Back to Vodafone, sorry Telecom

Another Telecom store experience just now, this time on Queen street. The good news is that they have a SIM cutter that will quickly turn a standard SIM card into a micro-SIM. The bad news is they were reluctant to pull it out of the drawer, and were certainly not taking responsibility for doing the …

InternetNZ: 5 questions

Dave Farrar asked each of the 12 candidates for the 5 InternetNZ councilor spots to answer some questions. I’m one of the candidates, and as they were good questions I’m posting the answers here. What do you consider the (up to) three biggest threats to InternetNZ’s vision of an open and uncaptureable Internet? Insufficient infrastructure …

Reducing roaming costs

Column number five for Fairfax is now posted online at Stuff. The columns are printed in the Businessday section of the Waikato Times, Dominion Post and Christchurch Press. Fine papers all. We are working to get them all online in a Stuff blog. It’s hard, really hard to reduce roaming costs as they are based …

Won’t these scams please go away?

Another scam today, this time from SMSbargain.net.  I have no idea how I got there but somehow this page opened up in my browser (despite pop-ups being blocked). I’m pretty sure I was not on a New Zealand based site, but the ad is targeted towards NZ: <update – I found this ad later on …

Air New Zealand looks at bulk discounts

Back in January I drafted* a lengthy post on what Air New Zealand could do better, and part of that was on regional airfares. I sampled five regional, seven domestic, two trans-Tasman and two international fares for travel in a month’s time. The results were startling, though not surprising: It’s twice the cost per kilometre …

How to launch a GroupOn clone: Groupy Deals

A few of us* founded Groupy Deals earlier this year, and we went live over Queens Birthday weekend. It’s going really well. Check out the GroupyDeals business site as well. *Groupy Deals was founded by Scott Kitney, along with Andrew Hunt, Fay French and myself. Groupy Deals is following in the footsteps of Groupon – …

Never forget to user test

Install Office 2008 12.2.5 Update, originally uploaded by LanceWiggs. Microsoft just keeps getting it wrong on usability. Here what happened when I updated Microsoft Office on the Mac this evening with the latest fixes. After running the update program (top, background), it downloaded and ran the updater itself (bottom). That program then popped up an …