Mayhem in Melbourne today, walls falling over, people getting killed, dust storms in Geelong… and locally we had trees down. There was one tree in particular that created havoc in Fairfield today, it fell down took out the power lines and fell on a brand new Porsche! The owner was seen to be weeping!

Not to mention the fact that suddenly the store had no computers, no internet, no cash register, no eftpos, no lights . What do we do? Because the whole system operates from a remote server that is not susceptible to power failures and the like (they have big fat generators and UPS’s) we could keep on renting.

Simon was tech support for me and my able assistant Patrick ringing in bookings, and operating the check in and out system via phone. One of our customers decided without power at home he may as well stay at the shop and we work shopped a bit of business development together… thanks Daniel! I then provided tech support from home for Simon at the shift change. Who’d have thought ME… TECH SUPPORT!!! We could operate the store from the Bahamas if we wanted…. now there’s an idea!

The only down side of course was it was harder to find a movie in store, although with the latest release cases on display in the windows and many more stacked around the place, not a lot harder than a normal store… we are all just a bit spoilt now and have forgotten the old ways!! suggestions from behind the counter are part of our normal service so things were not really that different.

Simon brought the ol’ Earth Hour candles back out, I had settled in on the lounge to provide tech support for the night and the power came back on. Luckily it wasn’t the 2 day outage as rumored by staff at the Bean Counter.. poor Beanie couldn’t make coffee:(

In January I wrote that Tim Pethick was spearheading ?What If!’s Australian arm of their innovation business. But I read from Smart Company here, that it’s all over! It seems the Aussie arm was really only a professional services division that just wasn’t profitable. Pity ?What If!’s (and I’m already tired of typing the ? and !) Ventures angle didn’t come into play. We have bucket loads of startups that could use some capital injection. Grass roots I say! Forget about big business, they’re just too slow to move. In fact, I’ve got this idea for a niche social network underpinned by a revenue earning store concept to create a unique social/retail model that could bring flixster/filmcrave/iheartmovies to Australia. Anyone interested?