June 2007 Archives

I abhor telemarketing.

I've received a number of calls from automatic diallers which start by saying something like "Congratulations! You have been selected for ...". I usually hang up as soon as I hear the robot sounding "Congratulations!" but today I realised I should return the favour by wasting the telemarketer's time. If you hang on for a few more seconds the next statement is something like "If you would like more information, please press nine". So I hit 9, put the phone on speaker, mute and waited to see how long I could tie up their phone line (thanks to the wonders of VoIP I have 2 personal phone lines and am not in the least concerned about tying one up).

After hitting 9 the line went silent and I wondered if I had mistakenly hung up whilst pressing the speaker & mute buttons but after about 15 seconds some guy actually started speaking. "Hello? .... hello??". So the automated dialler is just to pre-screen people so that the telemarketing company doesn't waste costly human time cold calling.

At this point if you want to be a real prick you'd abuse the person on the other end of the phone. I'm not sure of the legalities of this but IMHO psychologically abusing someone seems an effective way to discourage folks from working in telemarketing centres. I don't buy into the argument about poor students, uneducated folks etc having to work in call centres as there are loads of other jobs for unskilled workers that don't involve annoying people. Anyway as I don't really have the balls to yell at random people over the phone I just let the guy say "hello?" a few more times before he eventually hung up.

So in summary I encourage you all to at least hit 9 and get someone on the phone before hanging up just to waste that little bit of the telemarketer's money. If you can be bothered, throw in a "this sounds interesting please tell me more" before putting the phone into mute. :)

I think this could be an effective counter since there are literally millions of people receiving telemarketing calls, and only a much smaller number of people calling out. Each lucky "victim" only needs to waste an extra few seconds and pretty soon the telemarketing scheme becomes ineffective/expensive.

I'm on a bit of a comparison rant at the moment. :)

Recently I was looking at credit cards. In poking around the various bank sites and infochoice.com.au it became obvious that deciding on the best credit card plan for oneself is not exactly an easy task. It shouldn't be a difficult task but its complicated by two things:
1. lack of any good way to compare credit card plans in terms of features, rates etc
2. lack of any good way to play "What If" with your own credit card usage

Issue 1. is partially solved by RateCity which utilises data collated by CANNEX. The interface could do with some improvement but its basically functional.

Issue 2. I've not seen anyone tackle but I propose that it could be solved quite nicely in conjunction with the data provided by CANNEX. How about a service where the user provides their latest 6 months worth of credit card statements for analysis by some magical computer program which will take into account stuff like your monthly spend, monthly repayments, monthly remaining (debit) balance and then lookup the CANNEX database to suggest the plan on which you'd be paying the lowest fees/interest.

Similar issues are found when selecting a mobile phone plan for example (should I choose a capped plan or pre-paid, or post-paid, or ...), and even regular fixed line plan so the same idea could apply - upload your monthly statements and let magical computer find you the cheapest plan. Number crunching is what computers are good at afterall...

The business model behind such a service seems pretty straightforward. Given the amount of money the typical credit consumer could save you could probably charge a fee for the service but I propose that you'd be much better off giving the service away for free. Instead charge the banks a referral fee since they already have massive advertising budgets.

The best part about this idea is that it doesn't have significant startup costs and its not technically difficult - one for any budding computer science student to have a bash at (and if anyone would like some advice implementing this feel free to email me).

Some implementation notes: for the privacy conscious you could simply provide a web form for the user to type in their numbers, but for those who are willing you could totally scrape that data straight out of the user's online bank account(s) as most banks provide ability to download statements into Excel spreadsheets, CSV etc.

I was recently looking to buy an underwater case for my Fuji Finepix F31fd (which BTW I highly recommend for anyone after a point-n-shoot). As I was going to Hong Kong for work, and having recently purchased a couple of cameras from online shops in HK which was heaps cheaper than buying from local shops I thought I'd try and find my underwater case on a HK site. I wasn't able to find any shop selling it for less than AUD250 which is about the going rate here anyway. From the US I could find it for about AUD180, but with shipping it gets upwards of AUD200.

