Partnerships and payments

Thoughts on partnerships, payments, platforms and the systems that quietly shape modern commerce.

A rant about Google Glass and social media

I was going to write something about how Google Glass is for losers who have to live their lives through a technological veil and I thought better of it. Apart from the medical, engineering, and commercial applications I thought there may be a little envy in my skepticism about needing to have a computer strapped…
In killing Google Reader, Google are killing openness

I was never a Google Reader user. Should have been but chose to consume my news the hard way with a spazmodic mix of bookmarks, Evernote, twitter, and other websites I can barely remember. Now I use Flipboard but question its efficiency even though it is very pretty. Google reader was built on RSS, an…
How the Gillard and Abbott NBN’s compare globally

There has been a heap of press this week on the back of the Coalition’s NBN policy announcement in a slick launch at the Foxtel Studios yesterday. There were a lot of sarcastic tweets, and a pretty funny Facebook page. Using Akamai’s “The State of the Internet” report from Q3, 2012 I compared the global…
Trust, the one thing a subscription business can’t get wrong

In January, after reading a Business Insider article promoting them, I subscribed to the bespoke shirt service from Hall & Madden. They were offering three dress shirts based on Hugo Boss styling and manufacturing for $150. The best thing is that they would deliver three new shirts every three months. As someone who never gets…
Lessons from a failed lounge room startup

A mate of mine living in Amsterdam, was sick of being a highly paid IT contractor so he decided to start a business from his lounge room with his MacBook Air. Despite having no web design or development skills, it would be an online business. Nine months down the track he tells me how he…
A blog will change your life

I recently had a twitter conversation with Australian blogging royalty, Trevor Young. He reminded me that in the 1990s blogging was called journalling, which evokes images of hormonally confused teenage girls writing about boys and bitchy girls. It is an important distinction. Journalling implies something deeply personal, something from the heart written with integrity, authenticity…
Random default thumbnails for Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

I installed the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) and was frustrated by the stripey default thumbnail that was displayed if a post didn’t have a featured image. Unfortunately for me, this was quite a few. So what I ended up with was: Pretty ugly. So I did some pretty basic hacking and created a…
How to beat online only retailers

I was cleaning my glasses the other day and they snapped in half. As a person with a very high prescription this was not good news. So I took myself off to the large Australian optical retailer, OPSM. The service was fantastic. Not only did they give me free contact lenses for a week so…
Process is the forgotten P

At Uni I had a professor given to pithy aphorisms like, “Don’t take drugs, masturbate instead. It’s better for you.” She was wildly unpredictable and a fantastic educator who could see beauty in a framework. To her the structuralism of Lacan, Jakobson, and de Saussere amongst others, was a beautiful tool she used to hack…
Will Click Frenzy work?

Inspired by the success of Cyber Monday, the post-Thanksgiving online sale in the USA, an Australian online retailer group have decided to create an Australian version – Click Frenzy. The online sale, which the promoters say will stop a nation, runs on the 20 November. With participants like Myer, Target, Just Jeans, Portmans, Dotti, Dick Smith, Bing Lee, Ted’s Cameras, SurfStitch, StyleTread, The Iconic, DealsDirect, and Booktopia, Click Frenzy…