Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

Joined Silverstripe Board

Tuesday, August 17th, 2010

Last month I was honoured to join Silverstripe as a director. Silverstripe makes an open source Content Management System backed by Sapphire, an elegant PHP framework, builds websites for NZ and international customers, and has a new performance monitoring product that's rapidly gaining traction. I was on their ...

Community Management Workshop

Sunday, February 21st, 2010

I attended a workshop on community management at Webstock, and at the end asked the attendees to write down some words of wisdom for a new community manager, maybe something they wish they'd been told or something they learned at the workshop. Here's their collected advice: Networking is important—often there ...

NZICT Near Future Digital Priorities Paper

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

NZICT is an industry lobby group, representing the NZ ICT industry (software, hardware, services, networks, education, and training). They've just released a "Near Future Digital Priorities" paper. Here are my first thoughts. First, I have to applaud the industry getting together to try and figure out how it can ...

Predictions into Opportunities

Monday, November 16th, 2009

Just a heads-up: over on the O'Reilly Radar blog, I posted about the opportunities for businesses in the future based on Stephen O'Grady's predictions for 2010.

Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

The New York Public Library and Wired Magazine have collaborated to bring a set of evening lectures on how new technology is changing the economics of art with speakers Lawrence Lessig, Stephen Johnson, and the dude who did the Obama poster. I'd love to see something similar in New ...

NZ Broadband

Friday, January 30th, 2009

There hasn't been a lot of action from the new Government on broadband (or anything, really, yet) but this Economist article is food for thought about spending priorities: When it comes to promoting economic activity, it is easy to see why having broadband is better than not having it, but most ...

Submission on NZ IP law and a free trade agreement with USA

Sunday, December 7th, 2008

SUBMISSION ON THE TRANSPACIFIC STRATEGIC ECONOMIC PARTNERSHIP AGREEMENT NEGOTIATIONS WITH THE UNITED STATES To: Ministry of Foreign Affairs & Trade Introduction This Submission is from Nathan Torkington, an author, musician, and software professional whose address is [...]. Summary I strongly oppose any proposals to extend the term of copyright, entrench digital rights management, assign investigation ...

Good one, National Library!

Thursday, November 13th, 2008

My friend Aaron Swartz writes about the increasingly-evil OCLC: Not satisfied with controlling the world's largest source of book information, it wants to take over all the smaller ones as well. It's now demanding that every library that uses WorldCat give control over all its catalog records to OCLC. It literally ...

More on the bizdev shortage in NZ

Saturday, October 11th, 2008

James McGlinn emailed me a great reply to my piece on the business cofounder shortage in NZ, and he's finally posted it. You should read it because I agree with everything he says.

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 ...