Online is where the price is right

There’s a debate (maybe more of a campaign) raging in Australia right now about the impact of online shopping on local retailers. Buying your golf-clubs from Amazon avoids the universal ten per cent sales tax chargeable in this country as long as those clubs come in under a $1,000 price point.

Retailers and their spokespeople have been lining up to persuade TV news audiences of the inevitable catastrophe awaiting our economy unless we tax online imports equally to their stores. And their point would be a fair one if it wasn’t so disingenuous. That’s because the price difference between online and store bought goods in this country goes well beyond a mere ten per cent, and photographers feel this more keenly than most.

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Is this Google telling us what they really think?

I’m not sure how much of the following is conspiracy versus coincidence but you can take a look and decide for yourself.

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When David becomes Goliath

What a difference a decade makes for Apple. During the late nineties the computer company (that’s all they built back then) nearly went broke. But then came the iMac which changed the company’s fortunes, followed by the iPod, which changed the world.

For most of its thirty years in business Apple has held underdog status, a David in the context of a Microsoft Goliath. The Apple brand brought connotations of a fringe-dwelling cult and its followers were personal computer outcasts with just a two or three-percent market share. But you need to strain hard to remember those days now given what Apple has become: today it’s a globally dominant force in half a dozen markets.

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Photo-phobia and its unintended consequences

Pardon my focus on the Brits of late but they’ve been dealing with a couple of issues that we shouldn’t underestimate the possibility of facing here one day. The Orphan Works legislation may have only just been defeated, but an equally great threat might be just over the horizon.

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The good news is you still own your photographs

The UK Parliament has just rushed through its Digital Economy Bill which contained that contentious Orphan Works legislation you may remember, but the good news is campaigning British photographers have achieved a major win for us all.

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iPad for photographers – a justifiable business tool or not?

The iPad sounds like it caters more for the photography audience than photographers themselves but I’ll speculate that it will be quite useful to us nonetheless. We know that it’s not going to be a primary computer any time soon, and it’s a consumer oriented device for sure, but priced at well under a grand I think it’s easy enough to justify, especially when you consider a few of these possibilities.

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Orphan Works Bill is the copyright thief’s get out of jail free card

It appears increasingly likely that Britain will pass into law The Digital Economy Bill 2009-2010 which contains an “orphan works” provision similar to what the Americans faced last year.

Orphan works encompass photographs or other types of intellectual property where, for whatever reason, the original creator cannot be found. The Digital Economy Bill seeks to implement a mechanism whereby publications can go ahead and use them anyway without having received the necessary authority to do so from the copyright holder.

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Cyber security is more than just your PINs and your passwords

I expect that not many of you are being kept awake at night by fears of a cyber attack, but we should at least all be aware of the scope of the threats that exist to photographers on the internet, and that there are some pretty straightforward countermeasures available to us.

The online bits of any small business are susceptible to risks which are compounded by the fact most of us are not IT experts and therefore don’t even know what they are, let alone how we might defend ourselves against them.

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Canon moves to claim new web real estate

Canon has applied to the people who control such things for the right to use its own company name as a custom top-level domain.

The company announced it is talking with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) about the right to use the “.canon” domain type.

They’re the first to apply to do so (certainly the first to say so publicly) so there’s no telling how they might plan to use it. I am assuming it won’t be canon.canon, so maybe eos.canon or 1d.canon to provide product specific links?

Or are they just getting ahead of the domain squatters?

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