Some unsolicited email spam (not to me) from Littlelot, who replace your Android or PC wallpaper with advertisements: Aside from the problems of this email being unsolicited, they also have a problem of giving away gasoline. This seems out of line with what I would hope are the ethics of the listed charities below: …
Continue reading “Do Oxfam, Amnesty and World Vision support petrol consumption?”
The Internet Party‘s website just launched, but sadly for them this is what happened when I tried to play on the video at the top of the site: I tried a bit later and had a different sort of error with the same lack of result. Policy But enough of presentation – let’s instead look …
Continue reading “Should anyone else adopt the Internet Party policies?”
Via the NBR in print, is Andrew Lewis’s excellent primer on the April and December changes introduced by the Financial Market Conduct Act. It’s a timely reminder. One change is that certain small offers, those under $2 million per year with less than 20 investors, are exempt from the complicated disclosure documents. These must be offered as …
Continue reading “Raising money is about to get a little easier”
Buried in an otherwise excellent report on NZ Tourism (found through this NZHerald article) is the statement: “Immigration NZ is investing $91 million in new visa processing technology that will enable visitors to apply for their visas online” That feels ridiculously expensive, but overall this is very important to NZ and we need to make …
Continue reading “$91 million for “new visa processing technology””
New Zealand rightly gets credit of being an easy place to do business, but sometimes we forget. As a reminder here’s an excerpt from an article on the tax implications of Kickstarter projects: In the United States, if you accept money for goods or services above a certain threshold, or at all for certain kinds of …
When I went to school over 30 years ago the norm was to walk, cycle or take public transport. Similarly a colleague I spoke to yesterday said that when he went to school in Tauranga 20 years that there were hundreds of bike racks at his school and it was hard to find a place …
Continue reading “No more little children being dropped off by their mummies”
There are a few different sources of advice for founders, with the most important ones being end users and paying customers. Below I have put a list of sources of advice in order of importance, just to push the point that the best form of advice comes from actually doing stuff and observing the results. …
Continue reading “Finding great advice and advisors for founders”
I decided to check out with Telecom’s broadband sign-up page to see how the impact of Telecom’s ongoing transformation is affecting end users. Overall things seem much easier to navigate than previously, and the plans are better. But there are still gaps between what I saw and where Telecom could, and should, be. The Technologies …
Continue reading “Telecom’s Broadband – getting there but room to improve”
What does Telecom do? For me it’s simple – as a telco (leaving aside Gen-i) it provides reliable internet and voice connectivity. That connectivity is accessed over the air and via copper and fibre, and there is a strong switch towards demand for pure data access, rather than voice, txt or other services. When Telecom …
In 2001, while I was living in the USA, I read the book Fast Food Nation, shortly after it was released. I stopped eating meat. The USA’s food system was so broken that the quality of the meat being consumed was not just poor, but dangerous to consumers. Abattoir lines were so fast that workers, …
This line records use of a certain item by New Zealand population since 2000. Where do you think it will be in say 20 years time? The statistic went up, and then down, and so the best estimate to me would be a flat or downward trend. But rather strangely the authors of this chart determined …
Continue reading “When broken forecasting means billions wasted”
The nominee for the USA’s Ambassador to New Zealand is one Mark David Gilbert. Here’s the text from the Whitehouse.gov press release, 4 months ago: Mark D. Gilbert, Nominee for Ambassador to New Zealand, Department of State Mark D. Gilbert is a Director at Barclays Wealth (formerly Lehman Brothers) in West Palm Beach, Florida. Mr. …
Continue reading “Our new US ambassador has a tough act to follow”
<updated to clarify this is for Kiwibank’s Core Banking System> Fairfax Media report that Kiwibank is signing up to SAP as their “principal computer platform” provider for their core banking system. The core banking system runs the business of the bank – including real time transactions, interest calculations and payments., and it is unclear where the line …
It’s great to see the UFB project continue, with the Quarterly Broadband Deployment Update for December 2013 showing over 27% of premises passed to date. The real question is how we can increase the pace of actual connections, currently at 1.5%. I’m trying to connect myself and can confirm that the anecdotes I’ve heard to date about …
Continue reading “UFB progress at 1.5% – who wants other 98.5%?”
BHP Billiton created this deceptively simple chart on the skills and experience of their Board of Directors in their excellent 2013 Summary Review. I challenge all boards to do the same. The categories in the table are interesting as they show what BHP Billiton sees as important. They want deep experience across the table in …
Continue reading “What Board Skills and Experience do you need?”
Lance Wiggs 