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. […]
Tag: Entrepreneurs
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 […]
Profiting from piracy
From In The Black: In the trenches The likes of actor Johnny Depp, with plenty of help from Hollywood, have in recent times romanticised the image of pirates and privateers. There he was charging about as Jack Sparrow in the blockbuster movie Pirates of the Caribbean, causing many a swoon and coining around US$2.7 billion worldwide at the box office. However, truth can be much stranger than fiction. According to some leading academics, pirates and privateers were not only very […]
Google targets small to medium-sized businesses
From The Australian, Entrepreneur JULIAN Persaud, the newly appointed online head at Google Australia, is a man with a big message for small and medium-sized companies. He wants to wake them up to the opportunities online presents for growing their businesses. “They are coming on board in increasing numbers,” he says. “About 40 per cent have a website and there’s about another 20 or 30 per cent who are currently building a website. There is a big opportunity. “The reason […]
Web application driven by a need to remember
From The Australian, Entrepreneur THERE are many reasons to start a business. Some people are driven by money. Others by passion. But for Omar Kilani, of Sydney, the Remember The Milk web application came about simply because of a personal need and his passion for programming, which he has followed since he was 13. He wanted to organise himself, and his business partner and fiance Emily Boyd was an enthusiastic user of to-do lists. In 2004, Kilani relished the programming […]
Crowd-sourcing can help with content, design, feedback
From The Australian, Entrepreneur TO some extent, Web 2.0 or the read-write web as it is known, is all about crowd sourcing. The idea is that the crowd can create content for you, give feedback and even have a hand in designing products they really want. It’s a tricky concept for many companies to master but the latest generation of crowd-sourced websites such as 99designs and Gooruze are making it safe for businesses to participate. There are many definitions of […]
Content on the move: the iPhone revolution
The Australian, Entrepreneur ONCE, the only way to find a business on the move was to call a directory on a mobile phone. But the arrival on July 11 of Apple iPhone — it is 3G, has WiFi and is GPS-enabled and integrated with Google Maps — is about to change the way people use mobile devices and find businesses through map-based online listings. The big difference is that, through Google Maps on an iPhone, users can search for a […]
YouTube attracts a lot of business
The Australian, Entrepreneur MARKETING fads come and go but YouTube and the internet look as if they are here to stay. YouTube is about rich interesting content rather than rich video production companies that usually make expensive TV ads. And this makes it an ideal medium for the small to medium-sized business, according to Sydney-based Laurel Papworth, a social media consultant and evangelist. “One of the things I like about small business is that they don’t do traditional marketing with […]
GPS will put you on the map
The Australian, Entrepreneur AS was first the case with computers and mobile phones, it’s difficult to know where in the technology cycle to dive into global positioning systems. GPS has only become popular in Australia in the past two years, with the sales value of GPS devices now overstepping digital music players. There are about 1.5 million GPS devices in Australia. About 600,000 were sold in 2007, and over 1 million will be sold this year, says Adrian Tout, national […]