Archive for the ‘Kiwi Stuff’ Category

Angus Tait – the founder of Tait Electronics, has passed. While some might not have agreed with his moving Tait into a trust structure similar to Bosch – a move that required considerable personal financial sacrifice – you can’t deny the incredible impact he had by creating a lasting NZ export powerhouse. 

Angus epitomized all that is great about NZ entrepreneurs – unrelenting persistence, deep technical smarts, a belief in the team over the individual, and a commitment to building great NZ-based technology companies with a global footprint.

No matter how great the legacy he leaves – and it is great – he will be missed.

New Zealand are back at it, trying to bring the America’s Cup to New Zealand. As much as I was disappointed to see Alinghi and it’s crew of Kiwi traitors win the cup – one of the many good things to come out of it has been the America’s cup web site. It’s got everything you could want (well, it’s close) and more.

Stunning graphics, real-time race scoring and radio, plenty of history and commentary – brilliant. What’s missing? Well – most of the things I normally hold dear – stuff like focused RSS feeds, community (and related ranking of content), blog aggregation… The rest makes up for it though.

Compare this to Toyota’s pathetic effort only available to Kiwi’s onshore. Nuts! It’s a global event with a global audience. What are you thinking!

Team NZ’s presence it very light-weight also. Pretty much a standard site with little sizzle. The downside to this is probably going to be most felt in merchandising and growth of the TNZ community. You’ve got to activate the community through participatory technology or, excuse the pun, miss the boat. Ok, Oracle BMW racing has a bigger budget but that’s no excuse – I know plenty of Kiwi talent that would have done the TNZ site for the privilege. Their site is a stunner. Blog, great photos, live racing and more. Still, in both cases, no apparent RSS -and TNZ has them on downloads and content. I hope they also take them on the water….

Technorati Tags: America’s Cup, Team New Zealand

Very cool story in the New York Times about a Kiwi company – LanzaTech – that has secured funding here in the US to produce ethanol from an untapped source — carbon monoxide gas. Vinod Khosla had this to day:

When I passed it on to my partners for due diligence, the technology stood up to every test, and the intellectual property protection was awesome,” Mr. Khosla said.

Then, referring to the bacteria that are key to the process, he said, “The performance of the bugs was frankly mind-boggling to me, not something I would have expected from a tiny research effort in New Zealand.” He said his firm “sent the best process engineers we know to evaluate the technology and could it be industrialized, and the answer was yes.”

OK, enough NZ stories for a bit… but I couldn’t resist this one from El Reg…

New Zealand scientists plan to tackle the thorny problem of ewes producing more lambs than they have nipples to accommodate, by simply upping mum’s teat-count, Stuff.co.nz reports.

Apparently, NZ’s ovine population has become more fertile over the past 10 years and females often drop triplets. AgResearch Invermay scientist George Davis solemnly explained: “A triplet, if he is the runt of the litter, is usually doomed.”

NZ is a broadband backwater. I’m a big advocate of waking up NZ to what it is missing in terms of broadband connectivity. What won’t help is drivel and comparisons that contain no evidence (I’m guilty of this too:-). Witness this peice in ComputerWorld with this little gem from really smart guy David Skilling:

Local companies with an overseas presence have told him broadband infrastructure is five to ten times better in China “which most people think of as a developing economy” than it is in New Zealand, and have pointed out that it’s much cheaper to get a document electronically from Sydney to London than it is from Auckland to London.

Five to ten times better than nothing? Than what? And what garbage on the cost of moving a document… on what transport? Nothing beats free and that is precisely what my Internet connection cost me in a Hotel in Shanghai. So, to get  a document from Shanghai to London costs nothing making Sydney a highly uncompetitive market? Hmmmmm… don’t think so.

What is more amazing is how the Telcos are putting-up with this nonsense. Why aren’t they correcting the facts and helping set the agenda rather than being slaughtered by competitive framing…

… this debate is getting more ridiculous by the day….