The problem with Elance

Elance is a great marketplace for service work. One problem with the site, however, is that there’s often a huge delta between high and low quotes for the jobs on offer. Here’s a classic example:

Apparently the market values this project at between $US438 and $US65,092.

The problem with this particular tender is the tenderer posted a very vague and unhelpful description of what they wanted done. The resulting confusion doesn’t help anyone.

EDRMS: It stands for ‘Every Department Requires More Software’

Digitising government files is big business for EDRMS vendors.

Te papa is the latest government entity to procure an EDRMS solution, spending $400-450k on a system supplied by Techtonics and OpenText.

The Public Records Act has been a gold mine for EDRMS vendors over the past few years, as it’s forced government agencies to upgrade their record-keeping capabilities.

A scan of GETS records isn’t terribly helpful when it comes to painting a picture of Government sector EDRMS market activity because the departments and agencies are pretty hopeless about lodging post-tender notifications.

However, looking at the seven previous EDRMS deals I did find recorded on GETS, it appears the big departments have needed to spend well over $1m each, while smaller agencies have had to fork out $100-500k in order to get up to speed in the digital document space.

Not surprisingly, major EDRMS specialist Objective Corporation dominates at the top end of the market. As well as the GETS data listed below, Objective reports other departmental wins on its website. Meanwhile InfocentriK appears to have found itself a good market supplying the smaller agencies.

Recent Government Agency EDRMS Contracts:

• Ministry of Social Development: $1.5-1.75m (Supplier: Objective Corporation)
• Land Information New Zealand: $1.5-1.75m (Objective Corporation)
• Te Papa, Museum of New Zealand: $400-450k (Techtonics / OpenText)
• Ministry of Culture & Heritage: $225-250k (InfocentriK)
• Education Review Office: $225-250k (InfocentriK)
• Ministry of Women’s Affairs: $125-150k (InfocentriK)
• Crown Company Monitoring Advisory Unit: $75-100k (Objective Corporation)
• The Correspondence School: Contract value not stated (Silent One)

Source: GETS

Microsoft’s New Zealand sales hold up … but Accenture follows Tiger into the rough

Sun Microsystems wasn’t the only big name vendor to sneak its annual return into the Companies Office during that hectic final week before Christmas.

Microsoft (0.7Mb pdf) and Accenture (0.7Mb pdf) both lodged their New Zealand accounts on December 22, an effective way (whether by accident or design) of ensuring holiday-minded journalists don’t notice the filings for a while.

In Microsoft’s case, there wasn’t anything to be ashamed of. The company’s New Zealand sales for the year to June 30 were $67.8m, down a shade from the prior year’s $68.5m. Not bad given the economic turmoil. Net profit was $4.7m, down from $6.5m.

Meanwhile, Accenture – which sponsors a certain high-profile (ex?)golfer — had a bit of a shocker in the local market. Its New Zealand revenue for the year to August 31 was $6.8m, down 30% on 2008′s $9.8m. Despite that, the company managed to make a $1.9m net profit, a turn-around on 2008′s $290,000 loss. Now, what to do about the Tiger factor?

Sun Microsystems’ NZ sales down 8%

Sun Microsystems (NZ) Ltd’s sales fell 8% from $74.7m to $68.7m in the year to June 30, according to the company’s annual return (1.6Mb pdf), filed with the Companies Office last week.

The New Zealand operation’s gross profit was flat at $22.7m but the fall in sales resulted in the local subsidiary reporting an annual after-tax loss of just under $300,000, compared to the $3.8m net profit it notched up a year earlier.

The 8% fall in New Zealand sales isn’t actually too bad when compared to Sun’s global result: the company’s total annual revenue was down more than 17% year-on-year, from $US13.88b to $11.45b

Sun is in the process of being acquired by Oracle.

My secret life as a spam king

Here’s what happens when your Twitter account gets hacked.

Thanks @sponno for capturing the moment.

 

Revealed: 2degrees handsets

New mobile operator 2degrees is scheduled to announce its services, prices and handset line-up tomorrow morning, but a Warehouse Stationery flyer provides an early look at five of the handsets and prices:

The five handsets detailed in the flyer are:

• Nokia 1202 – $79 (Not pictured)
• Samsung Crest Torch E1100T – $99
• Nokia 5030 – $129
• Nokia 2700 – $249
• Nokia E63 – $649

Interesting to note that the E63 is selling for $50 more ($699) on the Vodafone website. It’s the only one of the five handsets available on the Vodafone site. 

The flyer from Warehouse Stationery, one of 2degree’s several retail outlet resellers, seems to suggest this is not the full extent of the handset line-up we can expect to see tomorrow.  The flyer says a full range of 2degrees handsets and pricing plans will be available on Warehouse Stationery’s website. They were not being displayed this afternoon, but will presumably be up after tomorrow morning’s 9am announcement.

