The Atlantic’s photo survey of America at Work (or not) is doing the rounds. It’s a compelling set of pictures that showcases all that is right and wrong about the world and the US today, and I highly recommend having a look. The survey is amazing, and sad. My own impressions of the work being …
Category Archives: NZ Business
Stuffed pictures
For some reason Stuff have chosen to “protect” their photos by disabling right-clicking. This is a giant leap backwards. Firstly it makes for an awful browsing experience. I tend to randomly right-click on things as I browse, and the pop-up dialog box is unexpected behavior. It’s behavior that feels like it breaks the internet. Secondly …
Share portfolio 2011
US portfolio results for 2011. A relatively simple trading year for my US share portfolio, which was up pleasingly versus the benchmark of 0%. All I did was buy some Call options on Amazon (betting that would go higher). I later sold some of them, bought some Puts to hedge against the price dropping too …
Xero blog: Focus on the customer, and do so with your strengths
Xero’s blog has drifted off course recently, as they commissioned external writers to come up with such marvels as Choosing the right smartphone for your business, How to avoid holiday computer disasters, Social networking policy: what’s in yours?, How to exit a business and win and How to make sure your emails aren’t marked as spam. The quality of the …
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2011 in review (auto-post)
Below is an automatically generated post by WordPress.com. While I don’t agree entirely with the direction of WordPress (the last thing we need is yet another social network), I do enjoy their essentially free service that continuously gets better. The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: …
Investing with appropriate speed
So you are, or are not an Angel. But as commenters pointed out from that post there are several ways to invest, and we don’t want to scare off potential investors. I got some flack for being a bit too negative, and sure, perhaps I was a bit harsh. Everyone starting a business is looking for …
Lotto investments
Well it seems the years of investment in lotto tickets for a Nelson couple paid off: Nelson region couple celebrating their $8.2 million Lotto win say they will retire earlier than planned. They had a strategy: The couple has been playing 10 lines of the same Lotto numbers, with all the variations of the Powerball …
OurFarSouth – the route
On February 10th we are heading South. If you know a school that would like to be involved in following the trip and learning about the region, then point them to http://www.ourfarsouth.org/education, and this brochure for schools. (Credit for the map goes to @ksuyin)
Are you an Angel? Probably not.
The other night I was speaking to a self-described angel. I asked the standard questions of “What have you invested in?” and teased out approximate answers for “how much, with how many others, when and tell me about the company?”. The answers were shocking to me – he had invested in just one company, it was several …
The ultimate protective gear
This really has to be seen to be believed. As the backbone of the imperial army, the Stormtroopers are the empire’s legions, a mass of menacing power in their awe-inspiring armor. Now, one of the most iconic uniforms in the STAR WARS™ universe has been exquisitely rendered in leather by the UD Replicas’ team, setting a …
The Internet is more important for us than any other media
The New Zealand version of the World Internet Project survey, which Internet NZ funded, has just been released. Apparently only 86% of us use the internet. I guess the others are too you, old, sick, or – and this is the big issue – poor and uneducated. But the finding I most appreciated was that …
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Introducing Define Instruments
At Texmate NZ we got tired of being confused with text editing software and our former US sister company. We were also increasingly conscious that the name that meant little to our clients or staff, and that we’ve moved on a lot since the early days under the name. So we embarked on a rebranding exercise. We …
Shame Shame Shame MahiFX
MahiFX is getting rave reviews for the quality of their web design. That’s nice, and good that a local NZ company did to this sort of quality, but while the design is nice, the content is disgusting. Here’s the home page. You enter your salary and wonder who John Paulson is. No – it’s not Hank …
Nobody listens to me. Or you.
Via the WSJ are the sobering statistics on the share of people who have gone ‘wireless only’. The article covers this in context of political polling. The law in the USA, where customers pay to receive as well as make mobile phone calls, is that pollsters cannot use autodiallers or robot calls, and must use …
Best post ever
The jury is back – and the final numbers in. The Let’s make New Zealand the percent post attracted an amazing amount of readership (for this blog). It got picked up …somewhere… and traffic went nuts, and then in early November traffic abruptly halted. All up it received 355000 views, with just 6660 of them …
Lance Wiggs 