Inline with Massey Universities 2020 strategy for teaching and learning, Mark Brown Director of Distance Education has announced the expansion of their electronic tool set to include:

• Acrobat Pro
• Adobe Presenter
• Adobe Connect

Acrobat Pro will enable them to enhance their accessibility, usability and quality of some of their online material. Presenter amplifies the teachers voice and provides a more engaging interaction with subject content online, and Connect will connect (pardon the pun) teachers with their students, including regular online tutorials, consultations with small groups, and offshore distance delivery.

Read the Massey article or view Adobe announcement presentation.

webqem looks forward to hearing the creative uses of these tools throughout the University.

An initiative of long-time Internet specialist Brendon Cropper, Digital Cadet is backed by the industry bodies and big names in online media. Aiming to address the shortage of skilled online media people, Digital Cadet provides an intensive 3 week course in market knowledge, practical training and industry mentorship.

• A vast array of holiday homes located within two hours drive of Sydney;
• A fleet of the world’s finest cars from marques such as Ferrari, Lamborghini, Bentley, Porsche, Lotus and Aston Martin; and
• A fleet of watercraft such as Jet skis, powerboats and sailboats.

Limited Edition takes care of the anxieties associated with ownership, namely depreciation, insurance, maintenance, taxes and storage. Limited Edition members simply pay a one-off Joining Fee and thereafter an Annual Membership Fee. In addition to access to the immaculately maintained prestige lifestyle items, Limited Edition membership also provides unparalleled access to diverse calendar events and social days.

Given that there are only 300 memberships available, Limited Edition will be launching the Club via a prospectus in June 2006, with Memberships being allocated on a first-in basis.

How Limited Edition works:

Limited Edition uses a simple points system to access the prestige Lifestyle Items. Members are given annual points at the start of each Membership year, which may then be exchanged against usage of the Lifestyle Items subject to membership level.

There are three levels of Limited Edition membership that can be applied for: Platinum, Gold and Silver.

Each level is limited to 100 members only and offers a different degree of access to the Limited Edition luxury Lifestyle Items. The number of points deducted per day of the member’s booking depends upon the Lifestyle Item’s group number, the season and the day of the week the booking covers, all of which also have a numeric value.

The exact number of Lifestyle days to be enjoyed by a member during their membership year will therefore vary depending upon the Limited Edition Lifestyle Item a member decides to enjoy and when the member chooses to enjoy them. On average members will enjoy around 35 to 70 days enjoyment of the Limited Edition Collection.

webqem relationship

Limited Edition approached webqem late last year with a view to create a dynamic website for the Club. The website development is very important to Limited Edition as it plays a major part in the Club’s marketing strategy including allowing all potential Members to express their interest in receiving the prospectus. The website will also be used by Members to book Collection Items.

Webqem is also working with Limited Edition in formulating their marketing strategy, designing and broadcasting email and forms to its members notifying them of up-coming events and allowing them to vote for new Collection items.

Webqem responded very effectively to our need for a cost-effective yet high quality method of communicating the launching of the Club. We expect the online Prospectus order form to work extremely well as a way to gather initial interest in the Club’s membership. This will enable us to monitor interest in the club even before the Prospectus is launched as well as giving us a member database from day one. Larry and the team worked extremely quickly and kept me closely updated on progress with projects – seeking feedback at all stages to ensure that the end result had the striking yet sophisticated feel needed.”

Gavin Perry
Operations Director, Limited Edition

realestate.com.au has had a great year in UV growth, what do you put that down to?

Yes we have had exceptional growth this year with our total UB’s just reaching a staggering 2.3 million in October! Furthermore, our gap over our nearest competitor Domain is now 1 million UB’s which puts us in a very strong leadership position.

We attribute our recent growth to the continuation of a strong marketing campaign this year, including SEO and paid search activity, offline brand activity, increased online display advertising and targeted micro-marketing via the realestate.com.au Property Guide. The significant marketing investment in the brand in the last 18 months is certainly paying dividends.

In the past 6 months you have redeployed some significant marketing funds towards the online medium. What is the reasoning behind the growth in online expenditure?

To date we have successfully built awareness of the realestate.com.au brand in key markets predominantly via mainstream offline advertising, with online activity focussed on SEO and paid search.

With the increasing use of the Internet amongst Australian consumers, especially the growing penetration of broadband, online is an increasingly important medium, particularly in the online classifieds category. For the real estate industry, the medium has incredible advantages over print, in that it enables consumers the ability to dynamically filter their searches for property according to their individual needs.

As an advertising medium we have seen more and more advertisers shift their spend to online, for both brand and response-based communications. Online allows us to maximise our reach nationally in an extremely cost effective manner. Moreover since online is a highly measurable and targeted medium, it has allowed us to continually evolve our marketing mix to maximise the effectiveness of brand and product specific messages over the last 6 months.

Having advertised online for 6 months now, will you continue with this strategy?

Our plan is to continue to invest in online display advertising, as well as SEO and paid search. In the coming months we are particularly interested in looking at new opportunities to promote the realestate.com.au brand, beyond traditional banner/display advertising.

