ProjectX Blog

Slashdot has posted a link (“Digital Waste Worth More Than Gold, Copper Ore”) to an article by Foreign Policy about the recycling of digital waste.

Scary numbers quoted in the article.

• Each year between 20 and 50 million tons of electronic waste is generated globally
• Its 10 times cheaper to ship waste to China than to dispose of digital waste properly at home
• One ton of computer scrap contains more gold than 17 tons of gold ore.
• Circuit boards can be 40 times richer in copper than typical copper ore.
• Lead, mercury, and cadmium are a computer’s most common toxic substances. When melted down, the machines release even more toxins into the air, ground, and water.
• Some disposal sites in China employ more than 100,000 people. In Guiyu, the average worker can earn between $2 and $4 a day.

It reminds of the infamous shipbreaking yards in India.

Scoble has just posted about Popfly – Microsoft’s new mashup builder. With Yahoo Pipes and Popfly, a new age of mashups is dawining where you can build a tools within minutes.

When I first saw this demoed a few months ago the Microsoftie who showed it to me literally built TwitterVision in two minutes right in front of me without writing code.
– Robert Scoble

Webservices will power the next generation of websites. If you’re building a new website, you should consider how webservices can increase traffic to business.

Performance

• 14 rules for fast web pages
• Scaling your rails app
• How facebook scaled
• How Livejournal scales (PDF)

Design / Innovation

• Jakob Nielsen on the state of web 2.0
• Steve Jobs on innovation at Apple
• Make your site mobile friendly
• The man behind Apple’s insanely cool products

Entrepreneurship / Business

• Eric Schmidt: Google buys a startup once every few days
• Only half of the bubble-era companies out of business
• Why mobile services fail
• Asking the crowd to spread the news
• Lucky things happen to entrepreneurs
• Traits of the best entrepreneurs

This news perked my interest ( from my start-up past). Yahoo is closing their US auction site (Yahoo are still the #1 auction site in Japan) . Yahoo has given up on being #2 in the US. No surprises really, Yahoo is getting caned by Google and it looks like they are focusing their resources on the challenges ahead.

Looking at the NZ market, it begs the question. Why the other the NZ auctions sites don’t get it? There is only ever one winner in each market for auctions. (They only market that isn’t true is China, they’re still fighting it out). You can’t have a marketplace without lots of buyers AND sellers. Its the old chicken and egg situation. Look at www.sellforfree.co.nz, there’s only about 50 items. (All the billboards have been put to good use!) Its going to have to work really hard to gain some traction against Trade Me!

If you’re thinking you want to build the next “trade me”. Stop! Buy some lotto tickets, its a better option. There is very little chance of real success.

OK OK that’s a bit harsh. If you still think you can do better, find a niche and become the dominant marketplace in that niche. That’s what the Hirething’s guys are doing and they are starting to get some traction.

Wellington-based international on-line mapping company ProjectX Technology
(www.projectx.co.nz) has been recognised for its bold ambition, technological
success and contribution to the community by being selected as one of four
finalists in the Cyber Gold category at this year’s Wellington Gold Awards.

Founder and CEO John Clegg say ProjectX is thrilled to be recognised in this way.

“We are proud to have been recognised and placed amongst Wellington region’s
best and brightest. To be one of four finalists is a huge boost for us as a young
start-up company and it’s a great incentive for us to do even greater things. Next
year we’re going for gold.”

The company, which is part of Wellington business incubator CreativeHQ, has
fingers in several pies. It specialises in developing online mapping tools for the
everyday person in the street.

Their flagship product is the free map website – zoomin.co.nz – which is about more
than just finding something on a map. Users can view or add photos and video,
read other people’s comments and reviews and add information of their own.

The company also created TradeMe’s Smaps product, which became the most
used mapping site in New Zealand within just three weeks of being launched.

ProjectX has already won two TUANZ awards (Telecommunications Users
Association of New Zealand) for craft and inspiration in 2006.

Here’s an post from ZDnet blog in US about the rise in profile and acceptance of SaaS. The post has links to the original article from a couple of McKinsey consultants. Here is one of key messages from the post:

Quoting McKinsey’s research last year that found a jump from 38% to 61% in the proportion of CIOs planning to use SaaS, the authors set out “why this trend seems bound to gain traction where an earlier generation of hosted software failed to do so a decade ago.” Several of their most compelling arguments come down to simple economics: they say that SaaS has less financial risk for buyers, is cheaper to use and yet just as profitable for vendors.

The SaaS is starting to gain some momentum at an enterprise level. This enables lots of opportunities for niche players to reach a wide world wide audience.

Time to getting cracking and release our new our map services 🙂

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We’ve been busy in the last couple of days working on our Gold Awards promotional video. We’ve managed to secure Aston Fiacé, renowned Wellington socialite and media promotions expert to direct our promotional film.

For our film, we decided to make the clip in the form of a movie trailer (even with our own ratings screen.) We have drawn influences from a number of great movies, Rocky, Reservoir Dogs, and the Matrix. Within 24 hours we were able to come up with some remarkable ideas. We’ll be releasing the video out on youtube closer to the event. In the mean time I’ll leave you with a quote from our director.

“…Making a movie using iMovie is like building a beautifully designed house but with mud, a spoon and a rusty pitchfork!” – Aston Fiacé

Spotted this on slashdot this morning, Indian Govt is proposing free 2Mb broadband to ALL of India by 2009.

India is working on a broadband future, what about NZ?

Sad news to hear that Ken Kutaragi, father of Playstation has resigned.

Mr Stringer had been hoping Sony’s video games unit, Sony Computer Entertainment, would be a bedrock of the group’s revival. Instead its losses are expected to balloon to $2bn (£1bn).

Ouch!!!!

Meanwhile, Nintendo, known for game characters such as Donkey Kong and the diminutive Italian plumber Mario, said yesterday its profits had leapt more than 77% to 174.3bn yen (£733m) in the year to the end of March.

Double Ouch!!

Two headlines from the herald today:

• One million NZ households now online
• Broadband infrastructure needs $1.5B investment

Now reading these two articles there seems to be a real disconnect.

The article states that 50% of all connected households have “broadband” (if you can call what we have in NZ broadband!) And Telecom says that it will cost $1.5B to enable 90% of NZ to get 5mb broadband.

1.5 BILLION DOLLARS ???? Are the putting fibre to every door ? This doesn’t make any sense at all. (They’re acting like the big tobacco companies who sponsor “research” on the benefits of tobacco!) We can really trust Telecom to tell the truth about the cost. I mean they’re spending $1m per month on Ferrit, so they’re really are how to use their money wisely 😉

As an online business, we are frustrated at the lack of speed and high costs of hosting in NZ. Low cost, high-speed infrastructure opens the door to a new range of services, eg. streaming tv, integrated telephony. (I need more bandwidth for Joost)

So how about it Telecom, why not make the internet better for all NZ?!?! Spend your Yellow pages bounty on something worthwhile!

Update:Rod has run the numbers and has estimated it will cost $270M a year to build and maintain the broadband network. Food for thought.