The Nokia 1202 was also flagged as a 2degrees handset and marked at the same price of $79 on Dick Smith’s website last week, although those details appear to have been removed again for now.

25Mbps and beyond: Allan Freeth explains TelstraClear’s ultra-fast broadband strategy

I’ve had several comments in response to yesterday’s news that TelstraClear has launched a 25Mbps broadband service in Wellington, with plans to eventually offer a 100Mbps service on its Wellington and Christchurch hybrid fibre coaxial [HFC] networks.

Not surprisingly, much of the feedback has been around the price of the 25Mbps service: a whopping $230 per month for the plan which includes a 120Gb of data.

The good news is TelstraClear says we can expect that price to come down.

My NZ Herald article on the subject is here, but I thought readers might like to read more of what TelstraClear CEO Dr Allan Freeth had to tell me – he had some interesting and enlightening comments which I couldn’t fit into the original article.

In short TelstraClear is rebranding the broadband service on it fibre-enabled HFC network as ‘WarpSpeed’. The 25Mbps WarpSpeed service (details here) has been available in Christchurch for a while and is now available in Wellington.

The company’s press release on this announcement is here.

Freeth admited to me that the Christchurch service has not been a big seller:

We’ve had 25Mbps sitting in a city of 250,000 people and we’ve had less than 20 people take it up. It’s an expensive product because under the present DOCSIS2 [Data Over Cable Service Interface Specifications]configuration it’s cost us quite a bit of money and it takes quite a lot of ‘node capacity’ to provide it to those customers so we’ve priced it accordingly, because if 500 people said they wanted it then we’d have a problem.

So what’s happening now?

We’re upgrading the whole network to DOCSIS3 so speeds from 25Mbps up to 100Mbps will be introduced progressively, partly in relation to the upgrade – it’s going to take a few months to do – but also very much in relation to the demand that’s out there. We’ve found the demand for 25Mbps, which is priced quite heavily – although we’ll be looking at that price point – has been somewhat limited. It’s mainly been the very heavy gamers, or people who are using quite large files at home. But we know that [demand] will build as people fully understand what they can do.

He says the DOCSIS3 upgrade will be completed this calendar year. Once that happens TelstraClear is likely to offer 25, 40 and 50Mbps plans, but hasn’t set pricing for those plans yet. It will do so once the upgrade is completed.

There’s a capacity issue on DOCSIS2, so the [TelstraClear technical] guys have done some clever things with the network to enable the 25Mbps to be delivered. As 25Mbps becomes a much more common element that people want, that price point will come down, and the price points at the higher end, for the very fast speeds, which eat up a lot more capacity on the network, will be priced accordingly to demand.

But it’s a case of how fast do you want to turn it up, and a lot of that will depend on demand. We have to re-architect both networks again – we put an overlay over both networks, then the question becomes: what speed do you want to tune it for how many customers? So we won’t be providing 100Mbps packages from day one because no one wants them, nor do they want to pay for them at the moment, but what it does is it puts that capacity in place and it’s simply a matter of if there’s demand for it from businesses or from customers then we can provide it.

We haven’t quite worked out what the packages should be – maybe 25, 40, 50Mbps over the next year or so. We will leave it at that and see how demand goes, and what people are using it for as well.

Freeth says outside of Wellington and Christchurch, /telstraClear’s focus is on local loop unbudling rather than expanding its HFC footprint.

We’re in 20 exchanges now and we’re going to be in 40 in another couple of months and we’re going to be in 70 next year. We’re already selling heavily into those exchange areas on unbundled local loop with ADSL2+ and VDSL will be coming on-stream as well. So we will be competing when we start migrating customers over to our unbundled local loops later this year. We’ll be competing very heavily in those cities both on Telecom resold products but also on our own products as we use the unbundled local loop from those 70 exchanges. We’ve taken the opportunity in this particular project of basically reconfiguring and restructuring our whole consumer portfolio so when we launch later in the year we’ll probably be relaunching a whole set of products across the consumer base.

An HFC build in Auckland would not be economic, he says.

But we’re still looking at partners. The best example the government has got of the type of thing they’re trying to encourage is the Northpower initiative with us in Whangarei, where Northpower put the infrastructure in and we put the electronics in, and provide the services. We’re still in very serious discussions with a lot of utility companies about what exactly are their aspirations, do they have a clear demarcation between being a utility company or a lines company and being a telco, and if we understand each other we’re very clear to pursue those. But our own builds of either HFC or fire beyond where we’re now is pretty questionable on a mass-scale basis. But certainly on a partnership basis, I think we’ve already demonstrated we can do that pretty effectively.

We’re reasonably confident about being able to compete on the sort of patchwork nature that we’ve been doing.

Freeth says he remains convinced the findings of the Castalia report – jointly commissioned by Telecom, Vodafone and TelstraClear late last year – remained correct. One conclusion of the report was that there wasn’t much demand for high-end services, because customers simply weren’t prepared to pay for them.

