Bl0g

In contemporary “Gadget press” (which is usually one bloke in his basement with a handicam), one of the most popular things to do is an “unboxing” - That is: to film what happend when you take some new doodad out of the box it comes in (and what comes in the box, etc.). This sounds incredibly dull, but some companies go to great lengths to give customers good “Out Of Box Experiences” (”OOBEes”).

Another popular trend in contemporary advertising is the enigmatic “viral” advertising campaign - That is: presenting some engaging online content with the intent it’ll spread between people online through “This is cool!…” emails, etc. Eventually when the content is on peoples minds a lot, the association with whatever the marketers are pushing is revealed and hopefuly this follows-through in the pre-existing publicity of the pre-launched content. This is somewhat analogous to a magic trick’s setup, reveal and prestige phases. Often, however, “viral” campaigns are just poorly constructed “faux-grassroots” efforts that get derided as “astroturf”.

A third concept with the young things nowadays is the “mashup” - that is: Taking two or more seemingly unrelated and often incompatible concepts or entities and forcing them together in a creative way to produce a distinct derivative work. This originated with people beat-mixing two songs together over the top of each other concurrently, which can often produce some surprisingly listenable results. More recently people have been “mashing-up” different web systems like Google, Yahoo and YouTube.

This is possibly the ultimate culmination of all this: An astroturf viral campaign mashed-up with a faux “unboxing” video. It kind-of works except the product is possibly the least prominent concept of the clip (It’s fairly cute though).

The explanation’s on the Technivator site.

Electronic Arts (EA) have obviously enough time to scratch themselves to study some things going on in the current marketplace:

• The cartoony mayhem of Valve’s Team Fortress 2 is popular and fun.
• EA’s “Battlefield” franchise has been popular in the past and could do with a new installment.
• The “Casual gaming” phenomenon made popular by Nintendo’s Wii is taking-off in big ways.
• Casual players tend to play free, bundled or pirated games.

To this end, they’ve mixed it all up in a bucket (with the eggs on top) and come-up with “Battlefield Heroes” (Have a look at the two videos for a taste of what it’s about):

http://www.battlefield-heroes.com

Lawdy! eBay/PayPal’s latest spam e-newsletter just casually asserts that in two stages they’re going to cease supporting any payment method other than PayPal:

From 21 May you must offer PayPal on all your listings as well as currently permitted payment methods.
From 17 June you will only be able to offer PayPal on your listings and pay on pick up (i.e.paid for when picking up the item).

Pay on pick up can only be offered in conjunction with PayPal. No other payment methods will be permitted.

A small number of exclusions will apply to these changes.

… ermmm…

Come again?!

Now, this is a good and bad thing for both buyers and sellers: I’m a great believer in well-implemented e-commerce systems like Google Checkout, Amazon Marketplace, PayPal, MoneyBookers, PayMate, etc. mainly because of the “invoicing” model opposed to the “I’ll open my purse and you just take what you want… repeatedly” model as-used by credit-cads… I mean credit-cards.

Paypal also has a really great insurance/guarantee system for eBay purchasers. Basically you’re covered against fraud of up-to $300-odd if paying through PayPal. More trusted vendors have even higher guarantees.

Infact this mandate will only have positive impact on me as a (very small-time) seller as I’ve always accepted direct deposit and cheque (an ancient promissory-note system of funds transfer that takes about 2 weeks and several dollars to complete), but only because some of the less tech-savvy customers objected to/were afraid of PayPal. I vastly preferred PayPay due to its guarantees, speed and simplicitly.

The problem is that there is now only PayPal. The aforementioned other payment systems are technically just as good (some claim better), but eBay has deliberately refused to allow direct integration into their site. In the meantime, their own PayPal system is heaviliy integrated and hard to get away from. Google has previously griped about not being let into the “eBay trading floor”, but this has always sounded a bit like a half-argument while external payment systems were allowed but not supported. Now that they’re explicitly forbidden, I think Google’s (and the others’) case’s may hold some legal water.

