Mapping your Linked In connections

Linked-in inmaps seems to accurately cluster the people you are connected to: Hit the link and login with your Linked In account and it will churn away, producing the pretty diagram. The fun is in mousing over the dots, especially the ones on the edges and between the clusters. But while it’s fun, it’s not really useful. Moreover I’m still …

Top lessons from Steve Jobs biography – it’s the products

Reading Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs was a privileged look into the life of a very special individual. It certainly completes the picture of the man that has emerged with increasing rapidity over the last years and months. In the spirit of what he stood for, here are what I see as five of the the key lessons we …

This is not a serious post – unless you want to be Trade Me CFO

Trade Me likes to ask candidates for jobs to perform a task that should be simple and fun for the applicant. For the CFO they are looking for it’s to do the following: Now the idea of calculating how much money Trade Me makes may not fill most with a sense of fun, but I …

The NZ election websites

There’s an election on – so how are the parties doing based on their website design? (Click on pictures to see larger versions) National is stuck in the past, cluttered but have a very crisp business-like approach. No glitz and glam here, though they do want to play videos at you. The site feels old …

Road deaths are not so bad

Microsoft Excel, originally uploaded by LanceWiggs. Despite our small population density, horrible terrain and fickle weather New Zealand is actually doing pretty well on the road deaths chart versus peers. There is a lot more nuance in the stats, which should really be by passenger mile and take account of the presence of pedestrians, but …

Future Digital: InternetNZ’s discussion starter

InternetNZ’s discussion paper for the NZ election lead-up is now online. The paper, and it is a quick read, contains a lot of the themes that emerged from NetHui, which was an excellent event with engagement from across the industry, society and Government. The key points for politicians and voters are: Embrace the fact that …

More text and fewer articles visible equals more pageviews

NZ’s own RWW reports that readers of the FT’s mobile Web app consume “about three times as many pages through the app as they are through the desktop in an average visit“. Drawar.com concludes in turn that the reason is that the the articles are in a single column in the web-app, while on the …

Let’s make New Zealand the 1 percent

The posts at WeAreThe99Percent are sobering, shocking. They are some of people caught in the downward spiral of the US economy, but in reality it’s been happening for years as the split between the wealthy and the ‘middle class’ gets increasingly large. The stories are of cripplingly high health care costs that destroy families, of …

The steps for Apple beyond iPhone 5

Apple are releasing another iPhone, or iPhones, tomorrow, and the rest of the industry is understandably nervous. However as what is now called smartphones catch up, Apple will increasingly be playing in a space with diminishing hardware margins. Sony used to own the Walkman market (they named it), but the remainder of that industry started …

Stop the terrorists

Sea Shepherd do not deserve our protection, sympathy, and increasingly arguably, the ability to freely operate in NZ. Their latest blog post makes it clear that they are not playing by the rules: They will have to kill us to prevent us from intervening once again,” said Captain Watson. “Are the Japanese people ready to take human …