What we’re doing [with the DOCSIS3 upgrade] is future proofing. We’re doing two things. The first is we very much believe in the finding so of the Castalia report but we’ve also noted that Government doesn’t, and if they do they’re not going to admit it. We are concerned about the $1.5 billion we have [invested in our network over time] and about overbuild by companies that certainly don’t have the business disciplines that we have, and we have to meet, so this type of investment is future proofing.

A lot of these upgrades you can’t do in graduations. So for $10 million, in both [Wellington and Christchurch] we can put in the big step, but tune it back to where we think the demand will sit.

We know there won’t be the demand at the high end, but we’ve put it in so that in future if people want it we’re going to be able to provide it. [Secondly] there is absolutely no reason for government, local bodies or anyone else to build fibre to the home to get 100Mbsp because the network’s already in place.

2degrees: Will 50,000 freeloaders be good for business?

New Zealand’s soon-to-launch third mobile network operator, 2degrees, has closed its pre-launch Chinwag promotion after signing up 50,000 potential customers who are being posted a free SIM card loaded with $5 credit.

2degrees has said it will launch in August, but is yet to announce a date. The timing of the Chinwag close-off seems to confirm what I’ve been hearing: that launch day will be around August 6 or 7.

I’ve also heard the company will go to market with a pre-paid offering only, and that post-paid subscriptions will follow further down the track.

The question is, will 50,000 launch users churning through $250k of free call time be enough to give 2degrees some decent market traction – especially considering it’s competing against Telecom and Vodafone who each have more than two million subscribers?

I think it’s probably not a bad way to kick of. The number of 2degrees SIM cards out in the market will balloon above 50,000 pretty quickly. The company has set up a solid and easily-accessible channel, including supermarkets and other retailers such as Dick Smith, so the SIM cards will be easy to find.

The proposition for picking one up is also looking relatively compelling, compared to the Vodafone/Telecom offer, which involves charging around $40 for a SIM.

The Dick Smith website is selling 2degrees SIM for either $2, pre-loaded with $2 credit, or $20, preloaded with $20 credit. (Type ’2degrees’ into the site’s search box.)

So provided 2degrees is planning to undercut its rivals on per-minute pricing – which it clearly is – there will be a strong incentive for pre-paid phone users, who make up the bulk of the subscriber base (eg. 71.5% of Vodafone customers), to switch to 2degrees.

Targeting this price sensitive segment of the market has its challenges, however. 2degrees is dealing with a very fickle customer base. This can be illustrated by this posting, by one Akmal Barekzai, to the company’s Facebook site:

why is it taking SO LONG [to launch] we getting annoyed now and would want to go back to fucked up Telecom or Vodaphone. i hope all this wait is worth it or i will piss on 2degress company.

There’s a huge amount of resentment towards Telecom and Vodafone out there – as illustrated by the fact that 2degrees has more than 8,000 Facebook fans who’ve not held back when it comes to spewing out vitriolic comments about the two incumbent mobile operators.

But the mindset of customers such as Akmal Barekzai shows the new arrival isn’t going to get an easy ride either. It will need to deliver on both price and performance if it wants to grab a decent share of the market.

 

Cops issue $650k job ticket to telco suppliers

Telecommunications contractor Sky Communications has won a contract worth up to $400,000 with the New Zealand Police’s ICT Radio division.

The contract is to complete structural designs for telecommunications support structures for microwave and land mobile radio antennae.

Sky Communications, a division of Kapiti/Horowhenua electricity supplier Electra Group, will work with the Police’s radio engineers and the department’s CAD team to produce certified structural designs that meet Building Act requirements.

Meanwhile, systems integrator W. Arthur Fisher (now part of CSE – W. Arthur Fisher Limited) has been awarded a contract worth up to $250,000 to supply telemetry equipment for the Police’s Waikato land mobile radio network (LMRN).

The LMRN system is used to monitor the Police radio network for the notification and diagnosis of faults.

W.Arthur Fisher recently merged with electrical engineering solution provider CSE Uniserve NZ to form CSE – W. Arthur Fisher Limited.

It’s official – geeks are sad sacks

Today’s Sunday Star-Times has an interesting graphical article on happiness (which doesn’t seem to be available online, unfortunately).

According to the SST, a poll of 15,000 kiwis by UMR Research has found:

• Asians are New Zealand’s least happy ethnic group
• Women are happier than men
• People earning over $100k are the happiest and those on $50-70k are the least happy (yup, even bums getting under $20k say they’re happier than you mid-level salary drones)
• Less-happy-than-average people tended to say: “I like to keep up with the latest technology”
• They also said: “I often surf the web”
• And: “I am left handed”
• Auckland, Gisborne and Wellington were “our least happy places”

So if you’re a left-handed Asian bloke, living in Auckland or Wellington, earning around $60k and spending your time online or playing with techy toys … then cheer up, at least you don’t live in Gisborne!