OzCableguy

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year from all of us at OzCableguy & OzTechnologies.com. Thankyou to all of our customers and suppliers for our continuing success.

The office will be officially closed from the close of business on Friday 21/12/07 to be back to work Wednesday 2/1/08 but we’ll still be processing and shipping all Internet orders received in that time (allowing for availability of couriers due to shut downs and public holidays etc) and keeping an eye on the emails. The phone will be on divert but if you have a hassle or query that isn’t answered in our FAQs please email us and we’ll take care of it asap.

2008 sees us with a new Labor government and the likelihood of a new FTTN (Fibre to the node) broadband network in the next year or two which should see some exciting new opportunities for cablers, techies, retailers and ISPs not to mention consumers. In the meantime 3G wireless broadband has really taken off with some strong competition between ISPs seeing some really awesome deals getting around at the moment along with a new batch of products to help share it on a network.

VoIP continues to develop and gain market share from PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) even amongst home users. I see wifi & cordless IP phones becoming increasingly popular both in and around homes and more user friendly products and technology hitting the market specifically aimed at this type of user.

HDTV is about to become very big news. Fingers crossed issues with EPGs (Electronic Program Guide) and copyright will continue to fall by the wayside. Sales of Microsoft Media Centre could have been much better in the early days if it wasn’t for Channel 9’s reluctance to make programming information freely available. (Hello? Can someone say “NineMSN”. Where’s the love?). Some clever people in the forums at XPMediaCentre.com.au were writing scraper applications that could lift the data from Nine’s website which led to a fun cat & mouse game for a while as Nine kept changing their site format to try to stay one step ahead. In the meantime IceTV wrote their own programming information for their subscription EPG service only to end up having to fight Nine in court. Thankfully IceTV won which is great news for the future of multimedia technology in Australia and Aussie owners and producers of media centres and digital recorders.
The battle continues but things are improving. On my Foxtel Cable service I can now see programming information for all Free To Air Channels except Seven.
A joint effort between Channel 7 and Engin will unleash a subscription based TiVo onto the market very soon. Perhaps Nine will produce something similar with Microsoft or maybe one of the Media Centres that companies like Netgear and D-Link produce which rumour tells me may include models with hard drives and TV Tuners very soon…

I think it’s going to be a very exciting year ahead!

Some of you may have noticed the OzCableguy site looks a little different, but at the same time a little familiar… The changes aren’t just skin deep either. You’ll possibly notice this new blog first of all but the biggest change is the new Router Review Data Base . Now if you know the name of the product you’re looking for or something to describe it you can just punch it into the open search box. Next down the page you can search by manufacturer, or right down the bottom you can select all of the features you might want and get a list of products to match.

With each product now you can also add your own comments and rating, but bear in mind I still have control and I may edit (mainly to correct grammar or bad spelling)  or remove it completely if it appears to be unnecessarily derogatory or nonsensical.

A lot of the new design there was to simplify the process of adding new products for me too. It used to be extremely time consuming and because of that I’d started to fall way behind, particularly this last year. At the moment I’ve caught up a bit but still have about 30 more to add, particularly for poor old Netcomm who I’ve let fall way behind over the last few years.

Also now you may notice a few ads around the place. Yep, I’m a sellout.  Retail has been less than fantastic this year so I’ll see if I can draw a bit of revenue from advertising to bolster it up. A lot of people have been telling me I’ve been mad not to have done it up until this point so we’ll see how it goes. I don’t think the google ads and the odd manufacturer banner really takes too much away from the site anyway.

You might also notice the strong resemblance now to my retail site at OzTechnologies.com. This may change a little once one of my designer mates has a go at it but the resemblance in the meantime is quite deliberate. I wanted to tie the two sites closer together so people would know they were both mine. If I had a dollar for everytime someone said “Oh, if I had have known that was your site I would have bought it from you” or “all this time I’ve been coming here and I didn’t realise you were the ozcableguy” I wouldn’t need the google ads…
For a while I was going to merge the two sites under the OzCableguy name for the sake of better brand recognition if nothing else. “Oztechnologies” has turned out to be a very generic name. There’s at least 50 registered Aussie businesses with similar sounding names and at least two competitors advertising in the same arenas with similar names. eg spelling “Oz” as “Aus” and “technology” as just “tech” etc. I’ve had wackers ringing up about products they think they’ve bought from “our franchise down south” and that kind of nonsense. (There is no franchise. Just the one shop in Brisbane shipping nation wide). But keeping the two sites separate has more merit than just the nightmare of changing bank accounts, merchant accounts, distributor accounts, stationery and so on. I intend to continue not to be biased by what I may or may not make money out of and also to keep the libelous tossers away from my house and that sort of thing. (I do my best to provide accurate information but I can’t guarantee that I won’t get it wrong from time to time or have my intentions misunderstood.)

The kids are a little older and I’m getting a bit more sleep these days so my enthusiasm is starting to come back so the plan now is to get back to writing about stuff again and doing a lot more reviews. And not just routers either. Under the Broadband banner there’s so many products now with many converging technologies, particularly in the VoIP and multimedia areas. There’s always something juicy in the pipeline.

Special thanks to Jason from ShutUp.com.au for his sheer brilliance and countless hours of help getting the backend working how I wanted it
Also thanks to Graham from Perfect Host for his original design and to Simon from Whirlpool for supporting the OzCableguy site all of these years.

If you spot a bug or anything incorrect please email me and let me know.