the goose

I have been thinking a lot recently on how you can use online payment methods and simple web pages to drive down the cost of delivering value and collecting payment. My previous Geek Goes Good post started me off on it and recently a practical application of the approach has come to light. On the Springwise website there is an article all about crowdfunding. It is a catchy term. In this case a micro-brewery is funded by 50,000 one off contributers. It seems to me one of those ‘why didn’t I think of that’ type moments. Not that I want to create a brewery – but I have no doubt that there are thousands if not millions of opportunities out there waiting to be taken advantage of in this fashion.

Last night we had another mastermind session at the Quality Hotel. It was probably the best yet. We are starting to get the hang of how the evening should run and had some great speakers. I have had great feedback so far and we have already agreed a date for the next event (on the 17th of June).

We had three excellent ideas on the table – each of which scored highly. It was Fran O’Reilly from Amaze.ie who took the honours in the end. The discussion was pretty lively and I hope everyone got something out of it.

A big thankyou to everyone who came along and contributed.

If the title of this post means nothing to you – don’t worry – normal service will be resuming shortly.

For a while now I have been sharpening my skills with the Ruby programming language. As an old skool java programmer – there has been a lot to learn. All the ruby kids make me feel old with their weird programming constructs and high-feluting dynamic code. A good while ago now I ran a training course for a group of Java and C# developers who wanted to drink some of the kool aid. I have been meaning to post my presentation for a while but just have not found the time – until now.

You can find a link to my slides at A introduction to Ruby for Java heads

The training was a lot of fun and I am looking for opportunities to do more of this kind of thing.

According to The Register, Ebbfsfleet football club are heading to Wembly. The semi-professional club is funded by 27,000 fans who each shelled out £35 for a share of the club. The payments were received online and in total – £700,000 was raised. Originally the plan was that fans would be able to vote for the team players they wanted to see on the pitch each week. This was abandoned pretty quickly but they still havea say in transfers.

What struck me about the article was that it demonstrated how technology brings down the cost of processing payments. The Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply will tell you that processing an order will cost you £50. By that logic – this fund raising would have lost money if there wasn’t some way to introduce efficiencies in collecting the cash. Accepting online subscriptions is not as cheap as you might think. The major cost comes in managing failed payments. I’ve found this to be especially true where we bill custoemer monthly. We tend to ask for an annual subscription at this stage.

The second note of interest is the fact that any attempt to select the team by mass committee was a complete failure. I guess this is not much of a surprise but it is worth bearing in mind. My post on groups donating to a chartiable cause has stirred up some interest recently and I’m hoping to make some progress on this front. This story re-affirms my opinion that you can’t really allow the great unwashed to have a say in managing any process. Much better to delegate.

I am just wrapping up for the day after attending Jonathan Bell’s Clicks and Prosper seminar. I was kind of expecting to be surrounded by people as techie as I am – but propbably the most telling thing was I certainly was not. Everyone in business – especially small business – seems to be waking up to the idea of automating income. Jonathan has a great integrated approach which include

• Network marketing
• Postcard Marketing
• Website marketing
• Website video

The difference between this course and others I have been on is that you get an end to end view of how to implement a marketing strategy from one end to the other. The thing that really makes it unique is that Jonathan will ‘hold your hand’ in the coming months.

I have not been a big fan of starting a traditional ‘eCommerce’ site in the past. My biggest concern with it is that there is a lot of physical labour attached to selling physical product online. Not very ‘passive’ in my book. This might be changing however. Amazon’s webstore has been on my mind recently and more particularly – their provisioning services. Using a programming interface – it is possible to have Amazon actually handle physical goods for you. Some someone hanging off the side of an Island in the middle of the Atlantic (well almost) this has a couple of advantages. Chief amongst them is the fact that I don’t need to be based in the US to organise inventory there. I can source my products somewhere in the world – have them shipped to Amazon’s US warehouses and sell directly to the largest online marketplace. More importantly – this is something I can do from anywhere. I can manage this business without having to have any staff or physical premises. Randy Smyth has written up a nice desription of this over on his blog. Randy still handles product before shipping to the Amazon warehouse but there doesn’t seem to be any necessity to do this. You can just have your supplier send the product directly.