For anyone who is fed up with sending another person to do the groceries, only to have them return with rubbish, or knowing the cost of an item before you leave the home, for budget purposes, this app is for you.

The free app Scan2List, by Australian team Tim Stanford and Kate Cass, allows the person to scan items from their pantry, or enter the items manually, before leaving the house.  There are over 150,000 items in the list!

It also allows people to scan the codes of products that they liked, not just those they have now, and check it out when they reached the supermarket.

For more information, check out the full article on www.stuff.co.nz.

With signs of recovery from the global financial crisis, NZ’s top 5 banks have shown collective profits of $2.7 billion in the last financial year.

The report, by PwC, on ANZ National, ASB, BNZ, Westpac and Kiwibank ‘wipes out’ the the $76 million loss made by the banks during the GFC.

“The majors’ full-year results reinforce their financial strength and the profitability of New Zealand’s banking system and confirms the ills of 2009 are well and truly laid to rest,” predicts Sam Shuttleworth, financial services partner.

The full article on stuff.co.nz is available here.

OPMC Client www.thecrewlist.com has just reached the milestone of 700 members.

Congratulations to their team, and if you haven’t visited their website check it out now!

I purchased the Palm Treo 750 PDA earlier in the year. I recommend that you don’t purchase it.

This phone really is useless. Amongst other things, it is especially bad if you have a data plan connected to your phone. The amount of data use my phone has been getting since purchasing it has gone as follows:

Month 1: 200MB
Month 2: 330MB
Month 3: 590MB
Month 4: 330MB (this is the first 10 days of the plan for the month)

And this is with no difference in usage. No difference. In fact I was using mobile internet in month 1, after that I have rarely used it.

After calling Vodafone after the first 10 days to query my last account ($500 in excess data usage, including a $92 per day 6 day Trans Tasman business trip), I have disabled the e-mail account for my phone.

This phone is the perfect example of technology going wrong. In order to -potentially- resolve this problem I have to upgrade the phone to Windows Mobile 6. This involves a complicated process, which deletes all data on the phone.

I think this is a typical example of the poor way in which Microsoft software operates. Once something goes wrong it’s difficult to fix without installing a new version of the software. Even then, who knows whether it’s reliable.

Compare that to an upgrade for an operating system such as Apple’s Mac OS X. It keeps all your data, and you don’t have to worry about it mucking anything up.

Needless to say, I will be holding off using mobile internet again until Apple brings the 3G Apple iPhone downunder.

Don’t throw your money away on this phone, it’s terrible.

We’ve had a lot of questions from new and existing customers recently about web strategy, particularly about Google and getting higher up the search results.

Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO) forms a big part of web strategy. It is a collection of methods we use to optimise your website for the search engines – with the intended consequence being that they will find your website better, and like your site better, and establish a “virtual relationship” with your site which gives you preferential treatment which you can’t just buy from them.

SEO is one of the technical sides of web strategy, it is a bit of a science and is designed to help contribute towards achieving your business goals. One of the main intentions is to increase the numbers of visitors to your website.

Why do I need more visitors to my website?

Why you need more visitors is really about a numbers game. The more people you have visiting your website, the more interest is generated online about your website, the more activity is on your website, and other parts of the internet pick up on that in various ways and this helps to push up your ranking.

When you go to a restaurant, do you go to the restaurant that is reasonably full, or the one next door serving the same food but virtually empty with a grumpy looking waitperson staring out the window?

Just like that restaurant activity leads to more new business, so too does your web strategy need to be designed to lead to more business for you. And this can be especially true whether you have 5 visits per day to your website, or 5,000.