Posts by Jason Kemp
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You;ll be needing the free Windows Media components for QuickTime. Works perfectly.
Thanks for that tip Russell. It does work and so I can now watch those Foo videos. Might be good to have that tip somewhere on the Media 7 blog.
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Some business trends in my patch...
My business is primarily online marketing and that is mostly for smaller companies. It is always hard getting them to invest in marketing work but now they often have difficulty with debt collection and that flows through to all service providers.
I still do some work for larger US owned companies in Australia but they have all had their budgets "reviewed". It seems the larger the company is the more momentum they have so they think they can coast a bit and cut marketing.
However of late larger ones are also dropping direct sales staff but still need marketing activities to continue as they all need larger sales pipelines to account for the lower actual number of projects going ahead.
The other big difference between last year and this year is length of sales cycles. That is the time between first intro and actual project go ahead. In some cases projects need extra sign-offs by boards or group financial controllers.
One of project items we tend to discuss more fully is payment terms. Much better to be realistic on this as early as possible. In some cases budgets get scaled back and we need to resize projects all standard.
On marketing cycles one of the better outcomes is that some companies are understanding the need and discipline of more regular communications cycles so ultimately that is looking to mean smaller projects but more of them.
Re: virtual offices - I expect more companies will look at some variation on this. I have been mostly telecommuting to various projects for 5 years now with some on location time needed in the early phases of projects but Auckland is so big that much work is via phone and in some cases video / although that isn't so useful yet.
I've found that some clients have meeting /board rooms they are happy to book out and there are some surprisingly good local services as well.
As an example the Grey Lynn Community Centre has a couple of smaller meeting rooms that can be booked ahead of time.
Over at greylynn2030 there is quite a lot of discussion on transition towns thinking and a generally much talk about local businesses working together.
One of the bug differences between this downturn and others is that the news generally travels faster and there appears to be more flexibility and a more of a border-less economy approach.
From talking with other businesses who are in the online sector we are often dealing with decision makers whose local economies have been hit hard. They want to defend home markets and as ANZ is very small global terms we may get cut adrift to some extent.
The upshot of that is we may need to spend more time on working locally and that might mean we have to adapt / develop different services and products.
One last idea is what is the equivalent of the 5 stages of grieving / when going through these transitions?
That is the denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance processes. No-one like having to go through such extreme changes and it might be that we need to step back a bit and see if we can improve our resilience by perhaps understanding a bit more about the emotional impacts on ourselves and our staff.
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Just checked Media 7 / on demand still works on the Mac
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I went to have a look at the Foo videos on the media 7 blog and the TVNZ site insists on wanting to load some kind of Windows media extension. As I'm on a Mac using Safari I find this a bit disconcerting. (Pretty sure that only works on a PC meaning the Foo vids are PC only?)
Is there a way to view them on Safari & Mac ?
Have been trying to switch to Mac for the last year but that kind of thing makes it hard.
I used to be able to watch Media 7 videos on the Mac but haven't checked the new season so hope that is OK.
Over n the PC which I still have to use for some things I've found that Firefox 3 sucks even more memory than it used to and so have been using Opera mostly which I like. The short cuts dialer feature sounds very similar to that new Safari feature.
I understand from various web groups that the Firefox problems are known and they are trying to sort this out.
I did try Google Chrome for a while but its update process killed my system and so I uninstalled it for now.
Really what most of us want is a browser that takes the least overhead and allows us to use some other programmes. Some of us obviously more than others.:)
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What I was trying to get to - we are now at the point where a fair number of people know that S92a etc. is a bad idea /
what I don't get ( and I've been looking for some time.) is some form of useful alternative to the wider issue.
Or is that still too hard for everyone.
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The underlying copyright issues won't go away. We should celebrate that a bad law is being delayed but much better to promote something more useful for next generation.
Is that creative commons or something else?
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Russell,
Sadly I missed the great Blend but I did manage to catch some of Andrew Dubber's comments on Kim Hills programme earlier in the day.
I'm wondering if he / you anyone else at Great blend (Webstock and / Foo) managed to shed any more light rather than heat on the future path way for next generation copyright thinking.
It has clearly been a very busy 2 weeks on the conference front.
Understand that due to the sheer quantity of discussions at those conferences there might be a some backlog but if its at all possible it would be great to hear a bit more about some of the most positive copyright scenarios that may have been discussed.
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I note that the link for the fine Cassette song seems to have all been used up. Cassette are very worth checking out.
Some of us were very happy to see Cassette live the same weekend as Foo over at Bethells Beach with Steve Abel where some very fine photos were also taken.
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Ok - so who is going to call Bill - we've found the topic for his next column right here. :)
I'm off for the swim!
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Isabel - a fair number of them are ex smokers. Dave Gibson of elemnop (12 years) . This might not be obvious from the TV spots but there is a cast of 21 and they get rotated around a bit.