At first I thought The Atlantic redesign was good – they are doing interesting things by putting stories in the tab drop downs. Then I tried to find Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish blog (responsible for a good chunk of the Atlantic’s traffic), and failed – I had to resort to search. On reading the blog …
Category Archives: NZ Business
Portfolio – 2009 results
I last wrote about my US equity portfolio in November, and here are the year-end results. Things have been steady since then – mainly becase the portfolio is almost entirely in cash at the moment. Overall it was a quiet investment year for me in 2009, despite the good results. I went long on Apple, …
Vodafone fails to take advantage of Telecom woes
Good for Vodafone on putting up http://www.vodafone.co.nz/leave-the-xt-network/ to try to take advantage of Telecom’s difficulties, but from there it just goes downhill. I’ve annotated their pages. First up the main promo page is pretty cluttered, and I have to say I am really unsure what the offer actually is. It seems Vodafone wants me to …
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Credit to Telecom, but a lot of work to do
Telecom has its XT and 111 woes, and the knives are being wielded across all media. Of course we in the blogosphere got our knives bloodied back in last year, and it just feels a bit sick to see the carnage now. So let’s be nice and give credit to Telecom for three things: For …
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Power supply is up – what will your prices do?
<shameless plug> Via Radio New Zealand we hear positive noises about the supply of electicity this winter: New Zealand’s third largest state power company believes the country will avoid a winter power shortage this year. ..The company (Mighty River Power) says a 130 megawatt geothermal plant being commissioned near Taupo will, on its own, exceed …
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Want to start a new company? We need developers and designers
I’m in search of designers and developers to work on a specific project. It’s going to be in competition with an existing site, so we are keeping the industry under the radar for now. Market The market is one that provides a service or product to businesses in Australia and New Zealand. There is a …
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The perils of customer reviews
Apple sent through a promotion email the other day – pitching the new version of We are the World. There was though, a problem when I clicked through: “Their heart is in the right place but this song is terrible.” “This new version, borne out of hubris and greed, features Auto Tune and rappers going …
A clever pricing approach for growing companies
Spreedly operates a service to make the process of selling subscriptions easy, and they are themselves, it seems, very good at locking in customers. One example is the Spreedly Kickstart offer, where they capture revenue and lock in early customers by asking for a large payment up front to lock in lower ongoing costs. The …
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The amazing Festo
At Equip Design Integration we like using Festo as a benchmark company. They make pneumatic equipment – beautiful pneumatic equipment: Do check out the Festo US website for more, but for now enjoy the flying penguins. <update – now beneath the fold because the video starts automatically>
How to give thanks
Workshop Evaluation for Eric Ries · Confirmation, originally uploaded by LanceWiggs. Webstock seem to do so much so well. Here’s the simple screen I saw after completing a feedback survey on Monday’s workshop with Eric Ries. The workshop was excellent, and the thank you note was just another item in the long list that made …
Why XT keeps failing
With a minor, I think, outage last night, Telecom’s XT isn’t racking up the best track record. @NealRich is the engineer that put it all together – and to his credit he fessed up to it a FooCamp. I’m a big fan of the XT network when it works – for my iPhone, and so …
Stop spamming me Dopplr
A gentle reminder to everyone that sends out email messages. An unsubscribe link is a link that says “unsubscribe” and links directly to a page that says “thank you for unsubscribing” or “are you sure Y/N?” An unsubscribe link is not “click here to login to your account and change your preferences, which means you …
The Grandmother effect is starting for Facebook
Something I wrote about for Idealog seems to be coming true: Facebook itself will also sink at some stage…. It’s very hard to predict what and when social networks will succeed and fail, but there is probably a simple test to determine the point of failure—and it’s almost certainly related to the date that your …
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Introducing MyTours
Announcing the launch of MyTours – today we have launched our first product on to iTunes. MyTours is a website that lets you load pictures, sound and text to create a tour. It’s great for Museums, local bodies, tour guides and other people that already have their own tours, and also for people that want …
More Sky spam, and another letter
Dear Sky Sports I am writing again. Last time I received your spam we had a great conversation and you promised to make some changes – which you have, and well done. I pointed you towards New Zealand’s Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007 and the the handy guide for businesses, and I suggested four actions. Let’s see how …
Lance Wiggs 