I’m angry. On three consecutive visits to Wellington city for coffee meetings I received 4 tickets on my motorcycle. Here’s the chap that gave me the third one – he is drawing a diagram of the location of the bike. Note that the bike is off the main footpath area, and between a tree and …
Category Archives: NZ Business
Proud to be a Kiwi. Shame on you Australia
Today I’m proud of our Government in New Zealand, and horrified at the one they have in Canberra. After the concerted #blackout campaign earlier this year the NZ government halted the implementation of the Section 92A bill that dealt very harshly with alleged copyright infringement. Today they came back with a proposed changed Section 92A, …
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Kiwibank’s Heaps – personal banking as it should be
I have no idea why it is called heaps, but Kiwibank’s new offering to personal customers looks superb. It really throws down the gauntlet to the other banks. The product lets you semi-automatically categorise your spending, and then track your spending against a budget. It’s the sort of thing previously only available with an aftermarket …
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The need for sub editing still remains
An article on Stuff with an AAP byline (but not writer’s name) reveals a little about the state of news reporting today. The original article was published in Fairfax’s Melbourne newspaper The Age yesterday – and has an author (Nicole Low). That brings us to the first finding: Big media companies share content amongst their …
Don’t drink bottled water
via @samfromwgtn this marvelous graphic. There really is no excuse not to drink tap water, especially in the Western world. I have water bottles sprinkled around the place – stashed in my bike, car and house.
Stop the spam Sky
Dear Sky Sports Please famililarise yourselves with New Zealand’s Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007. There is also a handy guide for businesses. Then include a way for me to unsubscribe from your puerile badly photoshopped spam. include the name and address of the sender – who is the sending entity? get my express consent to …
Telecom XT Outage: Unacceptable
The other day I noted that Telecom seemed to be ramping up data use sources on the XT network, asking “Is Telecom really doing this?” Commenters said I was being unfair (and perhaps I was) as the XT network is much better than AT&T’s, there is fiber to each cell site and we have data …
Corruption and restrictive regulation
An interesting finding by the World Bank’s Investment Climate Department – the less procedures required to start a business, the less likely a country is corrupt. Note that New Zealand is way to the left and bottom of this chart: There is more on the World Bank Private Sector Development blog, (article) but I tend …
Persistent offenders will be prosecuted
Whaleoil does it again – making it clear who someone is when their name is suppressed. He is defending his actions: “I will not remove the series of images in question. The way I have acted has been entirely consistent with the public interest. “I intend to vigorously fight any charges or allegations to the …
Increasing interconnectiveness of the mediasphere
WordPress.com has just added another link to the increasingly interconnected mediasphere. They’ve added the ability to login, read and post to WordPress blogs using the Twitter API. What that specifically means is that we can now post blog entries using apps like Tweetie 2.0 for the iPhone, which I am doing for this. * However …
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Is Telecom really doing this?
Combine three recent pieces of news: 1: Telecom got fined $500,000 by the Commerce Commission for offering “unlimited data usage and all the internet you can handle”, paying another $8.4m in compensation to customers. The offering was less than unlimited in speed after everybody jumped on board – oh and they were shaping as well. …
51 in the top 500 – what does it mean?
The latest Asia Pacific Deloitte Technology 500 results are out, New Zealand looks pretty good, with 51 companies making the list. It looks even better on a per-head of population basis – with New Zealand demonstrating real strength. I’d hasten to add that I do not really believe this result – as the sample is …
Tamiflu – does not work, costs a lot
A stunning indictment of Tamiflu by The Atlantic. A trail of false evidence and marketing led the US alone to spend $1.5 billion on stock piling the drug for pandemic preparation for things like SARS, and the whole world over $3 billion since H1N1 (swine flu) emerged. This week, the British medical journal BMJ published …
Who is the biggest bookstore of them all?
I’d never heard of TheNile.co.nz – but via an advertisement in Geekzone I went there to find that they claim they are New Zealand’s largest bookstore. That seemed strange – until I noticed the link at the bottom to their Australian site: Ok – so they are also Australia’s largest bookstore. Strange – I could …
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How ideas are often handled
Via Teri Abel here is the superb Scott Campbell‘s take on ways to destroy ideas.
Lance Wiggs 