100 seems our lucky number this month. We’ve been named 51 in the top 100 Smart Companies of Australia, as named by business mag Anthill, and just cracked the top 100 Australian Web startups as named by Technation, coming in at 84.

The Technation rank comes from web stats compiled by Alexa, Compete, Quantcast and Hitwise. I wasn’t sure we’d get into the Technation top 100, because we’re really only generating traffic out of a single suburb in Melbourne. If we get some press (eg from Anthill) we get traffic from all over (which may have caused us to pop up this month), but otherwise we’re a little different from other web startups in that we’re ‘hyper-local’. If you’re not renting discs in Fairfield, we ain’t much use to you!

What interests me is seeing our Hitwise score (which is not published publicly). This is purely Aussie traffic and more relevant to us, and reorded by Hitwise we slide up to #53. Nice one Fairfield people! Of interest in our Alexa stats, it says we get on average 7.1 minutes per day spent by people on our site. That’s great. By comparison, Bigpondmovies gets 3.4 mins/day, Quickflix 4.3 mins/day, Redbubble 5.5 mins/day, so to trump us we need to go to the mighty Facebook for 25.4 mins/day.

It’ll all change tomorrow of course …

Wow .. this is big news. According to this ABC report, the receivers have been called into manage EzyDVD.

EzyDVD are one of our biggest online DVD retailers and have been operating for 9 years (since 1999). As well as their online operation, they have 26 company-owned bricks and mortar outlets, with another 36 franchised.

I guess it shows you how brutal the retail world is when dealing with commodity products like DVDs. There’s just not a lot of margin in it. Being online doesn’t insulate you from operational and distribution costs, rather it just shifts them from a high-street presence to a back-block warehouse. And when you move off the high street, although your online reach is in theory vast, visibility goes down and you’ll be lucky to match the throughput of a well established bricks and mortar footprint. The essence of it, if you believe Gerry Harvey, is that local retail is king. Online retail is a sideshow.

The ABC report a retail downturn has squeezed EzyDVD, which combined with existing debt and recent operating losses has pushed them over the edge. As Tim Pethick pointed out a while back, if you haven’t innovated before the market turns, watch out.

Perhaps EzyDVD’s woes are management based .. I thought their move into VOD (with ezydownload) was ill-conceived and their attempt at bringing retail to local video stores was completely ignored by all rental groups. Costly initiatives, whilst their core retail platform, their website, sat unchanged for way too long and remained completely un-integrated with their 62 bricks and mortar outlets. Perhaps it’s an issue of don’t forget your core focus.

In any case, commiseration to Jim Zavos and the EzyDVD team, it must be horrible to see your baby slip into receivership.

Update
Ouch! Apparently ezyDVD was $18 million in debt.

Everyone’s going online! Sanity has just launched loadit.com.au. This is a purchase and music subscription service. Gizmodo is pretty scathing as the service is chock full of Windows DRM that puts it at odds with recent movement to go DRM free. And they of course don’t support the iPod. Who was the genius behind that strategy? Perhaps Microsoft paid for it all :-).

Launched today, iTunes now sells and rents movies online! Just 2 months ago I bought an ep of Lost on iTunes for the helluv it.

So ‘There Will Be Blood’ for $25. Is a $5 saving worth it over a $30 DVD? No slick, store it on your hard drive, less than DVD quality? The big news is rentals! You can’t rent TWBB but you can rent 27 Dresses for $5.99 for apparently 2 nights. We’re still doing it for $5.50 .. so that’s pretty competitive! Except you need to buy the apple TV for $329 to watch it from your lounge room, and lets not forget we do it for $2 on tuesday or $3.33 if you rent 3 of our latest releases in our 3 for $10 deal :-). But hey - it’s launched and it’s the first online rental service in Australia I’d give a shot. This is really going to test Ezy DVD’s download service, ezydownload.com.au.

As for the offline rental world .. yep it’s clearly another competitor and another downward pressure that all rental stores will feel. Your old school video store is starting to feel a bit creaky me thinks. Barn-like spaces, movies buried somewhere in 50 metres of shelving, no easy search .. there’s gotta be a better way.

Got waaay too much business doco to churn out at the moment to be watching TV or flaffing about checking out download services. But just picked this up via Macrumours: TV shows are now available on ITunes AU. So I had to give it a go.

I went to download Lost, Season 4 Ep1. $2.99 for the single ep, or $41.86 for the season. This is interesting because:

1. Lost Season 4 isn’t yet available via retail DVD here yet
2. Prices seem reasonable. Lost Season 3 costs $68.77 on iTunes but $90 at ezydvd! The retail DVD comes packed with plenty of special features and extras, but that ain’t worth $20 in my books.

