Ti Point Tork

Innovation is a Moral Good

November 20, 2011 – 9:54 am
Pondering the New Zealand fishing industry, I had an insight today. Forgive me if it's old news to you. You have three options to make more money: Lower costs. Sell more of the same stuff. Make new types of stuff to sell. In quota-limited systems such as fishing, you can't catch more fish because you don't have the quota to do so. So option 2 is out. All you can do to make more money is lower costs or find something new to sell. These are FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT propositions. If you lower costs, you don't increase the overall size of the market. If there's $5B in sales, you can make more of that $5B by lowering your costs. This isn't entirely true: elasticity of demand might increase revenue because lowering costs means you can lower the price, so more people may be able to afford it, and perhaps this new number * new ...

Posted in Business, New Zealand | 1 Comment »

Questioning University

November 16, 2011 – 8:17 pm
There's a trend now to question the value of a university education. It used to be that simply possessing a university degree gained you access to a Better Class of Job. That is no longer the case; now you have access to The Same Class of Unemployment Benefit. Even degrees in subjects without immediate business application (classics, art history, etc.) were valued as a sign of studiousness, discipline, etc. at least in so much as they put the possessor into the class of People Who Have A Brain. These days so many people are emerging with degrees that a degree alone isn't enough to separate you from the herd. That this happens in the liberal arts is understandable. But there's also a move afoot to reject Computer Science degrees: "go straight into a startup!" people say. I used to oppose this: university taught me ...

Posted in Business, New Zealand, Personal | 5 Comments »

Week 2

September 29, 2011 – 11:42 pm
A busy week but with little progress on MacLean and Higgins. I did, however, manage the Mix and Mash judging and a trip to Wellington for the Library Information Advisory Commission (LIAC), and managed to informally acquire a new project (codename: Bagley). Bagley is for a large international company, and will be delivered offshore. I'm helping a friend with it, and it promises to be both large and fun. So far we've passed through the "oh my god, it's going to happen!" stage and are pondering the myriad of details that we will be bringing together. We've started the conversations of how many of which type of person we'll need, which is the fun fantasy part of the project. In the next few weeks we'll nail down the specifics and budget. I finally got my kick-off email out with MacLean yesterday. Everyone had informally agreed to ...

Posted in Weeknotes | No Comments »

Two Upcoming Auckland Gigs

September 25, 2011 – 1:41 pm
Our band has two gigs coming up in Auckland and we'd love to see you there! We play The Thirsty Dog on K Rd on Sunday, and the set is shaping up to be a good 'un: the songs we were playing last year have really bedded down nicely. We are, if I do say so, getting good. That gig is Sunday Oct 2, and we'll start playing around 4 or 4.30. It's a 45m set, daytime, easy to get to if you're in Auckland, just $10 at the door. The setlist features songs from Gillian Welch, Tim O'Brien, and Claire Lynch and some beauties I don't want to tell you about just yet. A week later, on Sunday October 9, we play the Devonport Bunker. That's two sets, featuring new material we haven't played in front of people before. The bunker is a small intimate venue, ...

Posted in New Zealand, Personal | No Comments »

Week 1

September 23, 2011 – 1:07 pm
I love BERG London's weeknotes and have resolved to follow suit myself. I'll do it for the rest of this year and see how it goes. So, onto it! Monday was when I wrote the talk I gave on Tuesday to Orion Health. They have regular hackathons (though they don't call them that, it's the idea of setting developers and other coal-face makers loose to build things for a few days, then report back). I was their first speaker for this hackathon, and was given a very wide brief—every topic I raised with the development manager there seemed to work. So I worked backwards from what I wanted to accomplish (firing people up at the start of a hackathon) and decided that I had to point out how awesome and important software people are (they are). I had been listening to an In Our Time ...

