An Australian campervan company has seen a 50% increase in requests for relocation deals after the credit crunch.
This is especially noticeable as most relocations (or $1 a day) deals take place during peak summer season, Christmas and Easter.
Read the whole article at news.com.au
On Saturday our email sending service SMTP.com decided to disable our account. The reason was that someone had reported our emails as SPAM. The account was disabled immediately and without warning.
No emails from Transfercar last weekend
We didn’t see the email until Sunday after some of you called us about not receiving emails. And from there on it took another 18 hours before we were able to get hold of someone at SMTP.com and convinced them that we are not in the business of sending SPAM.
Transfercar practices a strict opt-in only policy and otherwise try to adhere to industry standards for good email ethics so we were very surprised that we were shut down without any prior warning.
Our web service Transfercar ( www.transfercar.co.nz ) is a facilitator between the parties of drivers and rental car operators, and two thirds of all our business is conducted by emails through smtp.com. We serve 60% of the rental car industry in New Zealand and many of them rely solely on emails generated and sent out from us.
The email list that generates the most emails (about 85% of emails are notifications of new listings in our database sent out to drivers) is probably the one that some poeple would report as spam. The reason for this is the nature of the list, generating a new email for every new car listed. That means that on some days subscribers will receive as many as 30 emails. We warn users about this but still we see many complaints about it to our support system.
We have gone through our email templates today and added more information in them on why the recipient is receiving the email together with unsubscribe links. We hope that this this will remove any claims of spam in the future.
I have made some updates to the site today. 
Mostly cosmetic changes here and there to make the site more usable. However on the front page there are some new stuff;
Will be back to make it all look a bit cleaner in the near future 
Transfercar needs your support!
Install the app at http://apps.facebook.com/kick-start/ and vote for Transfercar at the “Kick-start.
StartUP is a global community designed to assist online Start-UPs. Every week they will be sending their entire group of thousands of visitors to one lucky Start-UP (Transfercar) and provide a major traffic spike and hopefully a lot of new users.
You can help Transfercar by voting for them at Start-UP with on their Kick-Start my Start-UP Facebook App.
So install the app at http://apps.facebook.com/kick-start/ and vote for Transfercar now!
Two weeks ago we had a fun day (more fun than usual) here at Transfercar when Made From New Zealand came up from Wellington and did a video shoot of us.
We started out filming outside the University of Auckland Business School (where the idea to Transfercar first was developed). Then we moved down to the car yard at Jucy Rental Cars (they happened to be close, sorry to all the other rental companies that didn’t get the same exposure!). And Tim Alpe, CEO at Jucy gave us a raving endorsement!
All in all the whole shoot lasted the afternoon and it was a lot of fun to do. We shot 3 short movies. The first one came out today:
Let us know what you think!
Today New Zealand businesses and individuals are joining in on a massive protest against the Guilt Upon Accusation law ‘Section 92A’ that calls for internet disconnection based on accusations of copyright infringement without a trial and without any evidence held up to court scrutiny. This is due to come into effect on February 28th unless immediate action is taken by the National Party.
A massive “blackout” of websites are occurring today from major online players such as Scoop Media, Zoomin, GeekZone, SilverStripe and many more. See full list here.
Transfercar will be carrying a centrally placed banner on all our pages in support of the protest. Click here for screenshot.
Francois Bondiguel, founder of PocketSmith pointed out on his twitter page yesterday that Norwegian websites have started a war to combat users of the browser of Internet Explorer 6 (IE6).
This immediately caught my attention. For one, I myself is Norwegian But more importantly is the extra work that IE6 causes web developers around the world, also here at Transfercar.
IE6 was launched in 2001 when the web was very different from what it is now. Also IE6 never complied properly with Internet industry standards. So web developers have been waiting for it to slowly die out. Unfortunately because of it’s bundling with Windows this never really happened, and web sites have been having to provide 2 versions of their pages; one for IE6 and one for the rest of the browsers.
Even the past 30 days on Transfercar.co.nz we have had 23% of IE users still using version 6.
23.9% of IE users are using version 6
So we have decided to join the efforts to educate and create awarness amongst Internet Explorer users that still have an old version on their computers. From today onwards we have the following message displayed on all our web pages:
Tip from Transfercar: You have an old version of the browser Internet Explorer (IE6)
To get the best possible experience using our website we recommend that you upgrade your browser to a newer version. The current version is Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8 is available as a beta. The upgrade is free. If you’re using a PC at work you should contact your IT-administrator.
If you want to you may also try some other popular Internet browsers like Opera, FireFox or Safari
You can also see a screen shot of the message on Flickr.
We hope that every website owner in New Zealand now will take up the challenge and put a similar message on their site. Go here for the source code to implement it on your web site.
The movement also have a wiki page and you can find a list of all websites having implemented the message.
Winners of the petrol vouchers announced
We are happy to announce the winners of the “Wanna win free petrol?” -competition in the December issue of Transfercar’s email newsletter.
For those of you who missed it, this was the competition:
Wanna win free petrol?
Well, you can! What do you have to do to win? Nothing much really, just refer as many colleagues, friends and relatives to us as you can. That’s it!
We will draw 2 winners of $150 petrol vouchers each. To enter the competition just get the people you refer to enter your username in the reference code on the registration page.
The more new registrations with your username on it, the bigger the chance you have to win!
We have had a great response with almost 650 new users signed up through the referral, so welcome on board to all of you!
..and the two winners of a $150 petrol voucher each are:
Matthew Rice
Queensland
Australia
and
Andrea Wilke
Berlin
Germany
We congratulate you both and thank you for your effort! The vouchers have been issued and sent out to you.
For all of you who missed out this time there will be some more competitions with even bigger prizes in the future. Hopefully we will see some Kiwi’s amongs the winners then as well!
Hot off the press, here is the first Transfercar video introduction, made for Startup:
Transfercar introduction from Espen Grimstad on Vimeo.
I put it together this afternoon, and even if the sound is crappy and the light changing, I’m pretty happy with it. Look out for more to come!
A great new initiative for New Zealand businesses has begun to emerge; Made From New Zealand has grown out of the people behind Silicon Welly and StartUp and it is a web based community/networking/linkbuilding/promotional-tool, and I believe we have only seen the start of it yet.
I have already been posting a some articles to the Start-up blog over the past months and so through that I have been in contact with Patrick Macfie and Tim Norton. It is very cool to see what have come out of it (so far).
So for any kiwi individual or company that have something to contribute to the NZ business scene, be it entrepreneurs, investors or customers, check out Madefromnewzealand.com!
PS: From today the Transfercar blog will be plugging in to the Made From New Zealand blog network so these posts can be read there as well.
Keep it up guys!
