Author Archives: Lance Wiggs

About Lance Wiggs

@lancewiggs

Investing on the dot – Syft

Posted on May 24, 2013

Some early stage investment is speculative, and other investment is into a steady growth curve. Christchurch based mass spectrometer company Syft seemed to never want to emerge from the speculative early stage, absorbing over $30m of investment and revenue without … Continue reading →

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Well done NZX

Posted on May 10, 2013

NZX – MRP – Mighty River Power, originally uploaded by LanceWiggs. A lot of people are visiting the NZX.com site today, with one thing on their mind – the Mighty River Power float. How delightful when we see in NZX … Continue reading →

Posted in NZ Business | 1 Comment

MiniMonos is closing; MinoMonsters is hiring.

Posted on May 1, 2013

No – they are not the same company. Sadly Kiwi Melissa Clark-Reynolds’ MiniMonos is closing down. It’s a virtual world for kids full of monkeys, and seems to have had a good run, so this is a tough time for … Continue reading →

Posted in NZ Business | Tagged | 10 Comments

Integrity: What to do if your academic paper is challenged

Posted on April 21, 2013

In the news recently is University of Massachusetts Amherst economics doctoral student Thomas Herndon, who reworked a very influential paper, and found some real calculation errors. He dug into the “Growth in a Time of Debt” paper by Harvard’s  Carmen Reinhart and … Continue reading →

Posted in NZ Business | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

Electrickery – 10 alternative suggestions for changing NZ’s electricity industry

Posted on April 19, 2013

<update = 10:20, Friday morning I’ve edited this post since publishing last night.> Let’s have a look at the Greens proposal to reduce electricity prices. I’m entering this as a sceptic, but also as founder of Powerkiwi [join!]. Powerkiwi sold … Continue reading →

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New Zealand’s tourists are very very happy

Posted on April 8, 2013

Buried in this MBIE report on the tourism outcome from the 2011 Rugby World cup was this chart: The little red pice of the left hand side of the bottom bar represents the percentage of people who gave their trip … Continue reading →

Posted in NZ Business | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Can we replace the Tiwai smelter with a data center?

Posted on April 3, 2013

(I was going to save this for Nine To Noon tomorrow, where I’m doing the technology segment, but things are moving fast. But do listen in) A few people have muttered, sometimes out loud, that one possibility for the apparently … Continue reading →

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Let’s stop hurting our container opening dock and warehouse workers

Posted on March 28, 2013

About a year and a quarter ago I was lucky enough to do some consulting work for Syft Technologies, a technology led company with a better mass spectrometer. They were well known for a few years, and even listed for … Continue reading →

Posted in NZ Business | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Stand firm Meridian on Tiwai – we can all win here

Posted on March 28, 2013

Patrick Smellie reports in the NBR that Meridian are unlikely to reach an agreement with Rio Tinto on renegotiating the 18 year electricity supply agreement for Tiwai aluminium smelter. I guess it’s time I should weigh in, and support Meridian in standing firm. … Continue reading →

Posted in NZ Business | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Novopay is Not Found

Posted on March 21, 2013

Not Found, originally uploaded by LanceWiggs. A real basic failure from Novopay that is symptomatic of the much greater issues. Even now, months after launch, the site does not resolve unless you type the full http://www.novopay.govt.nz. I have not typed … Continue reading →

Posted in NZ Business | 5 Comments

Lightknight: Place a big order now

Posted on March 19, 2013

Lightknight is receiving customer interest, reports Christopher Adams from the NZHerald (no paywall yet). So I thought I’d check them out. I had no idea I could also give them a big order. It seems like a good product – lights … Continue reading →

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Nothing Advanced Here

Posted on March 19, 2013

Nothing advanced here, originally uploaded by LanceWiggs. A search for my site on Google shows only one post has an Advanced reading level – and it was written by my father. Read what you like into that.

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Are NZ house auctions illegal?

Posted on March 19, 2013

Over on 200Square Grant Wakelin wonders whether some house auctions are illegal: ..real estate sales and auctions are governed by among other things the Real Estate Agents Act 2008. Under those rules there is a case to argue that property … Continue reading →

Posted in NZ Business | Tagged | 4 Comments

Doing business the hard way

Posted on March 12, 2013

Good news: A US-based site for doing the legal documents for venture capital backed start-ups in the USA. It’s not the first, but it does seem lovely to use, and they have yCombinator’s General Counsel as an advisor. Bad news: … Continue reading →

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What makes for a good newsletter?

Posted on March 8, 2013

About 13 years ago I started an internal newsletter at McKinsey, with the intent to educate and inform other consultants about the goings on online and in telecommunications. It failed badly. That first newsletter was a PDF of several 800 … Continue reading →

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