October 19, 2007

Labor’s released their tax policy today.

Here’s an article about Peter Costello’s response.

He’s in glorious form:

TREASURER Peter Costello has accused Labor of copying his tax policy, saying the opposition plan is 91.5 per cent the same as the Coalition’s.

…

Mr Rudd talks about education – if he’d have brought his exam paper in after copying 91.5 per cent of the answers from the student sitting next to him, he would have got an F for fail

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Mr Rudd and Mr Swan do not understand the Australian economy. This is entirely clear from the fact they have spent four days copying 91.5 per cent of our tax plan

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He hadn’t done the work, five days after our tax policy, his great contribution to the tax debate in this country is to say ‘me too, but’.

“The trouble with ‘me too, but’ is, it’s OK for Mr Rudd to say ‘me too, I’ll be like Howard and Costello and adopt their policies’, but if he gets in Howard and Costello won’t be there writing the policies.

“So who is going to say ‘me to, but’ to them? I think the union movement will be giving him a few ideas.”

Solid gold, Peter. That’s why I want HIM to become our Prime Minister. Get out of the way, John.

SMS marketing is something that most people my age have become accustomed to. The two major sources of marketing SMSes for my phone are Telstra and Citylife Church (ie. the church I go to.)

To be honest I find them a bit annoying. However a post I’m reading suggests that brands are overcoming the impersonal nature mobile marketing software to achieve some good results.

Marketing Vox talks about it in this post.

Most significantly;

“The percentage of big brands who said up to 10 percent of recipients of mobile marketing campaigns requested more information as a result of receiving a mobile marketing message grew from 32 percent in 2006 to 58 percent in 2007. “

However, as the quote below suggests, these campaigns are also running into problems:

The perception that MMS is difficult to use has grown from 14 percent in 2006 to 29 percent in 2007, and concerns about reliability have grown from 12 percent to 34 percent in the same period.

I’d agree with this. If a company wants to undertake an MMS campaign they have to contest with the fact that MMS barely works. My phone is set up to take MMSs but they never work. Most Optus users I know receive an sms with a link telling them to go to it to view a picture - very inconvenient and will mostly be forgotten.

When I sign up to mobile tv - which will probably be around Feb or March next year - I won’t object to having to watch ads so I can access content. But currently, I find receiving a marketing SMS out of the blue a bit intrusive.  My mobile phone inbox is a personal space and I’d prefer not to receive messages from companies.

The only messages I like receiving from companies is when you land in another country and you have roaming switched on. “Welcome to Thailand! Bla Bla bla…”

I’ve been working hard over the past few days to add a gadgets section to the Jonk’s Bargains website for the re-launch. You can’t see it right now, but you will be able to in a few days!

I made a test site for the unblock Hotmail function and here it is. It looks a bit different but you’ll be able to use this to sign into hotmail on computers that currently block it. I know it works because I have been using it from a pc that has it blocked and have read emails, sent emails, deleted emails, everything. It’s great.

When you sign out there’s an option to chat on msn and I have been using that too. This will prove very convenient for people in my situation.