Whilst in HK Colin took me to the shop behind dcfever.com who had my case selling for HKD1100 (~ AUD170). Ace. But why couldn't I find this online?

I guess the answer has something to do with the site being entirely in Chinese. And shame on me for not knowing my mother tongue. :)

So here comes International Shopping Comparison. A solution to my problem would be to have an aggregator that scrapes local product info & prices in Chinese, but has a UI in English. Of course extending this idea beyond Chinese<->English leads us to the generalised concept of product price aggregation and comparison that would be implemented in any local language feeding a front-end UI that supports multiple end-user languages. For bonus points such a site should take into account what currency the user would like to spend (defaulting to the user's current location), and return prices taking into account current exchange rates as well as postage. Welcome to the Global Economy.

The thing that makes this an entirely solvable problem is that most products have the same product code in many countries if not worldwide. Hence even if the product info, brochures etc may need some translation work a product code and price are pretty easy to do.

If only I spoke more than English!

I flew Virgin Atlantic to Hong Kong last weekend and having flown Qantas, LanChile, Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific and Air New Zealand in recent years I have to say Virgin Atlantic has the /worst/ airline food I have ever eaten. Anyone who knows me knows I love food, and when on a plane I love the neat little packaging of airline food and eat every last scrap just because its there. :@) I could not bring myself to eat the weird crap that Virgin Atlantic served. I'd say all of the other airlines are roughly the same food wise regardless of their claims to having meals prepared by celebrity chefs - its really not rocket science to cook a remotely tasty meal.

On entertainment. Qantas needs to fix their entertainment system. In the last year I've flown Sydney to London and Sydney to San Jose on Qantas, and I can only come to one conclusion - if you are flying Qantas, expect the entertainment system to crash. Virgin shits all over Qantas in this respect - their system appears to be built on some Linux variant (based on the wacky NFS messages I saw at bootup) and is pretty solid. It had some startup issues and I did see it crash once (which is when the NFS messages appeared) but it magically reset itself and recovered. Contrast this to Qantas flight attendants having to reset their system multiple times on my London trip, only to realise after 3 reboots that the on-demand system just would not stabilise itself and eventually falling back to the old one-movie-per-channel-on-endless-loop routine.

Got off the bus this evening and was fiddling with my MP3 player as I walked up Oliver St. Looked up and saw a cyclist coming down Cavill St across the intersection, an intersection I had ridden across many times. The odd thing about this scene was that a 4WD was coming the opposite way and turning right across the cyclist's path. I looked on wondering how the cyclist would get around the car and it didn't even register that they were about to collide until I heard the screech of tires and a bang. A loud bang, as loud as you'd expect car on car, not something you'd expect of a bike.

Being right next to a bus stop there were a bunch of pedestrians around and we all rushed out to see if cyclist guy was ok. I instinctively reached for my mobile and dialled 000, spoke to an operator for about 20 seconds before I realised everyone else had done the same, so I hung up. This was a stupid thing to do since the 000 operators then had to trace my call and rang me back about 5 minutes later to see if I was ok. In the meantime we'd established that cyclist guy was breathing and decided to leave him alone as he had landed in a semi-recovery position and had no visible injuries apart from a graze on his chin. He wasn't really conscious, kind of mumbling and stirring a little but a doctor also happened to be passing by so that kind of reassured everyone.

An ambulance turned up a few minutes later, followed by another. The first set of paramedics immediately went to treat the cyclist but the second set did a very practical thing - they told us all to get off the road as we were all standing in the middle of a busy-ish intersection. We waited for the police to show up and left our details as witnesses, and I wrongly figured a vehicle and two guys that I thought were the ones who had hit the cyclist (they had stopped to see if cyclist guy was ok then driven off which looked suspicious to me). It turned out the responsible driver had been standing amongst us the whole time.

