Met Mike Culver, web services evangelist for Amazon's S3 cloud services today on his first trip downunder. All this cool stuff about how we can base an entire startup on a pay-as-you-go storage and computing model with the same reliability and speed as Amazon itself.
Mainly technical discussion, so a lot of it way over my head but one of my questions hit home:
If Amazon's charging me in USD and only accepts credit card payment, the foreign currency exchange fee my bank is going to charge me is a big hit. My bank's 3.3% for Mastercard and 3.4% for Visa foreign currency transactions is probably standardish.
Mike hadn't come across that before but seemed serious about taking that issue back to the US to get solved.
Not as big an issue for me personally as having no amazon.com.au, but prolly enough to make such a variable cost unaffordable here.
US companies still aren't great at the whole international product strategy.
(btw, no links or image with this post because iPhone STILL doesn't support copy & paste grrr)
[Sent from my iPhone, still unable to copy and paste and it's 2008]
