My latest Businessday column is up over at Stuff. The cost to New Zealand businesses of complying with the changeover to 15 per cent GST and the other tax changes will be at least $275 million, according to my rough back-of-the- envelope calculations. The upcoming changes should have us all concerned, and small businesses in …
Author Archives: Lance Wiggs
How to avoid upgrading MYOB to cope with GST change
MYOB demonstrate again why I have switched to Xero. To cope with the GST change you either need to upgrade, or follow the instructions on their website. The instruction pages all start with the boilerplate text: “The quickest and easiest way to handle the 1 October GST and tax changes is to update your software.” This …
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Wugly stuff
I received this spam through the contact me form: Name: Wuglies Convenor of Judges Email: moderator@thewuglies.co.nz Website: Dear Web owner Congratulations!? Your webpage has just been nominated for the inaugural Wuglies. Bought to you by Microsoft Internet Explorer 9, The Wuglies exist to raise awareness of plain Jane and wugly web sites. Our driving cause …
Name suppression – the judge’s findings and how to do it properly
Whale Oil failed in his case (at least so far) and is up for some eight thousand of dollars in fines and fees. To me it was clear that his actions were breaching the law, but it’s the considered opinion (Thanks Kiwiblog) of Judge Harvey that really matters here: “The remaining nine charges having been …
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It’s time for video evidence as the standard
Two Justices of the Peace (one of whom I know) found lawyer Keith Jefferies guilty of driving while using a phone in Wellington recently. But the constable Bevan Sheffield-Cranstoun had no physical evidence to back his assertion – there was no video, no call transcript and no photo. There was only his word, as the …
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Soft Sunday News
Sunday news is traditionally a bit softer than weekday news, but today I noticed a bunch of, shall we say, softer headlines. So I decided to browse the popular news sites and copy a few of the more delightful leads and headlines. So meet a selection of headlines from 8pm on this Sunday night. Each …
YouTube Instant
Yet another classic Stanford undergraduate story. Google releases Google Instant, and so Feross Aboukhadijeh creates YouTube instant. Try it. Very shortly afterward Feross received a tweet from YouTube CEO Chad Hurley offering him a job. That’s smart – other students have stuck it out and formed companies – like Google itself. More on Venturebeat To …
The Yike Bike
I’ve just had a go on one of these amazing Yikebikes. They look beautiful, and that to me is why so many people want one. It’s up there with Apple products in its ability to attract desire. Riding it is relatively intuitive – In my short but quick burst on the bike I found that …
Writing should be free – Businessblogs
Let’s play spot the difference. Businessblogshub.com is a US website that aggregates and pushes out business writing from people wanting PR. Businessblogs.co.nz does the same here in New Zealand. Can you see the difference? It’s buried a bit, but if you dig around you will see that the US site is free for contributors to …
How not to lift things – fatal risk
I watched amazed at this lifting operation in Auckland last night. From where I was watching it appeared that the load went over the head of the workers and drivers several times, which is a fatal risk if anything goes wrong with the load. The load itself was often very cumbersome, long and skinny and …
Five reasons not to auto-DM on Twitter
(With apologies to those not on Twitter) I followed back a lot of people this weekend, and received several auto- direct messages in return. They say things like “thanks for the follow – look at me/my website/my company.” These messages are rude and make me annoyed, and here is why: They waste time as they …
Telecom Broadband meter is a bit short
Telecom may want to think about upgrading their broadband meter. My Orcon connection (over Chorus cabinetised lines) is a lot faster than their “Extreme!” speed of about 2.5 Megabits/sec. This is, of course, a good problem to have, and a symptom of ever increasing speeds. Fibre to the home will give well over ten times …
Air NZ automatic insurance ripoff
I am a huge fan of Air NZ – the people that work there are great, the experience on the ground and in the sky is superb and they were deserved winners of a number of awards this year. However as customers we owe it to them to be ever-vigilant in helping them maintain their …
We love Flowerpower, do you like?
We at Powerkiwi love our Flowerpower product, and so we have created a Facebook page to have some fun. For now we are trying to build up to a decent number of people who like the page so that we can start offering sme fun deals. Therefore we are giving away $100 of free credit …
Your tweets cost money
Read David MacGregor’s novel: Vanishing Act for free… – davidmacgregor’s posterous, originally uploaded by LanceWiggs. A snapshot of Dave MacGregor’s blog entry giving away free copies of his book shows interesting implications. Almost everyone choses not to tweet the post and get a book.
Lance Wiggs 