Mafikizolo, I’ll leave you with this thought:

'Technology can never replace smart people who care'
(thank you Judy for that! :)”

That’s me. Out of my tree & off my soapbox.

OK, so who's blog is this exactly?

I’ve been asked if this is a Storm corporate blog. Some colleagues seem to assume that it is and that I’m speaking on behalf of Storm here. Allow me to set the record straight.

I work for Storm. I actually have fun working there (most of the time, but not when I’m having to dredge up legal discovery documents for battles we’re not involved in – then I get homicidal!). I blog here at hitting the wire* where I also have a fair bit of fun too. I talk about the telecoms/ICT/VoIP industry here because it is a subject I’m quite passionate about.  I do not speak on behalf of Storm here.  Storm does not own 'hitting the wire*'.

SA Blog Awards - time to nominate your favourites

One of the best parts of blogging is the freshness of content. Someone, somewhere is cooking up something interesting, intelligent, relevant, funny, worth a read. You just have to find it!

I was totally unaware that the SA Blog Awards existed.  It seems to have been going since 2005. There is a magnificent prize of R20.07 for the Best of the Best, so I'm looking to enhance my Storm salary here - vote for me! <rolls about in mirth>

There are a bunch of categories...

it only takes one tag (or 5)...

Amazing how an action, like the well used analogy of the stone lobbed into a pond) can ripple out far into the world - in this case, across the blogosphere.  On a whim, I started a rogue offshoot (Sorry if a I screwed up the exercise for you Jeff, but could not resist) of a game started in another corner of the blogosphere.  According to Michael Jensen at SoloSEO, this branch of the Blog Tag game has now gone beyond 11 levels.  How the devil he has had the patience to track it that far I have no idea - possibly his interest in family trees has been ample conditioning to dogged detective work.  If my own dear brother is anything to go by, genealogists can be the most tenacious of blood(line)hounds.

His "blog tag tree" can be found here.

Most people I see have good humouredly entered into the spirit of the game, and I am now have a slightly better insight into the soul as well as the brain behind the words I read on some blogs.  One person (and I apologise for forgetting who you were) suggested that we find a more constructive objective for such an exercise in future and I wholeheartedly agree.  Suggestions welcome. 

Strange though that of all the posts I have done in my so far in a very brief blog-life, none has elicited more trackbacks and site visits as one so superficially frivolous.  Maybe it is that despite the regular "meeting of minds" we engage in so often here in cyberspace, we always hanker after something more profound and personal.

Enough rambling so very far off topic.  I am on leave for 3 weeks until 8 Jan 2007, and am not sure if I will succumb to the blog-drug during that time, so forgive me if I go silent for a while.  Have a wonderful Christmas-tide wherever you are and whatever you do.

That's me.

bloggers block?

(ok, so I was just too knackered to work up the material on VoIP Quality of Service  - maybe Monday.)