Just as we constantly evolve our site, and the product offerings, so too we are aiming to maintain the cut-through and relevance of our online advertising, in an ever changing media landscape.

E*TRADE has been going from strength to strength over the past couple of years. What are the keys reasons for this success & growth?

Underpinning our growth has been providing a market leading product with a range of investment choices for customers. Over the past couple of years we’ve revamped our active trader products – Power E*TRADE and E*TRADE Pro, introduced our conditional orders service which assists in providing more discipline in share trading, online options trading, SMS alerts and our recently launched Contract for Difference (CFDs) service. This coupled with successful and valuable alliances including ANZ, Qantas, Bendigo Bank and Yahoo! has helped grow our customer base and build awareness with the Australian public.

What are your customers like? Why do they find your service so
appealing?

Our customers come from a broad range of backgrounds. You could have a mother of 3 in suburban Brisbane who in her spare time during the day looks at investment opportunities, to someone just out of university in Melbourne who is considering their first investment right through to a retiree in Broome who is thinking about what to do with their superannuation. The reason why our service appeals to such an array of customers is that we break down the barriers to investing. We equip our customers with the tools they need to make their own informed investment decisions. This includes real time market information, the ability to create watchlists, a choice of investment products, 7 independent research providers to give you investment ideas, all supported by free seminars, held nationally – just to name a few things.

Online communication is a big part of your acquisition strategy. Why is it working for you?

As a business which has originated from ground up with the internet as its key focus, we believe online communications is one of the most important avenues to grow our business. It works for us because in everything we do, we are results oriented. Campaigns we do run have a bottom line, return on investment impact. We have systems in place which we use to measure and evaluate which channels and creative executions work most effectively for us. The internet also allows us to quickly and efficiently communicate with customers and leads. The great thing with online communication is that this measurability and responsiveness isn’t always the case in other forms of acquisition based marketing.

E*TRADE is always looking at enhancing its offering. What new, and exciting things can we expect in the next 12 months?

Well, if I told you that I’d have to kill you… but seriously – we plan to continue to develop new products, refine existing products, but most of all, use all these refinements to the end game of continuing to be Australia’s leading online investment solution. In keeping with innovation, in July, we launched Contracts for Difference (CFDs) – the first online stockbroker in Australia to offer such a service. We also plan to continue our commitment to improving the financial literacy of all Australians including our customers.

When I first trekked Kokoda with a solitary guide in 1991 I was struck by the rugged nature and wild beauty of the terrain. I was also disappointed by the neglect of such an iconic Australian symbol as I often had to cut and slash my way across the track. It is difficult to imagine why the secrets of Kokoda have laid dormant for so long.

This 96-kilometre jungle track that traverses some of the most rugged and wildly beautiful terrain on planet earth is the only link between the north and south coast of Papua New Guinea. It is inhabited by the bush Koiari and Orokaiva people.

Papua New Guinea almost defies description because of its geographic and cultural diversity. It has been variously described as land of a thousand cultures, a Parliament of a thousand tribes and the land of the unexpected.

Over the previous two centuries, Australia went out into the South Pacific as biblebashers and blackbirders; as carpetbaggers, captains and canegrowers. We sailed and traded and built and searched for both gold and souls. And, of course, we sought security for our country.

This security was breached when Japan entered the Pacific War with the bombing of Pearl Harbour on 7 December then swept unchecked down through Asia and the Pacific. They defeated the Americans in the Philippines, the British and Australian forces in Malaya and Singapore, the Dutch in what is now Indonesia – and they were heading towards Australia.

The naval battles of Coral Sea and Midway checked their seaborne advance so they decided on an overland advance via a little known native track beginning at a small village called Kokoda – an Orokaiva word meaning a place of skulls.

Australia was ill-prepared at the time with most of our forces embroiled in the European conflict. All we had to check the Japanese advance initially was a small band of part-time soldiers soon to be immortalised as our ‘ragged bloody heroes’.

The Kokoda campaign was a bitter and desperate battle against overwhelming odds. The Australians were poorly trained, poorly equipped, outnumbered and outgunned – but somehow they prevailed.

Over the years the jungle has reclaimed the battlesites but there has been a recent awakening of Australians who want to explore this forgotten part of our history.

Soon after my first trek in 1991 I decided to establish my own trekking company (Adventure Kokoda) because I believe that the only way people will understand the significance and spirit of Kokoda is to trek it. Neither the written word nor the photographic image can capture this. Since then I have led 38 group expeditions across the track and never cease to be amazed at the response they have to the experience.

Business was traditionally by word of mouth, largely as a result of the television documentaries I was asked to lead for the major networks. With the increased awareness of Kokoda I decided to develop a web site and go online. Since then the numbers have exploded with an increase of more than 100% signing up for my treks this year. The site has allowed me to showcase the experience of Kokoda with video footage and an extensive photo gallery. The stories Diggers have sent me together with some of their poetry gives people a good feel for what they experienced – and for the debt we owe them.

If the spirit of Kokoda is strength in adversity, courage and mateship that spirit has been seeded in us all. We cross in a brief 20 minutes what has taken us eight gruelling days. And like all those who crossed it before us, who left their souls in the mud and the heat and the terrifying jungle, few will ever go back.

