Official Rugby World Cup 2011 Tickets – Tonga v New Zealand, originally uploaded by LanceWiggs. I’m seeing a rising sense of excitement for the World Cup – in spite of, it seems, the sponsors best efforts. The streets of Auckland are busier, cars and people are increasingly decked out in team colors and businesses are …
Category Archives: NZ Business
Around Auckland
Doesn’t this building look like a transistor radio? Or an old mobile phone? Real gang members don’t turn up to the Viaduct on Auckland’s waterfront for coffees on a Saturday morning. Therefore these bikes belong to the local accountants, who are, while not being such good riders, considerably more welcome than their brethren. A new …
Giant slingshot meets angry bird
This is the sort of thing that happens when you have a genuine community and groups of kids playing together. It’s a shame about the bird though, which did not survive the experience fully intact.
A field day
It’s been a while, but some of these pictures from NZ’s Field Day bring back memories. One of the first signs we saw as we walked in. The next sign was a little more detailed. The Smartwater tech guys had a simple yet great product, that would display the water level of your tanks. I …
Being in denial
One of the most common traps in early stage businesses, or even people with ideas, is underestimating your competition. Clearbooks seems in clear denial about their competition, and is also, as a UK company, opening themselves up for challenge under their fair trading law. For the record Xero, which I use, has many of the …
No YooBee No
YooBee is a poor enough name, which I hear through the grapevine was given to the branding agency, BRR. But how it must hurt when clients take your work and add other things to it. These are from the front of the Newmarket YooBee store. Compare that to anything Apple, which if they ever build …
No No No do not buy a house
I wish the Financial Market Advisors bill would also cover people that write articles like this: It was the cover story. For the record now is a bloody awful time to buy a house. The economic fundamentals in the world are very fragile, the rent versus buy equation is horribly skewed towards buying and home …
Blog refresh
Thanks to Su Yin for the refresh of the blog design – which was several years old. The site is still hosted on WordPress.com and now uses the theme Twenty Ten.
Western Australia recollections
I was recently in Western Australia for 2 weeks, spending 4 days in each of Kalgoorlie and Mt Keith, and the remainder of the time in Perth. I arrived on Saturday night. While everything else was closed, after hours you can always be sure of the availability of alcohol and gambling. Seriously – they still …
Unsafe New Zealand work practices – Quay street, Auckland
I often take photos of worksites in New Zealand, and they tend to carry from poor to appalling. That doesn’t mean to say that there are not better sites out there – those are usually behind purpose built walls and have strict health and safety rules. This scene, shot on Quay street in Auckland recently, …
Continue reading “Unsafe New Zealand work practices – Quay street, Auckland”
A good year to be short
Like Teresa Gattung I see very little broad potential in international stock markets. Many shares are overvalued, and it seems like a huge correction is coming. But there are always exceptions, and for me in the US markets two companies stand out – Apple and Amazon. Each are critical players in the transfer of media …
Stay away from our All Blacks Kevin Roberts
The dumb as anything Abstain from Sex for the All Blacks campaign was something pushed for by Saatchi and Saatchi’s CEO Kevin Roberts. I’m sure he is an awesome bloke, but some of his advertising-agency-driven recommendations seem way off kilter. Conflict of interest? The Abstain campaign was devised by Roberts, as an excellent Press article …
Continue reading “Stay away from our All Blacks Kevin Roberts”
Lessons from a relationship gone bad
Doing business with a partner can be a lot of fun – but what if things go out of control? A crazy case is playing out in public right now – with Kelsey Upson from Architectureblog.org, and what appears to be her ex Logan Douglas at NZ Cloud Hosting. First hint was a tweet I …
Is your pricing based on analysis and not commercial speculation?
A New Zealand executive from Marsh, the giant insurance broker, gave an unscheduled talk at the NZCID conference today. (I didn’t get his name) While the good news was that even after Christchurch international insurers have appetite for insuring NZ property, the bad news is of course that prices and terms have changed for the …
Continue reading “Is your pricing based on analysis and not commercial speculation?”
Electricity prices will keep rising
I just saw a talk by Carl Hansen, the Chief Executive for the NZ Electricity Authority. He made a comment which is retrospectively obvious. Electricity is a natural resource, and follows natural resource economics. So investors in electrical generation will build the the lowest price solutions first, and as time goes on the cost of …
Lance Wiggs 