Fairfax NZ Digital chief Bernard Hickey is now blogging, at Show Me the Money. I worked with Bernard at Fairfax when he came across from the Independent Financial Review to run Fairfax Digital. Good guy. Bernard is first and foremost a professional journalist, and is always good for some insights and opinions on what the …
Category Archives: Business
Evergreen: Why Telecom is a poor company
That Telecom Strategy post below isn’t just some mindless rant. (well no more than normal) The Evergreen Project, which I led for a while at McKinsey (and which turned into a book) may give some context for those comments. The Evergreen work was an enormous quantitative and qualitative effort, which took millions of dollars and …
Xero – the product
I’ve been playing with Xero’s demo, which is well worth looking at. You land on the dashboard, which has a nice summary of what is going on. What is particularly pleasing though, in true Don’t Make Me Think style, is that you are not just looking at information, but you are being asked to do …
Apple Numbers….
I’m playing with Apple’s new OSX spreadsheet – numbers. It is lovely to look at – you can put multiple sheets on a page, and so you can really drive to a good looking layout without worrying about the column sizes in the first table affecting how you lay out a table below. Let’s try …
Direct Broking versus eTrade – Fees
Fees for trading in NZ stocks seem to be still based on ancient premises – percentage takes and high rates. Here are ASB’s fees – they charge you the same $30 for a $500 or $10,000 transaction. Ditto with Direct Broking, who have a slightly lower ticket clipping rate, but still set the baseline at …
Jasons, vianet and Trade Me.
A new beta travel site from Jasons. Interestingly they are targeting Australia and the South Pacific as well as NZ. They have 168 listings for Wellington. Vianet, Trade Me’s Travel partner, has 80. However, Jason’s site only displays 10 results at a time, doesn’t map them at all. The battle is on. My money (and …
Vista for $US66 in China
Smart move by Microsoft – make the price of their software low enough so that the extra cost over a pirated copy is worth the positive feeling by buying a legal copy. It’s still really expensive compared to the average income, but they have to draw a line in the sand at some point. The …
Facebook, LinkedIn and Second Life…
Sometimes I really have to sit back and wonder at our short memories… Facebook is the new new thing it seems, even though it has been around since 2004 – starting at Harvard and spreading to other Boston and Ivy League universities. I have an ivy league alumni email address, so in theory could have …
pay phones, funny money, income and Telecom
Chicago’s OHare airport is ripping out pay phones and replacing them with power sockets, chairs and counters. Bless them – I’m sick of wandering around (usually american) airports looking for power sockets. Disposable income for “Managers” is largest in Saudi Arabia, small in the USA and generally better in third world countries than first world. …
Continue reading “pay phones, funny money, income and Telecom”
42 investor return
15.5% per annum – that’s the investor return Mark Clare is reporting for 42 Below IPO takers. It is a great article. Folks – that’s not success for those shareholders (but it was for the founders and financiers). An IPO is risky business, and expected returns are much higher. The exit was pretty smooth though, …
Book now pay later with Qantas.com.au
About time – we’ve aways been able to do this with travel agents, and now Qantas lets you schedule a flight and then commit later. Unfortunately there is a $25 deposit, which you lose if you do not commit. It is unclear whether you lose this if you move the flight. (So it isn’t perfect …
On IPOs Xero and BF
To me a successful IPO: is fully subscribed raises the money at a fair price results in a healthy listing Xero was fuly subscribed, BF was not. We shall wait and see whether BF is able to make the second deadline with a meaningful shareholder base. To determine whether the price was fair, we look …
on getting it done
A message to Garcia is a delightful little story – which perhaps belabors the point a little later on, but worth a read of the first screen. It’s about taking responsibility and getting stuff done. These days a fable like this would be published as some sort of hokey business book.
Average NZ card transaction size
The average electronic debit & credit card transaction size in NZ is $4.6bn/80m = $57. From memory that average transaction size seems really high – I recall figures of closer to $30 from US and historical NZ experiences. <update – seems I’m wrong – this presentation is showing much higher numbers for the USA – …
Wellosphere Interconectedness
Brenda L (who this blog thinks, for some strange reason, is kiwgrll) has a great post on the interconnectedness of the Wellington blog community – the Wellosphere perhaps. Let me tweak a few things. Rowan no longer works at Trade Me – he is at Xero, where Rod is the founder/CEO. I’m also gone from …
Lance Wiggs 