Archive for the ‘New Zealand’ Category

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 ...

NZ Values

Monday, June 9th, 2008

I had a thought on Saturday that wouldn't let go. Here's the brief pitch: let me know what you think.

Lazyweb: NZ Budget Hero

Sunday, June 8th, 2008

I'm impressed by Budget Hero, a game from the American Marketplace radio show. It lets you see the effects of the various spending possibilities (bring the troops back home, raise the social security eligibility age, etc.) and see the long-term wealth of the nation. I played it once ...

National’s Broadband Plans

Saturday, May 3rd, 2008

I see in Rod Drury's blog that National have released their first real economic policy and it's to do with funding fibre-to-the-home in NZ. It's good! Anyone who travels knows how dire the bandwidth situation is here, and it's worse on the ground. For me, bandwidth = productivity. ...

Telecom hosting not worth the premium

Monday, March 17th, 2008

A client made the decision to use Telecom as their web site host. I argued against it because the price differential was so great between Telecom and, well, anyone else. The client's management decided to go with solid blue chip Telecom. The service we've had from them ...

Explaining technology in words

Thursday, February 28th, 2008

Julie Starr faced an interesting problem recently: how to explain RSS, aggregators, even Twitter to a room full of journalism students ... without slides or a net connection. In attempting this, as she says, she "found a new respect for teachers this week". As a recovering teacher (or, ...

Font Geeks in New Zealand

Tuesday, February 26th, 2008

I often joke that Foo Camp ("Friends of O'Reilly") should be Font Camp (Friends of Nat Torkington) in New Zealand. I love typography and was delighted to find "The Font Scene in New Zealand", a list of typographers and fonts made by New Zealanders or by New Zealand companies. ...

Crafty Kiwis

Sunday, February 24th, 2008

Congrats to Sue Tyler and the Ponoko team, and all the others who were interviewed by Peter Griffin for the Idealog issue focusing on craft. The article (which will be online in a few weeks) has photos of various Ponoko-made goods, including a necklace of sheep which looked awfully ...

The Eyes Have It

Thursday, January 11th, 2007

About two weeks ago, my uncle Zom got a little carried away with some repairs in the cabin and drove the family fishing boat ("Foam") onto some rocks. Getting it off damaged the propeller and keel, so ten days ago he and I took advantage of the time, tide, ...

All Good

Thursday, January 11th, 2007

I haven't blogged in a while. That doesn't mean things are bad. In fact, it's the complete opposite. Something happened around September, the end of my last trip away for 2006--something good. We just clicked. We went from feeling like strangers in a strange land to ...