Charlie, of course, is the exception. He will continue to pluck other ordinary humans from their comfortable lives and help them blossom into indefatigables, drawing on the greatness that lies largely unchallenged within us all. For the rest of us though, Kokoda will become just one humbling week in our lifetimes: albeit our whole lifetimes lived in just one unforgettably humbling week.

Marion Frith
The Canberra Time

The most important feature of my web site is the flexibility it provides by allowing me to keep it up to date with my own humble PC from wherever I am. This is important because I am developing a pioneering product in ‘the land of the unexpected’ – flexibility and simplicity are the two most important features I require and I now have them both.

The success of the web site has had an unintended benefit for our guides and porters in PNG. They live in a subsistence economy with very little opportunity for employment. With increasing numbers of people wanting to trek Kokoda we have assisted them to establish their own trekking company, Kokoda Experience PNG, and we have developed budget ‘self-guided treks’ for them to lead. Our web site provides them with a marketing tool that will assist them in developing their own self-sustaining eco-trekking industry. As custodians of land so sacred to our heritage they deserve nothing less.

Charlie Lynn, Founder Adventure Kokoda

After consolidating this position as the leading direct debit company in the Fitness and Leisure industry, EZYPAY branched out to other industries. Today it provides services to such areas as Medical/Dental clinics, Veterinary Hospitals, Internet Service Providers, Childcare, Professional Associations, Charities and Photography Studios. They supply professional Services like Accountancy , Consultancy firms and Legal firms. Some of EZYPAY’s accounts include Video Ezy, Kumon Education Centres and the Australian Rugby Union’s World Cup 2003 ticketing services.

Initially, EZYPAY developed dial up client-side software to allow the client to use reporting tools and make alterations to customer payment schedules without needing to contact them by fax or post. While promising, several factors prohibited any major success, including the costs of deploying and supporting the client’s site, and the need to address multiple Operating Systems such as Macintosh and legacy versions of Microsoft systems.

Taking the business online

The obvious solution was a web application – independent of Operating Systems or hardware capabilities. The web was the perfect place to put EZYPAY’s systems in order to minimise support requirements and provide a powerful, yet flexible service – one that could be used by employees after hours, or by off-site managers who did not access the main systems in-house.

EZYPAY approached webqem in 2000 to develop a site capable of reporting on payment data at both a customer and business level, altering customer payment schedules and other details online, and exporting information for use in various systems. During the initial development, webqem assisted closely in identifying and implementing which features and technologies could benefit EZYPAY’s clients, without requiring more than a basic technical knowledge and simple browser interface.

Continuous Relationship

Rather than just development and handover, EZYPAY represents the classic client/webqem relationship.

From the beginning of the project life cycle webqem agreed to host the site, which started intentionally as a very simple and bandwidth friendly solution. With most users on legacy PC’s even then, and nearly all on dial up, small tight pages and reports with simple navigation were key elements of this site.

The initial release featured real time PDF generation for delivery of reports which we deployed on our own server infrastructure – not something that many hosting companies were prepared to do unless renting/owning a dedicated server at a very high cost. Our infrastructure allowed EZYPAY to deploy these features very cost effectively.

Subsequent to deployment we managed the ongoing tuning of the site, data flow management and growth related changes. Prior to launch EZYPAY had just a handful of users utilising the pre-web dial up system. Today, 5 years on, there are many regular users representing a very high percentage of EZYPAY clients.

With data volumes expanding in sync with the phenomenal growth of EZYPAY, this translated into their database soon surpassing many millions of records. webqem worked with EZYPAY in tuning the web site with new database technologies capable of managing the volume of data and the volume of requests, ultimately culminating in a managed database server dedicated to the EZYPAY web site. This has been expanded to also hold 100,000′s of monthly reports providing an online archive for clients to retrieve settlement and other accounting details.

Future plans include a range of industry-specific management tools, better online data entry for client sites, and greater connectivity between sites, leveraging off the recent explosion in broadband availability across Australia.

Want to know more about EZYPAY?

EZYPAY’s main benefits to business include (but are not limited to):

• reliable business cash flow
• improved customer retention
• reduced operational costs
• easier sales process
• increased margins
• professional image for business
• security of funds transfer via third party
• reliability of service via our highly automated systems with fail over capability.

EZYPAY’s contact details are available on their public web site: http://www.ezypay.com.au/v2/apply_online.htm.

The business opted to profile its services and products with a professional web site from its initial launch. Since then it has managed to reach markets as far away as the United Kingdom and the USA.

“webqem design and developed a web site that has allowed our business to be showcased professionally to a very broad market including local, national and international clients”, says Sarah Davison, company founder. “Consumers and businesses from anywhere can view the products online and opt to either order direct via the internet, or call to discuss finer details”.

One of the main challenges that has faced ‘Smell the Roses’ has been to establish regular clientele quickly, as it had not one existing customer when it opened its doors a year ago.

The feedback we have received regarding the web site look and user friendliness is a credit to webqem. We are delighted the site reflects the same quality and elegance our product portrays.”