MELBOURNE-BASED Ruslan Kogan, the founder of the Australian-based consumer electronics company Kogan Technologies, is branching out to the US market and says his buying power will increase by over 1000 per cent in doing so.

At a press briefing last week Mr Kogan showed off some of his latest products and announced that he was ready to open a warehouse in the US State of Kentucky.

There’s some good news for his Australian customers too, he says.

Analysis done by Kogan Technologies in regards to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) indicates that any search term in Australia like LCD TV or Blu-ray, for example, the US are searching 25 per cent more.

“As soon as we go to the UK our US and Aussie customers will benefit,” he said.

One issue Kogan will face with getting into the US market is getting his SEO and branding right.

As Kogan doesn’t own the domain name Kogan.com it’s likely he’s going to have to purchase it from its owner Tucows Inc, an internet services company.

However, Tucows owned the domain name ten years prior to Kogan and have refused to hand it over even though Kogan says they are breaching his trademark.

“Our lawyers are onto it,” he said. “It was secured ten years before we came into the marketplace and we’ve had some interesting conversations with them recently because they are actually passing off on the Kogan trademark,” he added. “If you go to Kogan.com they’re advertising LCD TVs, GPS’s and Digital photo frames.”

Kogan remains confident in getting the domain name.

“We’re trying, but we’ll get there,” he said

The young entrepreneur has been undercutting the Australian market for quite some time now and says he can do it by taking out the middleman.

“The fact that containers (are) direct to here, straight to customers, none of the overheads the other companies have (and) an efficient business model, a paperless office, things like that,” are all things Mr Kogan says are the reasons he can keep his prices lower than other big name brands.

Kogan will do anything in his power to keep prices at bare minimum, including the removal of paper manuals from products.

“Sony will spend $2 printing each one of their manuals,” he said. “You’re probably not even going to read it.”

“We’ll put it online.”

When asked why he chose Kentucky he said it was mathematically the right choice.

“There’s been a lot of maths done and that’s the central point…because it’s cheaper to distribute to the rest of America.”

When commenting on his launch in America he said it was much more easier than launching in Australia because of “stupid” Australian Government standards.

“Launching into America is even easier than Australia because our government was stupid enough to select a digital TV standard that none of the world uses,” he added.

“Our TVs are more expensive to manufacture already because the manufacturing process can only be used for Australia.”

The launch of the US warehouse will also see the launch of his pro-range of LCD TVs.

“The ones with (a) built-in DVD player, USB drive and SD card,” Kogan said.

Kogan re-affirmed that once he secures the US market it’ll have a great impact on Australian prices.

“When our buying power grows to that magnitude, our Aussie customers are going to benefit because that is going to drop our prices.”

• BarCamp Sydney this Saturday June 27th (tomorrow).
• Listen to an interview from the last Sydney BarCamp.
• Register.
• Directions.

Tomorrow is Saturday June 27th and it’s time for another Sydney BarCamp to be held at the Australian Technology Park in Redfern, Sydney.

So what’s a BarCamp?

“BarCamp is an intense community event with discussions, demos and interaction from attendees,” It’s community members say.

“Anyone with something to contribute or with the desire to learn is welcome and invited to participate.”

Usual discussions at the event:

The usual discussions at the event include:

• Comparing startups in San Fransisco to Australia and whether startups should accept funding;
• Coding and hacking;
• The latest internet technology; and
• The most randomness thing you won’t even think will be talked about.

Almost 200 people have registered for the latest Sydney BarCamp, with previous ones seeing more than 100 people show up; sponsors even put in some money for food and drink.

“There’s something for everyone,” said un-organiser Jean-Jacques Halans at the last one.

“The things we talk about here touch on everyone’s life; everyone uses the internet”

Image Credit: Jean-Jacques Halans

From the media release:

Windows 7 Upgrade Option
Customers who purchase a new Windows Home Premium, Business or Ultimate PC from today (26 June 2009) will be able to upgrade to Windows 7 for little or no cost when it launches on 22 October this year. This means that consumers can purchase and use a new Windows PC now, while being assured they are investing in the latest technology.

The Windows 7 Upgrade Option will run until 31 January 2010, and people can redeem the offer until the end of February 2010.

In addition, from now until the end of the financial year (30 June 2009) eligible Australian families can take advantage of the Education Tax Refund (ETR) on offer from the Australian Federal Government. The ETR allows eligible parents of school-age children to claim up to 50 percent back on expenses related to their kids’ education, including Windows PCs.

This incentive, combined with Microsoft’s Windows 7 Upgrade Option, makes for a very attractive opportunity for eligible Australian families who have a window of opportunity from 26-30 June 2009 to take advantage of both offers by buying a Windows PC with a guaranteed upgrade to Windows 7 and getting up to 50% of the cost back from the Federal Government through the ETR.

