We have a couple of rooms available on our floor for rent or sub lease in our office in Johnston Street. Both rooms are approx. 4m x 4m.
Share the floor with [business:Lushai], [business:CBDrealty.co.nz], [business:Cloudbreak] and [business:ProjectX Technology] .
The space can be furnished or unfurnished, and shared internet is also available. Email John if you’re interested.
We at ZoomIn joined the internet blackout last week, along with many others.
The recent news of the delay of Section 92A is good news. We have now removed our “dark maps” as the black out has ended. Thank you all for your comments as well as participation in the blackout.
Joel Sposky talks about business strategy and compares it a simple concept that he learned in the army – Fire and Motion.
Here is how it works. You fire at the enemy. That’s the fire part. And you move forward at the same time. That’s the motion. Get it?
You’re firing because then your enemy has to take cover. He can’t fire back at you when he’s cowering behind a wall. But firing is not enough. You also have to move forward, or you won’t make any progress.
Its all sounds all pretty standard stuff. When you start to think about the parallels in the business world that it start to really hit home.
If you look at a competitive market, the successful company is always the one setting the agenda and forcing competitors to match it.
If you’re constantly looking at matching your competitor’s features, thats equivalent to firing at the where your enemy was, not at where they are or where they are going.
Joel offers some insight on how to break this cycle.
The good news is that this isn’t terribly difficult: Instead of paying attention to what your competitors are doing, start reading your customer feedback e-mail personally.
…
Rest assured that your customers are already trying to tell you that this opportunity exists, if you’ll only listen.“
And finally here’s a quote from the ice hockey legend Wayne Gretzky that sums up what business strategy should be about.
“A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.”
Here’s my wishlist for Xmas:
We moved office over the weekend. We’re now located on Willis St above Roti restaurant. (Across the road from Catalyst and Ascent. Hi Guys !)
Our new contact details are as follows:
ProjectX Technology Ltd.
Address:
149A Willis Street
Wellington
Phone / FAX:
+64 4 910 3100Postal Address:
PO BOX 155
Wellington
Techcrunch have posted about some of the user numbers behind facebook. Paul Francis compiled a spreadsheet of the numbers.
NZ has 250,760 users – 71,600 male (28.55%) and 179,160 female (71.45%) ! Women outnumber men more than 2 to 1!
Looking at those numbers I would guess that we have a lot of ex-pats still calling NZ home. That’s a lot of people using face book! If what they say is true that more than 50% of facebookers log on once a day. That should put it squarely behind Trade me in terms of visits (althought bebo is more popular in NZ than facebook).
So if you’re looking for a captive NZ audience, then launching a facebook app to that audience is very very appealing. I’m not convinced that people pay any attention to the advertising!
I’ve been ranting about how expensive mobile calls and data rates have been for years…. Going back to India, highlighted just how crazy the price gap is. I was in Mizoram, which has only had mobile phones for about 18 months and they have super cheap rates!
How cheap?? How about a pre-paid phone with local calls from 0.6c per minute !?!? and free night-time calling ! (Ok, this is a promotion with super-low prices but still !)
Having a look at one of the top providers rates (Airtel and Vodafone)
| Feature | Pre-paid | Post-Paid | Standard NZ rate |
| Base Rental | nil | $6.90 – (200 Rs) | $20 |
| Local calls | 6c (Rs 2.25) per minute | 1.5c (.50 Rs) per minute | from 15c per minute |
| STD calls | 6.5c (Rs 2.65) per minute | 6.2c (Rs 2.5) | from 15c per minute |
| International call to NZ | 20c (6.4 Rs) per minute | 20c (6.4 Rs) per minute | more than 49c per minute (49c to Australia) |
| local SMS | 1.7c (0.5 Rs) | 1.7c (0.5 Rs) | from 0.20c |
| national SMS | 6.8c (2 Rs) | 6.8c (2 Rs) | from 0.20c |
| international SMS | 17c (5 Rs) | 17c (5 Rs) | from 0.20c |
I’ve taken data from Airtel’s website and tried to extract info from vodafone. Broadband pricing is slowly coming into line. Its time to get Mobile prices inline with the rest of the world. The impact of lower mobile prices was a wider effect to the economy. More New Zealanders would benefit to lower mobile prices than wold benefit by broadband. It will help development and innovation in the mobile space, thus creating jobs and growth opportunities for NZ companies. The future of computing is mobile, its time we grew up and get with the rest of the world!
This came as a very pleasant surprise: In last night’s NZ Open Source Awards, ProjectX won the “Open Source Use in Business” category, and NZ Summer of Code took out the “Open Source Use in Education” award.
We’ll write some more soon about the advantages we’ve found to using open source, and some specific software that we can’t do without; but for the moment we’re all just rather stunned!
Hot off the heels of Ponoko being at the techcrunch 40 , PlanHQ have just been techcrunched.
Congrats to Dave, Tim and the teams at Ponoko and PlanHQ
Silicon Welly represent !
Here are the slides from our talks at Bar camp.
John & Paul on “Why your website is SLOW and how you can make it fast!” – John’s slides in PDF (2.2Mb) and Paul’s slides in PDF (87K )
Tom on “Space, Place and the meaning of Where” – (Powerpoint 7.5Mb and Openoffice 7Mb)
We had a great time talking to everyone and putting faces to some famous bloggers.
Kudos to both Mike’s, Nat and Fronde staff for putting on a fantastic event!
