GazWebTech – Garry Hamilton-Smith

Part of the Online Retailer Conference is the ORIA Awards.

In only April of this year, Ecommerce Apparel Pty Limited (part of the Gazal group) launched a new web site called The Mens Shop. http://www.themensshsop.com/

It was great news that just after 3 months of trading, we made the finalist in the awards for “Best New Online Retailer” along with 5 others including The Iconic and Harvey Norman.

I guess it is pretty hard to compete with the likes of The Iconic knowing the budget they have and are spending as a new online retailer. The award on the night was taken out by The Iconic, but I would like to think TheMensShop.com.au came in a close second.

Maybe next year will be our year.

It was a good night out and all the best to SurfStitch who took out 2 awards and the overall award of “Online Retailer of the Year”.

See you next year, where hopefully we will have a winner.

All,

Just attended the iMedia Summit in the Hunter Valley (May 2012) and can say when they phoned me in December 2011 and invited me, I had no idea how this would turn out.

But good news, it was a great 2+ days with loads of networking between both providers and other retailers.

Can say will probably take up and use the services of one or two service providers that I meet at the Summit.

Great work to Mark and James at iMedia. Will be there next time around…

Thanks for the invite.

All,

Well I can report, that the Percona MySQL Conference held at the Hyatt in Santa Clara CA USA from April 10 was just as good if not better then the O’Reilly version.

What would have helped is that is has been two years since attending the 2010 O’Reilly MySQL Conference and so much has changed.

To start, the Maakit toolset has been taken over by Percona and rewritten and branded as the Percona Toolkit. If you are not using the Percona Toolkit, I suggest you read up on them and use them.

Next, Monty and the MariaDB team are just going great guns, with the GA release of MariaDB 5.3.6 and MariaDB 5.5 which is some areas out performs the Oracle version and google patches.

Can say, I now run MariaDB and love it.

Heaps of other tools from MySQL Sandbox and others.

If you have not yet attended the MySQL Conference and you are actively involved in decisions around it or you administer or use it, get yourself along to a conference next time around.

A great trip, long days, and loads of new tools.

See you again soon…

All,

Off to the Percona MySQL 0212 Conference tomorrow flying United direct to San Francisco.

The conference is being held at the Hyatt in Santa Clara, CA, USA.

Also have lined up a few meetings, so looking forward to it all. Have a few goals set, and looking to see where Drizzle is at and who is now using it in a production environment.

Anyone that is there and wants to catch up, just give me a bell or drop me an email.

All,

Just writing to advise you all about our latest creation.

http://www.themensshop.com.au/

A new online menswear store covering most top brands from Calvin Klein, Pierre Cardin to Van Heusen and Ben Sherman.

For news in the media, checkout http://www.powerretail.com.au/news/the-mens-shop/

And don’t forget to get $20 off your first order by subscribing to the newsletter.

All,

Some exciting news, last monday we launched a new B2C website for brand Nancy Ganz.

If you get a few moments, please check it out at http://www.nancyganz.com.au/

Also, to help spread the word, if you like what you see please click on one of the Facebook like buttons or send it to your friends.

At this point this brand only ships to Australian Addresses.

Any comments, please send to me via Twiiter at @gazwebtech

This is the first fully integrated B2C site (with ERP and WMS systems) we have launched on our in house platform.

More phases to come at a later date.

Enjoy !

Visit: http://www.nancyganz.com.au/

All,

Just an update that I would like to share around the traps.

Recently added the Kampyle (http://www.kampyle.com) feedback icons and functionality to one of the Gazal Apparel websites (Bisley Workwear). The Bisley Workwear B2B website was relaunched with new platform last September and since than has had a few changes making it easier and providing more functionality to our customers.

So the results from the customer feedback that we received was not to put it lightly, was “fantastic”.  On a score out of 5, over a 1 month period we received a score of 4.9 from our online customers.

For anyone looking at the Bisley Workwear (http://www.bisleyworkwear.com.au) site, they may think oh its not so pretty, but login and you will be amazed at what it offers our clients. Look under the bonnet and you will find page load speeds with sub-second performance, and yslow and google page speed scoring very high “A Grade”.

A true success story.

Looking for to more enhancements and more sites coming soon…

Hi all,

Well the Web 2.0 Conference / Expo in San Francisco for 2011 has come and gone.

Overall it was a very good conference, as over the whole conference I think I only walked out of about 4 sessions as they were below par. But overall in general a lot of good sessions where information was shared with the community.

So would I go again to the Web 2.0, yes I would.

Although, I did have a bone to pick with the organisers (O’Reilly) as they offered tickets for $99 on Groupon just a week before the Conference. Although these were called “Lite” tickets, they still allowed people in (and lots of them) to certain sessions. And I do remember more than once I ended up sitting on the floor at the very back of the room even after paying top dollar being the complete conference price for my tickets. Surely for $1200 USD I could get a seat guys ?

But apart from that, it was pretty good, with some night sessions put on by different companies.

For my next conference I may look at oscon in Portland OR USA or perhaps ConFoo in Canada or the Internet Retailers in San Deigo  CA USA.

Also, bumped into a few friends over in San Francisco, one being Timothy Hitchens who was also attending the Conference. Was good to catch up.

Overall a great trip and not much time to see the sights.  I did manage to tour Alcatraz which I have not done before and can recommend it to everyone. Something that I thought would be boring was far from it with the voice tour. Simply great.

Hopefully I can post to my site a little more often over the coming months.

I don’t post very often as I have been so busy. Just wanted to say that the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco is only 4 weeks away.

So in summary, I can’t wait. Hoping to catch up with some of my US friends.

Also, look at for a new Startup called Hapture.  Only weeks away, and it something great. You can follow Hapture on twitter at @hapture. Also accepting early registrations at http://hapture.com

A great year ahead. Bring it on !