So ep1 (@43 minutes long) weighed in at 500 MB and took about 10 minutes to download. For the complete Season 4 of 14 episodes that’s a mighty 7 gig to download. Try Season 3 at 23 episodes and that’s 11.5 gig. On my home optus cable limit of 12 gig, season 3 of Lost would wipe me out. Downloading at off-peak rates (midnight - midday which gives me 24 gig allowance) is better, but the season download will still grab half.

At this download size the resolution is near-DVD quality. In a purely empirical test the ‘actual’ playback window on a DVD is bigger than the Lost window .. hence Lost runs at a lower resolution. Of course when you put it next to some hi-def content (eg http://www.apple.com/trailers/disney/walle/hd/) you immediately see how aged SD (Standard Definition) really is. HD resolution is stunning. When you upgrade to a flat panel you’d be crazy not to grab a Blu-ray player. HD will blow out that Lost Ep from 500 Mb to 3Gig (1min playback =11Mb to 1min=70Mb at 1080p) and the full season to 70 Gig. Yikes!!

I need Apple TV. My association with TV and movies is chill-time, and I’ve got thousands of dollars tied up in couches, coffee table, TV, DVD player and lighting to create a space that makes watching the box pleasurable. So like FTTN, until the last leg of delivery of video to my lounge room and TV is sorted, downloads just won’t grab for me. Apple TV could change this .. especially when rentals become available.

That last leg of delivery is crucial for the emergence of VOD and the downloads business .. let’s see where it goes ..

Ross Dawson has been busy compiling 100 web 2.0 applications around Oz for Business Review Weekly. It’s a pretty good question, ‘are there actually 100 web2 apps downunder?‘, well here they all are:

Inside Retailing reports that Australian retailers are losing out on e-tail sales. It’s mentioned this isn’t an issue of broadband adoption, rather the lack of vision traditional bricks and mortar retailers have in tackling the online space.

Yes! Couldn’t agree more. There’s very few bricks and mortar retailers that mix it in the online space, even though it’s an area of future growth. Think of good ‘ol Video Ezy, with it’s 500 odd stores in Australia .. with a buying group servicing a few million customers, why not go online and add retail to their operation? Why can’t I search the Borders catalogue over the web and work out which store has the book I want (I’m happy to pickup)? Why is it only Domino’s that lets me order a pizza online?

Granted, developing an online strategy isn’t cheap. And whilst I know people that love Coles online, their site is incredibly ugly. So if Coles with their budget can’t create something engaging, what hope do the rest of us have?

Well .. APPLEBOX shows what CAN be done with minimal resources and a compelling vision. So here’s to innovation. Look in the nooks and crannies and it’s to be found. Small is the new Big as Seth would say.

The Startups carnival has finished with Scouta taking the line honours. Second went to GoodBarry and third to SuburbView. Well done to all three, and Vishal of course for putting the whole show on.

Interesting though is the complete lack of discussion around all these different businesses. 31 different startups, and I’ve counted a total of 16 comments. Thats pretty poor. I’m no better than anyone else, because I haven’t added to the discussion either (although I did post but it somehow got lost between the captcha, preview and final ok). Not sure why this is (although I’ve never liked blogger for commenting). Is it that we are just antisocial in the Aussie startup space?

Of the top 3, gotta say I really like GoodBarry. The site looks great and I like the business model. If I ever advise a small business in getting online, I’ll be looking more closely at GoodBarry. Scouta looks to have potential, but I can’t get into it because I don’t get into recommendation engines. I’ve never found one that works for me. My feedreeder is chocka with hand picked feeds and I don’t get time to read them all anyway. Finding more content would leave me never doing any work (but I’ll keep tabs on Recommendation Ventures to see how they go). I like SuburbView for it’s simplicity, but agree with the judges in that it needs a tart up.

All in all though, good to see startup activity and people following a vision. I would like to have seen a submission from RebBubble because they look like they’re taking off.

As I mentioned in my last post, Vishal Sharma is running a startups carnival that I was unfortunately late to register for. However Vishal has kindly profiled APPLEBOX as a surprise late entrant, even though we aren’t eligible for judging. You can read our profile here. It will give you some background on our wee little startup and is worth a read. Thanks Vishal!

Being a startup ourselves, it’s great to read about other Australian startups, what they’re up to and how they started. A while back Chris Saad began writing for blognation with an agenda to profile emerging ozzie tech ventures .. but the whole blognation network imploded and that was that.

So it was great to come across Vishal Sharma who looks to have initiated his own coverage of a number of startups. He’s organised this into a 2 week carnival, and roused together some judges (Duncan Reilly, Justin Davies and Ross Dawson) to make comment and pick the top three ventures.

Unfortunately I was too late to the party, so APPLEBOX probably won’t be seen, but if you’re interested it’s worth checking out. Those profiled so far are Scouta, Evaluator, Tinker, Suburb View, Plugger, Smartpath, Global Surfari and Invoice Place - and there’s still a heap to go.