Game over for Telecom’s ferrit.co.nz
It has been predicted since the beginning, and lo and behold, it became a reality! Ferrit.co.nz, an online shopping website started and owned by Telecom was closed at 5pm, 14 January 2009 after around three years of business. NZ Herald post featured 11 pages of users comments about the closing of Ferrit.
So what's wrong with Ferrit?
- Lack (if any) of word of mouth referrals. Most if not all web 2.0 success relied on this factor rather than bombardments of TV ads.
- Annoying TV ads
- Poor choice of name. People do not associate it with online shopping
- Telecom's bad public image
- It was seen as a response to Trademe which was at the height of its success
- Bad website interface and design
- Seen as just providing links to retailers websites
- Telecom was trying to run a business outside their expertise
A blogger commented that although it is not a successful business, Ferrit should not close down. I agree to some degree, it costed Telecom NZD $30m to setup, and it's only been three years!
The closing of Ferrit saw Telecom's shares went up in value, but only to drop again the next day on announcement of "Commerce Commission commences review of backhaul".
Compare directories / folders using xxdiff
I just found this wonderful tool called xxdiff which is a command line but graphical tool, it didn't make sense at first, but it is actually a tool that you start from command line but then gives you a graphical UI (a pretty simple but effective UI, in my opinion).
After installing xxdiff, just type a command line like this one to compare two directories recursively:
xxdiff -r /dir1 /dir2
and a GUI window should show up, something like:
One of the wonderful things about the GUI is that you can copy files from one directory to another. And you can also double click on each file to see the differences in the files contents.
I have not explored all the features and capabilities of xxdiff but it seems like a very handy tool to keep around. Very useful for manually synchronizing directories / folders.