Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
Tuesday, May 29th, 2018
There's an open consultation about to end, on the changes MBIE would like to make to NZ's R&D incentives. In particular, they'll phase out the Callaghan Growth Grants and replace them with R&D tax credits. As the FAQ says, There are differences in the definition of eligible expenditure between the ...
Posted in Business, New Zealand, politics, Rant, Technology | No Comments »
Sunday, October 30th, 2016
I was just catching up on Tim Kong's excellent blog, when I read this great quote from Dan Carter:
"One thing we talk about over and over with this current All Blacks side is about never focusing on the outcome. We view the outcome as a function of following our processes. ...
Posted in Business, Technology | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 25th, 2016
(Wynyard Group, an NZ tech high-growth company [or, perhaps, not-so-high growth] just entered voluntary administration. On Twitter, a friend was adamant bad luck had nothing to do with it. Instead of a tweetstorm, here's my response in a vintage retro format known as "a blog post")
You can always look back at every ...
Posted in Business, New Zealand, Technology | No Comments »
Saturday, April 30th, 2016
It's bloody hard to build something new into the world. Don't let anyone tell you it's easy: there's a lot of unfunded and unrecognised work that you have to do before you can get to the point where fame and/or fortune arrive. And once you've finished the painful birth of ...
Posted in Business, Technology | No Comments »
Thursday, January 28th, 2016
I write a short daily series for O'Reilly Media, Four Short Links, which I've done for years. I recently posted a link to someone's "10 Golden Rules for Becoming a Better Programmer" and said "what are your 10 rules for being better in your field? If you haven’t built a list, then you aren’t ...
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Monday, January 4th, 2016
I was asked for comment by Bill Bennet from the NZ Herald, for a piece on Kiwi startups moving to Silicon Valley. He built a nice little article, in which "Torkington says" features heavily. My policy is that if I email journalists, I'll blog my side of the conversation for transparency's sake.
I ...
Posted in Business, New Zealand, Technology | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 20th, 2015
In this internal 1972 DEC memo (PDF) about the PDP-16 re-release, modern tech companies should find plenty of familiar territory:
While the PDP-16 has been marginally successful to date,
some problems have been noted.
1. Since the product, in its present form, is relatively
complex, it is difficult to train salesmen.
2. Since the ...
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Friday, July 10th, 2015
I moderated a panel today at Gather on the topic of "Work". We had representatives from different types of work: self-employed, salaried employee, startup, and investor. As moderator, my role wasn't to share my opinions. Fortunately, on the Internet I'm also blogger, and my role as a blogger is to share ...
Posted in Business, Technology | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 20th, 2013
The NZ Arts Foundation has launched Boosted, a way to crowdfund arts projects. Now, if you're like me, you're probably wondering "don't we already have several ways of doing that? I mean, Kiwi artists have already used Kickstarter and PledgeMe to fund projects."
Boosted's key point of difference is ...
Posted in Business, New Zealand, Technology | 1 Comment »
Monday, March 4th, 2013
Kiwi Foo Camp just ended. This year, I collected Twitter handles as part of registration and I wanted to create a Twitter list. Twitter doesn't provide an easy way to do this: you're supposed to visit each person's Twitter page and then add them to the list. Many ...
Posted in Technology | No Comments »