12,000 euro tax credit to go online

ICON has recently sent us some good news (posted below):

The Malta Enterprise E-Commerce Tax Credit Incentive, aimed at online businesses, will be in place until the end of the year. The tax credit is equivalent to 100% of the eligible costs as approved by Malta Enterprise, up to a maximum of 12,000 euros per project.

The incentive will be awarded under the de minimis aid rules in terms of Commission Regulation (EC) No 1998/2006 on the application of Article 87 and 88 of the EC Treaty to de minimis aid. Eligible costs must be directly related to the creation, development, or aqcuisition of a new or significantly improved electronic commerce system. These costs must be incurred within 2 years from commissioning the new electronic commerce system and should be specified in a maintenance contract, agreed to at the time of the development of the system.

Applications to qualify for the 12,000 euro grant must be submitted to Malta Enterprise by the end of the year!

Go to Malta Enterprise Website or read full post on icon's website

Agency Insider: Daphne Caruana Galizia about Taste

This is the 9th Agency Insider blog post. In this post, we chat with Daphne Caruana Galizia about Taste.com.mt and the whole Taste project, conceived in November of 2004(4 years ago this month)

KG: Taste turned 4 last June. How has the project changed since 2004?

DCG: Taste magazine has changed a great deal, growing from 64 stapled pages to 144 burst-bound pages at its largest. We’ve changed the paper from matt to a high quality semi-gloss, and now have the cover laminated. We’ve got more cooks, more features, and lots of interesting information, but we’ve kept to the same policy of keeping an advertising-to-editorial ratio of around 60% editorial and 40% advertising. In the vast majority of magazines published in Malta, it’s the other way round. We’ve also kept to a policy of keeping overheads to an absolute minimum, which frees up revenue to invest in editorial content. After all, readers don’t care how many staff you have; they’re only interested in what lies between the pages.

KG: Taste is a magazine for those who love food and drink...Who loves food and drink (who are the readers of Taste)?

DCG: Taste readers, we were amazed to discover, come from all walks of life, all ages, both genders and several different nationalities. We’ve even had enquiries from people who’ve seen a copy while on holiday here and want to know whether we run a subscription service. We don’t. It’s not feasible as the postage is too expensive and the administration is cumbersome. That’s not our main area of business.



KG: 4 months ago Taste also evolved online? Why and what was the feedback?

DCG: People don’t throw Taste away. They keep it, use it as a reference because of the recipes and features, and try to source back copies – which, incidentally, have run out at our end. We were receiving repeated enquiries about an index, but then said – hang on, an index is the old-fashioned complicated way of doing things. It makes much more sense to have an on-line archive, and it’s easier for people to use, too. They just key in the recipe they’re looking for and it comes up. Once we were going to all that trouble, we thought we might as well add on features like facilities which allow people to ask questions about food and food products, and a ‘blog’ which would allow us to communicate news like publication dates and so on. Further features will be added. The feedback has been very good. Lots of people now keep a laptop in the kitchen, so you can read your recipe straight off the screen while preparing it.

KG: Taste as the printed magazine and taste.com.mt? What's the relationship between the 2? How do they complement each other? How has this changed the lifetime of your magazine's content and its consumption?

DCG: The two are very different. The concept is different. Many people thought that www.taste.com.mt would be an on-line version of the magazine, like the on-line versions of newspapers, but of cours,e it’s not. The internet is not a substitute for the print media. It’s a different medium altogether and not necessarily a complementary one. It has to be approached with a different mind – not in terms of putting your magazine on-line, which would be the equivalent of developing a company website by putting its corporate brochure on line. No, people don’t throw the magazine away because they have access to the site. If anything, the site has built more demand for the magazine. The magazine and the site were conceived differently and are used differently. Also, people like to keep magazines that are beautifully illustrated, and thanks to our wonderful photographers and designers, Taste and its sister magazines Flair and Town look very good indeed.

Which is the largest retail store locally?

Strategy 2.0 (post no. 1)
Without trying to be too 'online' oriented my answer to the above question is Amazon.
- It has at least 16 million products on sale
- A very large chunk of the occupied households can access it (walk in) all day long
- This implies they can review (window shopping), purchase and evaluate (recommend)

If your answer is not somewhat similar to the above you probably still perceive the online world as an interesting topic, a very effective medium for companies in other markets and a 'nice-to-have' channel which in the real world locally is not key. This does not exclude your interest in experimenting with it sometime in the future, when business is running smoothly and you have some cash and time to waste on an online website.

If on the other hand you agree with my answer, then you must already be exploring new ways and means to reach out to your customers, either by partnering or by competing with the Amazon store. As I do, you probably realize that the largest connected community locally consists of 347K mobile subscribers, that at least 24,000 locals have a facebook profile, and that when each of these post, poke, tag or even comment on a popular social site (news portals incl.), they are speaking to a mass audience of approximately 200 other locals at least.

Finally, whether you agree or not with my answer, you will have a very hard time to debate Amazon's global success. And if Amazon is successful online, then it is also successful offline (a.k.a. the real world). Hence, all the above has serious implications on your current business processes whilst redefining the market you currently operate in.

The above discussion is drawn from '(B2C) Strategy 2.0', a presentation given out by Karl Galea at the 6th MCA Annual Conference. Presentation slides will soon be made available at mca.org.mt.