Its a sickening thing to see a cyclist get run over, and doubly so when I realised he wasn't wearing a helmet. And that he was riding the same path I use several times a week. I'm never cycling without a helmet again.

I've just spent a few hours looking at credit card options and thought I'd summarise my findings because there are significant differences in the cards on offer and the pros/cons of each.

First up my wants:
   * rewards that convert efficiently to Qantas Frequent Flyer
   * 55 days interest free
   * purchase & travel insurance cover
   * smallest card fee possible

Note that I did not consider interest rate at all in my comparisons because I always pay my card off in full every month.

This basically lands me in Gold card territory since most standard cards have either rewards or free insurance cover but not both. Gold cards typically have an annual fee between $100 and $150.

The attraction to a rewards program that converts efficiently to Qantas Frequent Flyer points is due to the fact that I hate having multiple credit cards with multiple rewards programs, and that the banks use this fact to lock customers into their particular cards. They prey on the fact that customers will either be too lazy to switch cards once they realise the hassle involved in using up their rewards points, or that they'll forget to use rewards points when they leave. Given that I travel pretty regularly it makes sense to just convert all my credit card rewards points to QFF and aggregate them that way.

Is there a better way to extract value from credit card spend?

Honestly, I can't be bothered finding out. It may well be more effective to convert rewards points to redeem annual fees for example, or to change them to movie passes. For example Westpac Altitude converts 15000 points into a $100 voucher at Dymocks, Myer and other stores. Or 7400 points into 4 adult movie passes ($60 value). This equates to around 0.67c per point and provides a good hint as to the value of a frequent flyer point since Altitude converts rewards point to QFF at 2:1, this would make a Qantas Frequent Flyer point worth about 1.3c.

Is the Gold card worth the additional fee?

Standard cards with 55 days interest free can be had for free. Virgin Money offers a fee free MasterCard for example.

In my case the main benefit is the frequent flyer points. Let's assume that a FF point is worth 1.3c based on the calculations above. This is lower than the 2c mile/point mentioned in Wikipedia, and pretty close to what you get if you take some Qantas flight prices and divide it by the FF points required.

The CitiBank Gold card I eventually settled on has an annual fee of $120, so at 1.3c value per point I'd want to be putting at least $9,200 through the card each year to earn back my annual fee. Given that I have historically put about $20,000 a year through my credit cards I'm easily past this barrier.

The Result

Firstly, some random learnings from looking at far too many bank/credit union sites:
   * CitiBank offers the only VISA/MasterCard program in Australia with 1:1 reward point to QFF conversion, where 1 reward point is $1 spent; Commonwealth Bank and NAB both have programs that convert at a ratio of 3:2. Most other banks convert at 2:1 which is just lame.
   * most (if not all) credit unions re-sell CitiBank's MasterCard via a company called "Card Services Direct" with a rewards program called BlueSky. The T&Cs for Card Services Direct are almost identical to CitiBank, the differences being that CSD caps rewards points at 60,000 per year whereas CitiBank says they MAY cap them at 60,000, and CSD resellers offer "Delivery Protection" which apparently insures you against non-delivery of goods which would be nice for online shopping, except CSD doesn't actually link the T&Cs for this feature, and CitiBank's own program specifically
   * everyone offers Travel Insurance via Zurich Insurance, except for the NAB which uses another insurer
   * someone could probably make themselves a tidy sum by building a credit card recommendation service. Information (especially the T&Cs) regarding credit cards, their fees and reward program limitations is remarkably painful to dig up, and there are clear winners in each category. I tried to use InfoChoice but it sucks as its lacking information and decent search functionality.

The exact same CitiBank Gold card program is available directly from CitiBank (duh) and various credit unions with the credit unions having a $99 fee vs CitiBank's $119.

Conclusion: I'm choosing to go with a CitiBank VISA since they have far more branches should I ever need to use one (especially if travelling). I'll also be keeping a Virgin Money MasterCard as a backup.