Consumers can check if the Windows PC they are purchasing is part of the Windows 7 Upgrade Option by:
1.       Checking in-store stickers on the PC they are looking to purchase
2.       Visiting the Microsoft website www.windows.com/upgradeoffer
3.       Asking in-store if the PC they’re buying is eligible for the Windows 7 Upgrade

For more information on Microsoft’s Windows 7 Upgrade Option go to:
http://www.windows.com/upgradeoffer

For more information on the Australian Government’s Education Tax Refund go to:
http://www.educationtaxrefund.gov.au/home/

Checkout http://www.staysmartonline.gov.au/ for more info or watch the video below.

IN HOPE of predicting and informing the severeness and scale of flu virus’ similar to the Swine Flu, Google announced yesterday an Australian version of Google Flu Trends in conjunction with health authorities’ data.

The Australian and New Zealand release follows the launch of the service Google have already deployed in Mexico and the United States.

Heath Kelly, the head of the Epidemiology Unit at the Victorian Infectious Diseases Reference Laboratory (VIDRL) told Tech Wired that he believed the data revealed that the current Australian flu season appeared similar to previous years when compared with Google’s results.

“It appears as though the Swine Flu is no greater than any other flu season from previous years,” he said.

“It may be able to put out the swine flu hype.”

Mr Kelly also said that multiple sources of information gathered would help provide better understanding of the flu virus, and that Google Flu Trends provided one aspect of value that could identify trends in influenza activity.

“Having additional sources of data will be even more important than usual in the current influenza season, with the circulation of novel influenza A (H1N1), commonly known as swine flu, already established in Victoria,” he said.

“It’s providing interesting data because our surveillance says there is a high rise in the flu.”

With the help of the VIDRL, Google Australia hopes to inform the general public and authorities of any threats in an outbreak of the influenza virus.

The search giant found, by analysing certain anonymous search terms, that queries related to the flu tended to be very common during the flu season each year, as you’d expect.

“Upon building this model, we found that our historical Google search data correlated well with the VIDRL’s historical data in terms of flu activity in past years,” Google said in a statement.

“As the season unfolds this year, we’ll be watching to see how well our flu model performs compared with these existing surveillance systems.”

Google’s Flu Trend tracker has already shown how powerful its aggregated results can be when it predicted the Swine Flu outbreak in Mexico; but it was all too late.

It was only after inquiries were made to Google by public health officials until it lead them to create an experimental graph that showed an increase in flu-related search terms just before the Swine Flu spread.

By using its Geolocation knowledge, Google can then pinpoint locations in terms of which state those search queries were made from and display them on a map. This can then allow authorities to pinpoint locations for quarantine of future outbreaks.

The VIDRL’s Heath Kelly said he would be watching Google’s Flu Trend tracker to “…keep a keen eye on”.

The Australian version of the website is available at:

http://www.google.org/flutrends/intl/en_au/

IN A WORLD where you could stay a fan boy of a brand such as Apple for life, could you live without your preferred laptop, phone and entertainment system for a week?

Crazy man Anthony Agius, aka @Decryption and co-founder of MacTalk.com.au, is embarking on a 5-day week without Apple to see if he can cope.

“For a full working week, beginning as of 12:01am Monday the 1st of June, I will abandon my Apple products, casting them to the fortress that is my mother’s house,” he said

Can he do it?

Anthony will be giving up the following items:

• 15″ MacBook Pro (Early 2008) – 2.4Ghz CPU, 4GB RAM, 200GB 7200RPM HDD
• 16GB iPhone 3G
• AirPort Express
• AppleTV 40GB

To replace these items he will use:

• HP Pavilion dv6-1143tx – 2.4Ghz CPU, 4GB RAM, 500GB 5400RPM HDD
• RIM Blackberry Bold
• Linksys WRT610N
• TiVo

If he doesn’t co crazy, Anthony hopes to document his day by day journey of equivalent products @ http://www.mactalk.com.au/tag/noapple/

If an apple a day keeps the doctor away then I think Anthony is going to be at the doctor every day this week.

IN A FIGHT to compete with the global search engine market Microsoft announced their new replacement for Windows Live Search this week.

Launching locally next Wednesday, and previewed by nineMSN on Friday, partnered companies Microsoft and nineMSN (PBL media) unveiled their new search engine Bing.com.au.

The product, of which the companies say has been two years in the making, is consider a brand change by many and more of an upgrade to what Windows Live Search currently offers.

Launching in beta to begin with it will see the launch of a bunch of new features that won’t be available locally straight away.

Hot Spots, Categorised Search and Vertical Search Categories covering local travel, health and shopping are some of the features we won’t be seeing on Wednesday.

However, Instant answers, Best match, Hover preview, Rich image search and Video thumbnail preview are some of the new innovative features we will see on launch.

When asked how long it would take for nineMSN to get its localisation team into gear, they said they’d announce something in the next month, suggesting one had not been formed.

Once such a team is initiated on its task to make the search engine more localised, the team would then take “six to 12 to 18 months” to roll out the localised features.

The two localised features that stood out from the rest, Bing cash back and a flight information tool, are features Google will no doubt look at implementing.

Driving Traffic

The companies hope to use mainstream television programs on the nine network to drive traffic to their online portal, such as using end credits and “editorial cues” that will suggest to viewers to head on over to Bing with a certain search term.