In the long run, I believe this is a foolish move from eBay’s perspective. It’s quite short-sighted in that they seem to be saying “We get good cash from PayPal, so if we ban other methods then we’ll get better cash from PayPal… right?!” More likely is that someone will come-up with a better auction market than eBay and their bubble will burst. This may have already started with the recent hikes in seller comissions turning-off a lot of vendors. Another possible contributory nail in the coffin is that eBay has for a long time had a pretty nasty website layout, which hasn’t improved much over time (It’s also been fairly resistant to 3rd-party web-applications when they start looking like they’ll affect eBay’s business - like auction-sniping tools). “Who could possibly come-up with a viable competitor?”

Well, first cab off the rank is Google, of course. Google has a galaxy of talented web-developers all jostling for slick “web-2.0″ developments. Google’s been spurned before with the Google Checkout system too, so it wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve been developing a secret marketplace system for a while now.

Amazon’s marketplace system is arguably already replacing eBay - many more “serious” vendors are there already hawking their wares successfully and in good volume. However Amazon Marketplace is a much more “heavy weight” offering than eBay (don’t forget: eBay was originally started for bubblegum-card trading and other collectable trinkets).

Craigslist has been running for ages too and does a lot of the “lower-end” stuff you see on eBay already too (Classifieds things like “Used dishwasher for sale - pick-up only”, etc.) . However Craigslist can be a confusing mish-mash of data-dense, information-light pages and often the controversies (”meet market” image or den of paedophiles?) turn people off gettng into it. It also has no support for payment systems, this is up-to the end-users to sort-out between themselves.

There may well be others, maybe Telstra/Sensis will get the online carcass of The Trading Post to fly (I honestly doubt that). There are still a swarm of “Web 2.0″ start-ups swirling-around and one may just hit the sweet-spot in the market, you never know.

Only time will tell, I suppose, but in the meantime, there’s always PayPalSucks to help disgruntled customers rage at them.

Update( 10-May-2008): Seems the Reserve Bank ofAustralia’s getting worried about a retailer appearing to not accept legal tender for transactions: RBA wary of eBay’s PayPal push (ABC).

Whelp, title says it all, really.

Royal Mint’s new coin designs.

Not really news, but I thought I might record a couple of the obvious-in-function but differently named rip-offs of the US bargain site Woot!: The similarly named Zazz! and the less catchy but more meaningfully named Catch of the Day.

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This is basically a fancy-sounding French version of baked beans with sausages. A “real” cassoulet involves more futzing than this recipe but really it’s a peasant dish originally anyway. Like most peasant food, it’s rustic, filling, tasty and warming (I’m a sucker for stews and casseroles too). This recipe was stolen and mangled from ABC’s Delicious magazine, april 2005, p.112.

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I was after a rock cake recipe, so I borrowed one of my mum’s treasured recipe books. You can tell it’s a favourite as it’s stuffed with clippings, is falling to bits and is liberally coated in dried ingredients.

The book is the CWA’s “The Esk Valley Cookbook: Treasured Recipes of the Countrywomen of the Esk Valley Group in Tasmania”. It’s full of cool and nutty recipes like “Brain Rissoles”, the classic “Curried Sausages” and the somewhat labour-intensive “Sausage Patties with Pineapple”. The recipe I’m using is the basic rock cake recipe but modified slightly (no peel, just sultanas and currants for a start).

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A few days ago Apple released next year’s spin on iLife - their “home” computer applications suite. The tool that’s changed most is iMovie. Infact, according to Saint Steve, it’s actually a complete redesign and rewrite. The name’s lost the superfluous “HD” suffix also too (It doesn’t “think” in SD any more, but can export to low-res formats if you want). I got to have a play with this tool today, so here are some of my experiences

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There’s been considerable hubub over the last year about how “off target” the Sony PS3 marketing has been ever since their “WTF, ID4?” and “WTF, children of the corn” teaser ads (Ok, we didn’t get these in Australia). Now check-out what their booth looks like at this year’s Leipzig Games Conventio.

Via Gizmodo.

(They’re all looking at pr0n on teh intertubes!)

IBM’s done some research. It doesn’t look good for “passive” TV in general and broadcast in particular:

IBM Consumer Survey Shows Decline of TV as Primary Media Device