I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
Posted by Rod in Old-blog-archives at 1:00 pm on Saturday, 15 October 2005
So another massive leak on Telecom’s Online Shopping initiative (project Sparky - likely to be called Ferrit) appeared in the NBR yesterday.
Points I picked up.
- This is a massive leak that really compromises Telecom. This must be one of the worst commercial leaks I’ve seen.
- The name Ferrit is negative. Though, as it appears Telecom were clearly lying in their messaging to the media this week, Ferrit is uncomfortably close to weasel words.
- The concept and plan doesn’t make sense. So phase one is a list of product information? I don’t see the value.
My favourite one though is … “We’ve built the environment as much as we can to replicate a startup, albeit we are Telecom.
A STARTUP!!
A startup is not offices in the burb’s with table soccer and free coke.
A startup is
- Devoting time after work and weekends on an idea you’re passionate about
- Going without pay for months while you build your idea
- Borrowing money from family
- Convincing your wife to wind up the mortgage
- Grovelling to get funding
- Calling in all favours to make your first sale
- Standing by the fax machine waiting for the order that was promised
- Sweating how you’re going to make payroll
- Spending months of your time trying to get through the bureaucracy at companies like Telecom who desperately need your solution but they’ll probably buy the crappy, safe, established product anyway.
This is not a Startup.

Hi,
I notice you have written quite a bit about Ferrit highlighting some of the many places they have been a bit disappointing in what they do.
On September 1st (Friday) we have launched CrazyShoppa, the first of its kind True Online Shopping website in New Zealand. Unlike Ferrit, people can buy stuff on CrazyShoppa. Apart form just being an e-commerce website, CrazyShoppa is an online community where people can come together and simply have loads of fun watching funny videos, listen to music, play free games, read live news, download free software and much more…
Please read our press release for CrazyShoppa which can be downloaded as a PDF here:
http://www.crazyshoppa.co.nz/Press Release.pdf
We have also compiled an FAQ list for the media….
You can view that as a pdf here:
http://www.crazyshoppa.co.nz/FAQs.pdf
We have only just launched and will be adding more interesting bits to our website form time to time. I would appreciate if you could provide us some feedback. The home page canbe accessed here
http://www.crazyshopa.co.nz/nz/index.php
I look forward to hearing from you sometime in the near future.
Regards
Manas
Founder, CEO
CrazyShoppa New Zealand