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100% Pure Chickenshit

June 23, 2011 – 11:56 am
New Zealand has, for a long time, marketed itself as 100% Pure. In the last year, this slogan has taken a beating. The climax seems to have been when BBC Hardtalk interviewer Stephen Sackur gave Prime Minister John Key a colossal roasting over the discrepancy between reality and the slogan. The slogan was watered down to "100% Pure You", and the pressure on politicians eased off. "Whew, our international PR slogan is saved!" Call me slow, but I just realized what a disgusting cop out this is. "100% Pure" isn't just a tourism slogan, it's how we see ourselves. We have a long tradition of believing we're clean and green, and of trying to act in league with that. It's a fantastically ambitious high standard to hold ourselves to. If we pollute streams with dairy farming run-off, stop doing that. If we ...

Posted in New Zealand, Rant | 2 Comments »

Nine to Noon: 3 March 2011

March 2, 2011 – 1:40 pm
This post is about my 3 March 2011 appearance on Nine to Noon on Radio New Zealand. Listen to the show in MP3 and OGG. My notes below were made during research for the show, but we often depart from the script. In particular, this week I ad-libbed about the Christchurch Recovery Map project. Something new this week: I solicited topics from my Twitter followers, and got some great story ideas that I wouldn't otherwise have covered. Go team! Thanks to Don Christie, Bernard Hickey, and Daniel Spector. Links Life from Apple iPad 2 event, antilasers, 3d Printing company, Reprap, MakerBot, Ponoko, ThingiVerse, NZ Tech Company Sells to US Partner. Quakes and Computers * how have Christchurch computer businesses been affected? * were people outside Christchurch affected? * what's been learned? Tech business in Christchurch have been affected by the quake. Not just employees dealing with lost houses. There's still intermittent ...

Posted in New Zealand, Radio, Technology | 2 Comments »

Nine to Noon: 17 February 2011

March 2, 2011 – 12:55 pm
This post is about my 17 February appearance on Nine to Noon on Radio New Zealand. Listen to the show in MP3 and OGG. My notes below were made during research for the show, but we often depart from the script. NOTE: An alert reader wrote to RNZ after the show and pointed out that Moore's Law is only "eerily accurate" if you ignore the fact that it is restated and revised whenever facts contradict the current predictions. He pointed me to this mythbusting. Links Space shuttle computer, Moore's Law, Exponential growth, The MOST Important Problem You'll Ever See. Instapaper; Long form.org. Webstock. Moore's Law and Mobile I just bought my wife a new mobile phone, and I had to take a moment to boggle. At first it was just at the price, but then it was at what she was getting for that price. The computers we carry around in our ...

Posted in Radio, Technology | No Comments »

Nine to Noon: 3 February 2011

March 2, 2011 – 12:50 pm
I resumed my Nine to Noon radio segments on Radio New Zealand. I'll be on every other week, beginning 3 February 2011. MP3 and OGG available. Below are my notes, made as I researched the topics for the 3 February 2011 show. We often depart from the notes, so they're not a reliable substitute for what aired. Nat Torkington will cover: * is Google getting less useful? * how do we keep something forever? Links Many commentators are talking about a decline in the quality of Google's search results. It's pretty important given we all use Google. The BBC Domesday Project is a canary in the coalmine about the longevity of digital media, whose lifetime isn't long according to The US National Archives (cf the original Domesday Book). Hard drive failure rates. NZ's National Digital Heritage Archive. Search and Spam Ignorance is now a human condition. What do we do? ...

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Career Advice

February 13, 2011 – 4:46 pm
I was honoured to give a talk of career advice to the 2010 Summer of Tech students. I appear to have let a few f-bombs fly, so don't watch if that sort of thing offends you. (In fact, you should probably stop reading my blog if that sort of thing offends you. For fuck's sake.) No transcription, as my notes consisted of a scrawled mindmap. Talk embedded below. What do you want to do when you grow up? with Nat Torkington from SummerOfTech on Vimeo.

Posted in Business | No Comments »