According to nineMSN director of MSN products, Alex Parsons, the Australian search engine market is worth around $800 million, and is set to become “the new rivers of gold” online. Whether it be 1 percentage point at a time, the two companies hope to grab a piece of that $800 million dollar pie.

NineMSN said that Google currently owns 90 percent of the global market, but locally nineMSN has a strong hold of it, with about 70 percent of Australian active internet users touching the nineMSN portal at least once a month.

A missed opportunity?

Initial impressions of the search engine indicate nineMSN are after more page views than anything.

By adding features that will keep users within their portal such as Bing cash back, a price comparison tool, and a flight information tool that can predict and show previous pricing of flights to certain destinations, there are quite a good number of features that could lead for a switch from Google if they don’t adopt some of the features Bing has.

One advantage nineMSN has over any other search engine is the fact they’re the default home page for Windows Internet Explorer users ‘out of the box’.

Embracing new features like a background picture that changes daily is something I think a lot of tech-savvy users are not going to be interested in. The brilliance behind Google is its ability for it to be simple, fast and relevant to use. On the other hand you have users like my mother and grandmother who don’t care about Google and love the fact nineMSN has news inbuilt into its portal as well as search.

The name

Bing… to bing…do you bing? These are some of the questions the marketing team would’ve been asked to try out on the public. A name is important. If the product is good then it really should not matter… or should it? Can you imagine nine network presenters telling you to Bing a certain product or telling us to “head on over to bing” to search for the latest video of karl stefanovic drunk? I just can’t imagine it. Only time will tell.

Tech Wired writer Ben Grubb was flown to Sydney for the launch of Bing.com.au

Claire Werbeloff, the 19-year-old that had her 15 minutes of fame extended by fabricating an eyewitness account of a shooting in Sydney’s Kings Cross, generated over 40,000 conversations online, to which the ad industry estimates is worth almost $200,000 in equivalent advertising dollars in social media.

A service that has been tracking conversations about Claire Werbeloff, BuzzNumbers, is suggesting that 41% of the 41,186 online conversations about Claire took place in social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter, whilst a further 27% of conversations occurred on blogs and forums, and 12% on News sites.

The CEO of BuzzNumbers, Nick Holmes à Court, said that he was impressed by the amount of conversation Clare had generated.

“It’s been great to track the spread of conversations online about Claire over the last week,” he said

” She is this year’s Corey Worthington,”

BuzzNumbers attributes the top five Influential destinations online that contained conversations or mentioned Claire Weberloff to:

1. Facebook.com
2. Twitter.com
3. NineMSN.com.au
4. News.com.au
5. InTheMix.com.au

“It just shows how powerful a medium the social web is, particularly the amount of revenue it can generate for an individual or company through exposure.”

Do you think Claire deserved the publicity she received?

A NEW website claiming to save you dollars at the online checkout is attempting to break into the Australian market.

Tjoos.com.au, the seccond stage of an Australian-based US-driven start-up, is claiming to save you dollars online.

The site, already a success in in the states, has this month decided to break into the Australian coupon marketplace.

Tjoos founders, Bart Jellema and Kim Chen, were apparently frustrated with the online shopping experience they were receiving in Australia.

The two then decided they would extend their already successful Tjoos.com website to Australians.

When speaking with co-founder Bart Jelemma earlier this year, he told Tech Wired that the US market was where it was at.

“It’s very big in the US, not so big in Australia,” Jelemma told Tech Wired.

Three months on and he’s taken a different view; he’s decided to test the waters in Australia.

The Australian version of the website currently hosts 1600 coupons including 50 exclusive to Tjoos.

The Tjoos team are also working on a price comparison engine they hope to launch later this year.

“Ever since I started on Tjoos, I’ve been amazed at the lack of quality and objectivity in price comparison sites,” Bart said

“…we are planning to do the same thing as we did with coupons, create an advertisement free, high quality, simple to use site for price comparison.”

The Tjoos start-up began when Bart and Kim lived in the Netherlands in Bart’s parents attic for 3 months.

The two then moved to Australia where they bootstraped their start-up.

Starting originally as a Podcast, Tech Wired has now existed since the 30th of September 2007.

Since existing it has merged into more of an investigative blog that now endeavors to cover whatever raises the interests of its publisher, Ben Grubb.

It’s been a mix between items that interest him in the journalism world, to very topical issues such as mandatory internet filtering.

According to Google Analytics there are a fair few people who stop by to read the things that are written (around 15,000 unique browsers last month).

In terms of RSS subscription it varies due to the Podcast and news feed using the same RSS, but from the latest Podcast download there are around 500 listening to the ramblings of Ben and other contributors.

Along the way Ben scored a couple of freelance gigs. He is now working with News Digital Media (news.com.au) and iTnews (itnews.com.au), where he now covers Australian consumer tech and IT news for those in the ICT industry.

This now leaves Tech Wired on the back burner, covering stories Ben knows won’t suit the mainstream.

With that out of the way, where do you think Tech Wired should head?