Time For NZ To Wake Up As Well…
BusinessWeek reports that Silicon Valley CEOs are issuing a wake-up call to America. The same call needs to be issued in NZ. One of the central gating factors is broadband – which is a critical innovation enabler. It’s just too expensive. It just takes too long to get installed. And once you’ve got it, punitive billing strategies limit use. It’s not so great in the US either:
Jerry Yang, co-founder and chairman of Yahoo! (YHOO), pointed out that the U.S. remains far behind some Asian countries in broadband. Korea and Japan, for example, offer consumers far faster broadband connections than the standard in the U.S.That’s a problem, said Reed Hastings, CEO of the DVD-rental service Netflix (NFLX). Hastings thinks the next phase of the Web won’t arrive until people in the U.S. can get bandwidth of 10 megabits per second, or about 10 times the common rate here, at a comparable price. Only then, for instance, will people really be able to watch video online comfortably. But he says that’s now three to six years off.
Just as these CEOs are doing, NZ needs to recognize that it isn’t the threat isnt the US – it is Asia. Driving home, I can barely hold a mobile phone call in the Valley. During a week in China, I didn’t drop a call. And my minutes cost me a fraction of what they did in NZ.
Dyson was the most direct: “The country has grown lazy and complacent,” she said. “We’ve created a country where we’ve outsourced the intellect to other countries.” Instead of trying to figure out how to beat the Chinese, she said, we need to try to “beat ourselves and help the Chinese” succeed, so that the U.S. has that huge market to sell to, she said.
Smart Thoughts From Mena
I’m a big Six Apart fan. TypePad is how I built and you see this blog. And I’m using MoveableType for all the enterprise blogs I’m working on. Recently the company ran into a few growing pains – they handled them well from my point of view. Here are some of the lessons they are sharing on Mena’s blog:
- Read what your customers have to say
- Ignore the tone of nasty complaints, but pay attention to the underlying messages
- Understand that the people giving feedback represent many who remain silent
- Don’t spend too much energy on distractions
- Don’t be afraid to communicate
- Trust your customers
Email Is So Yesterday…
I remember the excitement I felt when email first landed in my lap – literally, on a Dell notebook – it was some version of Lotus. Soon, I’m hoping, it will be gone in relation to much of the work I need to get done. When recently working on a major site redevelopment a Wiki did so much more for the team in terms of communication – we all edited content in real-time, in the same place, without any confusion in relation to versions. It made a significant task so much more productive.
BusinessWeek touches on the utility of blogs and Wikis as a replacement to email. They start by going down the old route that most of the email you get is a waste of time: “Indeed, the onetime productivity wonder has turned into a maddening time waster. Despite the brawniest corporate filters, more than 60% of what swarms into corporate in-boxes is spam.”
That isn’t why I don’t like email anymore. Its more about what I do like about the virtual collaboration space of the Wiki. “ Among them: private workplace wikis (searchable, archivable sites that allow a dedicated group of people to comment on and edit one another’s work in real time); blogs (chronicles of thoughts and interests); Instant Messenger (which enables users to see who is online and thus chat with them immediately rather than send an e-mail and wait for a response); RSS (really simple syndication, which lets people subscribe to the information they need); and more elaborate forms of groupware such as Microsoft Corp.’s (MSFT ) SharePoint, which allows workers to create Web sites for teams’ use on projects.”
So far, companies have invested 95% of their spending in business processes, according to Social Life of Information author and former Xerox Corp. (XRX ) Palo Alto Research Center director John Seely Brown. A scant 5% has gone toward supporting ways to mine a corporation’s human capital. That’s why fans say the beyond-e-mail workplace will become a key competitive advantage. In the global race for innovation, it’s not as much about leveraging what’s inside your factories’ machines as what’s in your employees’ heads.
It’s worth a read.
NZ To Host 2001 rugby World Cup…
Yeah… everyone had written us off. This is a massive upset – the bookies had Japan holding the event, and if not them, South Africa.
New Zealand Wins Vote to Host 2011 Rugby World Cup (Update2)
Nov. 17 (Bloomberg) — New Zealand upset Japan and South Africa to claim the right to stage the 2011 Rugby World Cup, the world’s third-biggest sports event by television audience.New Zealand beat Japan, the bookmakers’ choice, in the final round of voting by the International Rugby Board council after South Africa was eliminated earlier today. The New Zealanders, who hosted and won the first World Cup in 1987, boast the world’s top-ranked national team and are the favorites to win the 2007 tournament in France.
“This is an enormous honor and a great privilege but also an enormous responsibility,” Jock Hobbs, chairman of the New Zealand Rugby Football Union, told reporters in Dublin. “It’s a proud day to be a Kiwi.”
The 2003 event, which had 3.4 billion TV viewers, was worth $289 million to the Australian economy. About 20,000 British and Irish fans spent $82 million in New Zealand during June and July this year tracking the combined British Isles touring team, according to Auckland-based tourism consultant Horwath Asia Pacific Ltd. The World Cup comprises 20 countries, and included nations from Georgia to Uruguay two years ago.
Look At Taggin
CNET has a good story on tagging – worth a read.
Also known as “folksonomies,” tagging systems are usually created by users themselves, rather than site owners, and make many online services far more accessible and useful than they had ever been before. The practice brings a social context to such resources as blogs, shared bookmarking, photography and even books.
