Mobile payments taking off

November 2010

WITH the arrival of the iPhone and smartphones in Australia in mid-2008, 2009 was the year mobile internet browsing took off. Now PayPal reports that this year mobile payments took off in Australia, opening the battlelines between payment systems, some that use SMS and others smartphone apps. PayPal’s figures indicate a twelvefold increase in mobile [...]

Read the full story →

Would you like coffee with that?

October 2010

TWO years ago, architect and former hospitality worker Zenta Ganaka wanted to create something different. He had ideas about a shared architectural office where people could walk in off the street, then he hit on the notion of combining a lifestyle retail store with a cafe. After all, he’d worked in design and had an [...]

Read the full story →

Can food be art?

October 2010

Food has come a long way since Stone Age man started hunting and painting the beasts he killed on caves. What was basic nutrition (later to become a status symbol) has been refined, polished and taken to new highs, catering for both rich and poor. But now chefs are claiming food, as well as being [...]

Read the full story →

A perfect match for sherry

October 2010

When Heston Blumenthal, one of the world’s most recognised chefs, starts to recommend sherry as the ideal match to food, it’s time to stand-up and reassess this fortified wine. In Australia, we have a ready supply of imported sherries, but also locally made wines in the sherry style. These are now called “apera”, a branding [...]

Read the full story →

The A to Z of food and wine matching

October 2010

There’s a lot of stuffy tradition associated with wine and what food to match it with. It stems from the 18th and early 20th century dominance of France and the rest of Europe in winemaking, and the stuffiness of the English. Plus, before food and wine traditions developed in Europe, roads and the car opened [...]

Read the full story →

The rock star chef

October 2010

Alex Atala is quite literally a rock star chef. A former DJ and punk musician, the tattooed Alex Atala is a Brazilian media sensation and runs what is claimed to be one of the top 50 restaurants in the world. What makes him different to many other carbon copy celebrity chefs is that he shuns [...]

Read the full story →

Supersizing Sue Perkins

September 2010

Sue Perkins has drunk human breast milk. She’s even squirted goats milk from the teet into her mouth. But nothing quite prepared her for eating udder in the first series of Supersizers Go. And yet now she and British journalist and restaurant critic Giles Coren (famous for his stinging emails to newspaper sub-editors who have [...]

Read the full story →

Marketing online: keep it open source

September 2010

FOR Sabino Matera the goal was to have the Quoco website up and running for the Taste of Sydney event last March where he had paid to have a stand to display food products imported from Puglia in Italy. But despite having a background in writing code in the information technology industry, Matera found he [...]

Read the full story →

Firms must be all ears using social media: online reviews

September 2010

SOME companies understand social media and how to deal with negative comments about their businesses. But most small and medium-sized firms prefer to ignore the comments rather than deal with the problem head-on, as Mocks founder Lara Solomon has. Last year Solomon decided to swap PR for social media as the main marketing method for [...]

Read the full story →

Offline the key to online sales: Digital Camera Warehouse

August 2010

AUSTRALIAN online retailers are learning that the key to online sales success is to expand their brands offline into bricks and mortar. Insightful statistics gained online make the decision a no-brainer. “Australia is a backwater when it comes to online shopping,” dStore chief executive and local pioneer in online shopping Andrew Cooper says. He says [...]

Read the full story →

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →