ProjectX Blog

ProjectX selected as Cyber Gold finalist for Wellington Gold Awards 2007

Tonight, John and I went along to the formal announcement of final nominees for the 2007 Wellington Gold Awards. The event was held at the offices of Bell Gully. Let me tell you folks—what a spectacular view of our beautiful city extends before the 21st floor panoramic windows of this simple, slightly understated yet oh, so sophisticated and cool office space. Their hospitality was top notch too. Great drinks and most exquisite nibbles.

Anyway, after we won two TUANZ awards I was in a bit of a shock. I thought to myself “what the hell did we win these for?”. Tonight was a reminder to me that it’s easy to forget about the whole world while you’re working hard with great people on really fun and interesting projects. It’s easy to get caught in your own little world and not realise that there are people watching us with keen interest. Some are looking at us as a great emerging business, some are looking up to us as technology leaders and some are looking at us as dangerous competition. Tonight I was reminded of all of this as the name of our company was read out in front of Wellington’s most influential business men and women. And I had butterflies in my stomach. Not because I was nervous but because I was excited, honoured and humbled.

We have built our company from nothing, with next to no resources and it feels great to be recognised for our focus, effort, creativity, technological expertise and dedication to provide a great service to local communities and businesses. Being nominated for this awards is very important for the company but it’s also important on a much more personal level. It gives me a great boost and makes me want to work even harder at making ProjectX the success that it is going to be.

I’ve been reading a bunch of links over the past week that I’d thought I’d share…

I would suggest that if you are interested in Entrepreneurship then you check out Y Combinator Startup News Aggregator, its a fantastic wealth of Knowledge. They have a lot a great stuff to read every day.

Tech

• The birth of Ajax – an Amazing Story
• Ajax causing pageviews to decline
• Optimising javascript and CSS in Rails (Thanks Ben)
• The developer Video series – Some good video interviews with Jesse James Garrett, Jacob Nielsen and Steve Krug etc. (Thanks Lulu)

Entrepreneurship and Start-ups

• The Myth of a Great Idea
• Michael McDonough’s Top Ten Things They Never Taught Me in Design School
• Seth Godin offering more sage advice
• Equity math for Startups
• Seth Godin on The realistic entrepreneur’s guide to venture capital
• Shrink a Market
• The lesson I learned during Y-combinator
• Paul Buchheit – “My Start-up Path”
• Seth Godin’s Squidoo starts advertising
• How to improve your pitch process with entrepreneurs
• John Doerr’s Startup Manual
• Evan Williams on “How Odeo screwed up”
• Top 7 mistakes at Sampa, a Startup tale
• The first of two foundations to grow your business

Business

• Tim O’Reilly on “Honouring the Skunk Works”
• Seth Godin’s new book blog – The dip
• An interview with Jason Fried on web apps, cash flow and pricing
• The Effort Effect
• Guy Kawaski on the Effort Effect
• 7 reasons why web apps fail
• Summary of Hugh Macleod’s talk about blogs and the cluetrain.

Design

• Grid computing and Design
• An example of Grid design
• Jeff Bezo talking about usability
• The laws of Simplicity

Rod Drury is profiled in the latest idealog. Plugs for Welly, PlanHQ and Well-Railed rails user group. Awesome!

NZ has finally got iTunes. Its not the cheapest on the block, Warehouse are offering new CD’s like U2 18 singles for $22.99, its $23.99 on iTunes and $34.95 at real groovy!

Given the razor thin margins for the music retailers, I expect to see a couple of music chains closing in 2007.

So when are we going to download movies 🙂

Was sent this by the team at Hansel, IDEO CEO Tim Brown’s presentation “Mastering Innovation” from Better by Design conference 2005.

If you think design is important to your business, you should read this!
What an amazing example of cool powerpoint.

Here’s a bit of fun a Friday. I just scored 22 on Guy Kawasaki’s Venture Capital Aptitude Test. Seems like I’d better stick to entrepreneuring, obviously I haven’t got enough battle scars….

Scott Berkun has written a couple of posts on creative thinking and they highlight how certain language that can wither help or hinder the creative process.

From Scott’s posts here are his list of Idea Starters vs Idea Killers

This make you think about how your language can foster new ideas!

PWC’s Hi-Tech awards were held on the weekend.

Congratulations to :

Interesting reading from the blogspace….

I’ve just been reading the Scott Adam’s blog on how he has managed overcome Spasmodic Dysphonia. Its an amazing story about how he rewired his brain to his overcome his disability.

This story also re-inforces <a href=”http://blog.projectxtech.com/articles/2006/08/31/hr-bits-and-pieces
”>David Rock’s lecture on how the brain is more receptive to creating new connections.