Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

 Wooohoooooo… (Reuters photo)

Congrats to Rod & the team at Xero on getting their listing away. Rod’s leadership has demonstrated that great tech ventures can get funded in NZ outside of the VC market. I’ve been concerned for sometime that the only path for a NZ tech start-up seeking serious money is the VC (I’m a part-time VC). 

Here we see another avenue opening up. Diversity in funding sources will drive prosperity by ensuring more businesses are adequately funded to make it to market.

Is this something that could be done with this degree of success in the US market? The listing of a pre-revenue company? Doubt it.

I’ve played a bit with Xero and as a very frustrated user of competitive solutions really liked it. For me online financial solutions have always been less about the logistics of finance – I get other folks to do that. What this is about is business literacy – the ability to clue in to what your business is doing and why. To do this you need to be able to read and comprehend the numbers easily.

4-up! Brilliant! First they pegged Oracle as the likely winner over Luna Rosa. Then, Luna Rosa over Team NZ…

Interesting story over at ComputerWorld with some best practices for deploying solutions.

“There is tremendous value to be gained from social networking tools. But you need to make sure that there are actual people that are responsible for making sure that the community is interacting in a way that fits the goals of the community,” she says. Doing otherwise puts the organization at risk for lawsuits and other malicious behavior. “Organizations have to manage the technology or it will come back to hurt them.”

Jim Klein, director of information services and technology at California’s Saugus Union School District, puts this advice into practice every day. Klein and his team recently rolled out social networking tools, including blogs, to the district’s faculty, students and staff. However, Klein has put many controls in place so that IT and the school are protected from users running amok.

Social networking: Not IT’s problem

Google is going to do it all for us apparently.

Asked how Google might look in five years’ time, Mr Schmidt said: “We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalisation. The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ ”