Good to see Gareth Morgan putting actions behind words. His newest venture is a KiwiSaver product, and information is available at aptly named Kiwisaver.com. Great scoop on getting that url. Gareth is on a campaign to remove a lot of the shoddy practices in New Zealand’s investment community. The new Kiwisaver product is aiming for …
Category Archives: Life
How are my Samoan investments doing?
..my Kiva.org investments that is. A while back I lent money to 5 entrepreneurs via Kiva.org in Keyna and Samoa. The three Samoans have already started repayments, and I have pseudo credit for about 8% of the original amount from each of them. This speed is great, as it keep me engaged in Kiva and …
Amazon logistics: single shipping
I ordered 21 books from Amazon the other day, choosing, as I always do, ‘expidited international shipping’. The books normally get shipped in 2 or 3 boxes, but this was my email inbox this morning….. Has Amazon figured that it is actually cheaper to ship items by piece to NZ than in a few bigger boxes? …
TheAtlantic.com
The Atlantic Monthly magazine continues its transformation from an excellent magazine and ok website into an excellent magazine and an excellent website. The site now features A lister bloggers Matthew Yglesias and Andrew Sullivan, along with James Fallows and Ross Douthat who are a senior Atlantic correspondent and a senior Atlantic editor. The homepage, as …
Blenheim air show
Somewhat randomly I went to the Blenheim airshow the other week. It was remarkably good. I was on the phone to a colleague in Australia when this trundled around the corner: Before you knew it a full-on dog fight was in progress, complete with bombs: Some airforce stunt pilots made for this lovely shot: While …
Worldwide Crackberry
Has someone actually done it? The biggest pain when travelling is that either your international friends and associates need to call your foreign number, or you have to buy a local phone or sim card. There are problems with both – the first incurrs costs for both you and your callers, and many in the …
Factoids from the 2007 Digital fact pack
Adage has published the ‘2007 Digital Fact Pack‘, where you can glean vital tidbits such as: Online display advertising was $9.77bn in 2006 according to ‘TNS Media Intelligence’…. …..and about $4.9bn according to ‘eMarketer’. One number would have been useful, two numbers is a joke. eMarketer projects 2007 Display ad and rich media/video revenue of …
Underpaid Kiwi executives
There are a few million dollar earning executives in NZ – and the Herald’s Owen Hembry believes that we are now on par with Australia, but that there is a gap underneath that. While we have a handful of CEO level people being paid well, there is a big payment hole in the next two …
Housing roller coaster ready to plunge
This is amazing – some wag has plotted Robert Shiller’s series of US housing prices on a roller coaster. Do check it out – it is an amazing way to see a data series. Follow along and marvel as you go up and down and up and down. However, be afraid as the final long …
Apple and democracy
Apple’s dictionary has views…..
Craplets and responsive advertisng
On April 5th WSJ’s Mossberg slams Windows PC’s [subscription reqd] as coming with ‘craplets’ – or trial software that is crippled. He received massive feedback, and responded on the 12th of April with a follow-up article suggesting a variety of cures, including the ultimate of getting a mac instead. “So, even my year-old Mac laptop …
Gliding in….
Apparently, from Wednesday week, some Qantas and AirNZ planes will be gliding into Auckland airport (with jets set on idle) to conserve fuel. Hopefully they won’t announce the fact to passengers. Or maybe they should announce it to passengers – frequent flyers will know something is up…. ” [These planes] typically arrive at times of …
Sao Paulo is billboard free…
Via Boing boing. A bunch of photos are on Flickr Will Auckland be next?
why vlogging is limited. for now
Matt Ygelsias, one of the early and influential US political bloggers, introduces his brother Nick, and generously gets upstaged as said brother takes down video-blogging. Essentially watching vlogging is too slow, and too annoying. Nick is right, but then again not everyone is as smart as the Yglesias family, and you have to wonder how …
Sunday Star Times 2, NZHerald 0
First the Sunday Star Times publishes a great editorial lamenting the NZHerald’s decision to outsource their core editorial competency – the sub editors. The outsourcing, for my mind, seems to be a dumb decision made by an MBA not a newspaperman. “Subbing factories will turn out factory newspapers…. Then the Sunday Star Times also publishes …
Lance Wiggs 