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How much does an online store cost?
I was asked by a magazine to answer the question of “Is it more cost effective to start an online business rather than launching a physical store, and could you give me an estimate of how much it could cost to start an online store compared to a retail business?”
I’m not sure how much of [...]
The iBurst ghost returns
Long-time Ideate readers will know that we have – how do I put this gently – loathsome thoughts towards the wireless internet provider iBurst. Read our past rants here, here, here, here and here.
After all of that, we’ve naturally moved on to greener pastures and iBurst is a distant and fading memory… But not according [...]
Spammers get rich on 0.00001% Response Rate
Ever wondered why spammers continue sending their junkmail through, when nobody you know ever looks at it?
MarketingVox and the BBC reported this:
Here’s the secret: high volume and a virally-expanding network, which means even the tiniest response rate can produce millions of dollars in profit per year.
Computer scientists at the University of California, Berkeley and San [...]
Try out cellphone banking
After a restaurant meal with friends, have you often scrambled to try and gather the correct change to pay the R163.50 that you owe for your share? Usually one person will offer to pay for the whole amount on a credit card, and that leaves the rest of you with a whole lot of note [...]
Go Green to Sell
While drooling over the latest MacBooks I noticed the “Environment” tab on the Apple website:
Nothing happens by mistake on Apple.com, so they are betting that the environmental qualities of the new MacBooks are a bigger selling point than the Tech Specs (which appears after the Environment tab).
Here is the green page:
They boast about dangerous stuff [...]
Buy shares. Warren Buffet is.
Continuing our stock market theme, here is a brilliant article by Warren Buffet that appeared in the New York Times yesterday. I’ll paste an extract and then direct you to the original article to read the rest:
THE financial world is a mess, both in the United States and abroad. Its problems, moreover, have been leaking [...]
How The Stock Market Works
Once upon a time, a man appeared in a village in Africa and announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for $10 each.
The villagers knowing that there were many monkeys around, went out to the jungle, and started catching them. The man bought hundreds at $10 and as supply started to diminish, the [...]
Help write a newspaper article
A major weekend newspaper contacted Ideate today and asked for some help with an article on how the current economic slump is affecting SME’s.
Below are the questions that were sent through. If you would like to contribute, comment on this post and leave your name, your company name, and your feedback. Specify the question number [...]
Hell Week
September 21 to September 27 2008 will go down in South African retail history as one of the worst weeks ever. The following forces collided to create a “perfect storm”:
- A massive change in our government, including replacing our president, and for a day or so the fear that our much-loved finance minister was out [...]
An inside look at e-commerce fraud in South Africa
In the movies crime is usually high-tech, stealthy and professional. In your neighbourhood crime is usually opportunistic, low-tech and unprofessional – someone jumps over your wall, steals a bicycle, and pawns it for a few Rand.
The same is true for most e-commerce crime. A list of credit card numbers is bought over the internet and [...]
