Author: Ed

journalism

Marketing online: keep it open source

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 was tripped up at every step in getting his website up and running for the launch, with the designers eventually missing his all important deadlines. […]

journalism

Firms must be all ears using social media: online reviews

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 her business, which sells sock-like mobile phone covers in Australia, Britain and the US. She focused on a Facebook page but didn’t anticipate the full […]

Drinks, Wine

Wine? It’s natural even for you

Voice of the People at The Melbourne Wine Room. Try it. Wine, most of us drink it. Some of us love it. But many of us are intimidated by it, or the wankery that comes with labels, hundreds of grape varieties and the language of the wine critic. All we know is that we like that particular red or white while slumped on the sofa watching TV and we wouldn’t mind drinking something similar down the pub. Or wine bar. […]

journalism

Offline the key to online sales: Digital Camera Warehouse

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 the main reasons are that high-street merchants have not gone online and because global online retailers put the relatively small Australian market at the end […]

journalism

12 Cheesemakers To Watch

From goat’s curd to gruyere, these cheesmakers have winning formulas sure to impress discerning cheese lovers. Holy Goat Made at the Sutton Grange Organic farm near Bendigo in Victoria, Holy Goat (at about $130/kg) is universally regarded as one of the best cheeses in Australia by top chefs, including Michael Ryan from Provenance in Beechworth. The cheeses, which include fromage frais and curd cheeses, are made using organic goat’s milk from the farm and use slow lactic acid fermentation. The […]

journalism

How To Make Cheese

There are many perceptions of the rustic, bucolic lifestyle of the artisan cheesemaker. But the reality is very different to how the mass dairy marketers would have us see it in their advertising and promotions. Even the most boutique of cheesemakers in Australia has more in common with the hygiene of an operating theatre than a rustic shed in France. The reality is shiny, spotless stainless steel surfaces, an environment that can be hosed down, white rubber boots, white coats […]

stinky cheese
Cheese, journalism

How Cheese Got Its Stink

Cheese has been around a long time. Nobody is quite sure how long but perhaps 5000 to 12,000 years, probably originating from the Middle East where milk products were curdled and drained of whey and preserved with salt making something a bit like the fetta we know today. In Australia, cheese has been around since the first fleet. It is a mere 160 years since the first cheesemaking equipment arrived from England and the first dairy co-operatives formed in the […]

journalism

The Raw Milk Debate

Raw milk dairy is one of those touchy subjects that decays into political debate. It is difficult to get to the bottom of whether or not raw milk products are a danger to anybody. Many artisan cheesemakers, such as Nick Haddow at the Bruny Island Cheese Company [pictured], say not; the Australian Specialist Cheesemakers’ Association says raw milk is irrelevant; and Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FANZ) says it is downright dangerous. The truth is that in Europe raw milk […]

journalism

Boss has his head in the cloud: data back-up

CUSTOMER databases, accounts and records are critical to business and if this information is lost a company will grind to a halt. The problem for many companies is that backing up information is often too complicated and expensive to do properly. But Ruslan Kogan, founder of the online stores Kogan and Milan Direct has made it easy by storing everything the company does on servers on the internet, the so-called cloud. He says while many IT managers see the cloud […]