about

Ian Mackenzie

To be interesting; be interested

Dale Darnegie

Short Story

I have more interests and ideas than I have time to pursue. Although some, I’ve chased more passionately than others. Online technologies have fascinated me since the Internet began. Online marketing and e-commerce have had the most profound impact on my life. 

Presently, I’m enjoying life in Nambucca Heads with my family. I also enjoy helping seniors with technology via Tech Confidence, and in my real job, helping others build an online presence, e-commerce development and digital advertising with Customer Path. I’m also looking forward to getting back into photography with Local Scene Photography. I use my own images throughout this site. My wife and I are also getting a kick out of watching our kids become young adults.

Longer story, but not too long

For most of my adult life, I’ve been involved with technology-based businesses. At 24 (1989), I was a sales consultant for a technology company carrying around a brief case my friends said looked like Q from James Bond gave it to me. They packed it with a transmitter and technology gadgets (Numeric, Alpha Numeric and Two Way Voice Pagers).

I found an image of the test kit I used all those years ago, but we had it packed neatly into a briefcase. The Internet allows you to find almost anything, even obscure things like this.

Looking back, it was a futuristic technology for the day, used by large hospitals and companies to locate and talk to staff on-site.

This technology is known as on-site paging: but with two-way speech ability, patched into phone systems (PABX), long before cellular technology came to the public in Australia. It’s still widely used in Australia today.

Our sales manager at the time sold a vast system to the New Parliament House after they built it in 1988. The system cost $750,000 in the day. He complained about having to train politicians and how painful they were.

All this packed in a brief case

At 27, I became fascinated with personal computer technology when it came to Australia. Funnily enough, I’m still connected on Facebook with the person I sold my first computer to back in 1993. 

In 1991, I connected to the Internet for the first time and several years later (I can’t quite remember when) I purchased my first book from Amazon and begun teaching myself graphic and web design.

In 2001, I started Cyberguide as a self-taught web and print designer. Within two years, we had pivoted to an e-commerce business, which pioneered and operated multiple e-commerce sites in several markets, all diverse from each other. Within a very short period, 100% of our business was over the Internet and on the phone with customers, government, corporate and small business across Australia.

As we didn’t have to meet customers psychically to do business, we could do business from anywhere with a decent Internet connection, so we moved out of Sydney to Nambucca Heads on the Mid-North Coast in 2005, and we’ve never looked back. Yes, technology has played a big part in my life. I would say it has been life changing, and it continues to be. I’ve been working from home now since 2001.