Newsbites

For small bits of news, quotations, odd videos, and flimflam.

Problems with the Top Twenty Money Making Feeds?

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I was reinstalling stuff on my reformatted PC with a new motherboard after the thing fritzed itself last week… and I downloaded the OPML feed. I had trouble installing the feed in my chosen Feed reader (FeedDemon 2.7) and wondered if anyone else was having trouble with the feed I had uploaded.

Please drop me a line on this post or the other post about the download or in the contacts form! I’d like to know because I only have got my own experience to compare: I know it works on BlogLines, and on Google Reader. It used to work on FeedDemon but not on the new version. (I actually didn’t like version 2.7 so I removed it pronto!)… where else did you try the feed?

Should I upgrade? Version 2.6 is very seductive!

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Should I upgrade? The past two or three days I opened my own Admin Panel in Wordpress to see the following message:

upgrade image

I’m sitting here wondering about this… It used to be pretty convenient upgrading on Dreamhost, their one-click installs would speed you through the process: without any fussy backing up (all done), the entire install was copied to .old and the new files and files were copied from wp-content. It was an easy and beautiful thing to behold. All you had to do was turn off your plugins!

Now I’m on a manual install, and I have to do the whole thing manually… it’s not that difficult actually, as I’ve done it manually many times in the past. But it’s still a little more difficult. Of course the bigger issue is: Should I upgrade?

The new features are quite attractive: Take a look for yourself!

Click to watch this video.

This is always tricky to answer. If you watch the video, you’ll know that there is versioning of posts, better gallery type functions, gears-type functionality, and better flock-type tools for blogging things you find… If any of these features are necessary or highly desirable for you, then upgrading might be the way to go. Also, if this is your first blog and/or you have JUST started blogging, upgrading should provide you with all these benefits and not much downside.

For larger blogs or more production-sensitive sites, a little tardiness may be in their best interests because usually upgrading provides great new functionality and it can also break things, too. As I found out: version 2.5.1 breaks password recovery and I suspected , too.

I’m not upgrading IMMEDIATELY. Why? Because no matter how many bugs and flaws are removed, there are ALWAYS unexpected developments that need fixing, so it is likely that I will wait for those fixes to be applied and perhaps version 2.6.1 or at least until I know that there aren’t significant issues with this version. It’s very seductive though to try, so I’ll be upgrading some minor blogs and less high profile blogs so at least I will be armed with the knowledge of how things work. In fact, I’m pretty sure most regular bloggers have their play-blogs where they try stuff out first, too!

Why can’t British retailers succeed in Taiwan?

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Another British retailer bites the dust in Taiwan, and the list of failures gets longer…

  • TESCO – sold out to Carrefour;
  • BOOTS – merged counters and business with Watson’s;
  • Marks & Spencer – Now closing;
  • Mothercare – only a few stores in Taiwan;

… can anyone add to this list?

In the rush to expand, many British companies are eager to expand in Asian markets… but they fail to grasp the complexities of the local market, the sheer amount of competition, the fickle nature of Taiwanese shoppers, and the importance of branding, but the worst sin of all: thinking you can make a quick buck here. What’s weirder is that each of these companies has successful operations in other Asian countries, including Thailand, Hong Kong, China, and Singapore… So what’s going on?

Lets start with TESCO. TESCO entered the local market and opened stores in Taipei, Taoyuen, and a few other locations. They were intending to open in December 2000 after purchasing their first location from Makro Asia. Shortly after they expanded to four stores in Taiwan, and a bullish statement by Peter Bracher, head of Tesco International Corporate Affairs, made it clear that they were intending to open upto 10 stores by 2004/5. Then in September 2005, Tesco sold their stores in Taiwan to Carrefour and closed them early in 2006. So what went wrong?

Well, I don’t have access to any of the sales figures, but as a customer I shopped their on more than one occasion. Frankly, I was not impressed. The format of the store was quite similar to the Carrefour stores that dot the island, the product quality for the local products were just not good enough, and they were very slow to introduce their own branded local products. There was an assumption that their typical model would work in Taiwan without sufficient localization. Only later on, when sales lagged, did the management act to introduce local products, such as Tesco Rice or Tesco Oil. While the pricing for these products were quite keen, we weren’t very keen on the freshness of the products, or the store arrangements.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_20000812/ai_n14321366

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/2005/10/01/2003274021