Archive for September, 2008

NZ Broadband Pricing and Network Neutrality

Sunday, September 28th, 2008

In this Ziff-Davis Australia article, the leaders of Australia's three largest ISPs declare network neutrality to be an American problem and explain why. It's an interesting argument, but I think there are some key elements unstated in the article. In America, largely for historical reasons, residential customers have "all you ...

NZ Open Source Awards

Sunday, September 28th, 2008

(reposted from The O'Reilly Radar blog) Wednesday night in Wellington is a lot more exciting when the New Zealand Open Source Award ceremony is on! The Minister for Communications and Information Technology, David Cunliffe, made a brief speech lauding open source and was around to hand awards to the ...

Memo to Future Nat on Slides

Saturday, September 27th, 2008

Reading back through my notebook at my jottings from last week's frantic flurry of meetings, I found this hard-learned lesson: When preparing slides for others, they MUST read them when you're done and MUST give a trial presentation with the hardware in place and MUST be the presenter doing these things. Yes, ...

Software Freedom Day Notes: ACTA

Friday, September 19th, 2008

Mark Harris lead this session. Was at SSC, MORST, now Independent. When Wikileaks in May released ACTA doc, saw NZ mentioned, began digging. ACTA is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Proposed by Japan and USA, but not limited to them at all. About eight countries, mainly G8 and a few ...

Business values

Sunday, September 14th, 2008

I had dinner tonight with my friend Cath Lewis, the awesome real estate agent. She told me that her new company felt right because honesty and empathy were at the top of their values. I think most of us aspire to those, but it was lovely to see ...

Software Freedom Day

Sunday, September 14th, 2008

I'll be in Wellington on Saturday, September 20th, for Software Freedom Day. It's open source's open day, a chance for the general public who might have been curious about open source to come along and learn more. There'll be copies of Linux given out and a WellyLUG installfest ...

Webstock 2009 Lineup Announced

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

I'm speaking at Webstock 2009 and really looking forward to it. What an amazing lineup of talent they have! I've been privileged to meet many of these folks before, and I'm honoured and intimidated to be in their ranks. I can safely say that New Zealand has never ...

The Tyranny of Distance

Thursday, September 4th, 2008

Jenny Morel is raising a $100M NZ VC fund. That's good news, in that NZ needs smart angels and VCs. I've had a number of NZ friends making the rounds of US venture capital firms and angels looking for investors, and the message has always been "not while ...

Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far

Thursday, September 4th, 2008

I found this list on the web and loved it. The ones that particularly rang true with me: 5. Being not truthful always works against me. 8. Drugs feel great in the beginning and become a drag later on. 9. Over time I get used to everything and start taking for granted. 15. ...

NZ’s Business Talent Crisis

Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008

Kiwi Foo Camp was my way of finding and support great technical talent in NZ. Last week I realized that NZ's critical shortage isn't in technical staff, it's in business staff. This goes beyond the widely-deplored lack of VC experience—where are our deal-making CEOs, the well-networked bizdev gurus? I ...