The currency fall has a wonderful effect for exporters, especially those who have most of their costs back here in New Zealand. As I write this, the NZD versus the USD has fallen about 10% since earlier this year. As an exampled of what this means I’ve made a simple spreadsheet estimating the impact on Xero. My take is that …
Category Archives: NZ Business
Sell your house privately in New Zealand – the book.
Over at 200 Square we help people sell their house by using the latest internet tools, and avoiding expensive print and high agent overheads like fancy offices. Our licensed real estate agents to the wheeling and dealing for clients, and are very successful and selling houses. The upside is that it costs just $4,500 to sell a …
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The comics of climate change
XKCD elegantly sums up what we are facing: We really don’t know what that question mark will be, but it’s going to be scary. It won’t be this scary: But it’s pretty clear that the implications for global warming are very serious for humans – and other land mammals. It’s interesting to look at …
How do we solve the Gender Gap?
The #YesAllWoman Twitter stream is the latest voice about the serious issue of the gender gap. There is a lot of coverage elsewhere, but for my part I want to try to summarise what the #YesAllWomen Twitter stream is saying, then ask ourselves, as men what our right response should be. Three Themes I’m going to pick just three themes …
Signing customers – learning from Optimizely’s website
Optimizely are in the business of helping people improve their websites so they can sign up more customers or achieve other desired results. They just raised US$57 million, on the back of US$28 million last year, and are growing very quickly. So they must be doing some things really well – so let’s take look at their own marketing website …
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Do Oxfam, Amnesty and World Vision support petrol consumption?
Some unsolicited email spam (not to me) from Littlelot, who replace your Android or PC wallpaper with advertisements: Aside from the problems of this email being unsolicited, they also have a problem of giving away gasoline. This seems out of line with what I would hope are the ethics of the listed charities below: …
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Should anyone else adopt the Internet Party policies?
The Internet Party‘s website just launched, but sadly for them this is what happened when I tried to play on the video at the top of the site: I tried a bit later and had a different sort of error with the same lack of result. Policy But enough of presentation – let’s instead look …
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Raising money is about to get a little easier
Via the NBR in print, is Andrew Lewis’s excellent primer on the April and December changes introduced by the Financial Market Conduct Act. It’s a timely reminder. One change is that certain small offers, those under $2 million per year with less than 20 investors, are exempt from the complicated disclosure documents. These must be offered as …
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$91 million for “new visa processing technology”
Buried in an otherwise excellent report on NZ Tourism (found through this NZHerald article) is the statement: “Immigration NZ is investing $91 million in new visa processing technology that will enable visitors to apply for their visas online” That feels ridiculously expensive, but overall this is very important to NZ and we need to make …
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Do you have your business licenses?
New Zealand rightly gets credit of being an easy place to do business, but sometimes we forget. As a reminder here’s an excerpt from an article on the tax implications of Kickstarter projects: In the United States, if you accept money for goods or services above a certain threshold, or at all for certain kinds of …
No more little children being dropped off by their mummies
When I went to school over 30 years ago the norm was to walk, cycle or take public transport. Similarly a colleague I spoke to yesterday said that when he went to school in Tauranga 20 years that there were hundreds of bike racks at his school and it was hard to find a place …
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Finding great advice and advisors for founders
There are a few different sources of advice for founders, with the most important ones being end users and paying customers. Below I have put a list of sources of advice in order of importance, just to push the point that the best form of advice comes from actually doing stuff and observing the results. …
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Telecom’s Broadband – getting there but room to improve
I decided to check out with Telecom’s broadband sign-up page to see how the impact of Telecom’s ongoing transformation is affecting end users. Overall things seem much easier to navigate than previously, and the plans are better. But there are still gaps between what I saw and where Telecom could, and should, be. The Technologies …
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Telecom’s burden is marketing: Spark
What does Telecom do? For me it’s simple – as a telco (leaving aside Gen-i) it provides reliable internet and voice connectivity. That connectivity is accessed over the air and via copper and fibre, and there is a strong switch towards demand for pure data access, rather than voice, txt or other services. When Telecom …
Let’s fix the New Zealand Food System
In 2001, while I was living in the USA, I read the book Fast Food Nation, shortly after it was released. I stopped eating meat. The USA’s food system was so broken that the quality of the meat being consumed was not just poor, but dangerous to consumers. Abattoir lines were so fast that workers, …
Lance Wiggs 