I retired from personal blogging in July 2008 but you can find me over at blog.xero.com
Follow @roddrury
Microsoft buys VoIP provider Teleo.
Notable as Scoble reckons it may be a Skype Killer.
It turns every phone number into a clickable call — if you were using it, for instance, you could call my cell phone (which is listed on my blog on the right side) just by clicking. Yes, you can call from your computer directly to my cell phone. This is very cool. Is SIP-based and goes through firewalls (Skype doesn’t work at many corporations). It’s the only SIP-based one that goes through firewalls.
Really good event. Great to reconnect with so many people met over the years.
As a trade show TechEd NZ is excellent. Most big companies are here. Gen-I has sent 400 people and ASB around a 100. Good to see companies investing in training.
Intergen sponsored the HandsOn labs so had 22 people here. Tony’s race car definitely got people excited.
For ISV’s it’s a great opportunity for to re-engage with prospects and let them check out progress made over the past year.
It was a bit disappointing to see only a few NZ ISV’s displaying. Hopefully that will improve for next year. I think this will be our major NZ event for next year.
We gave away an iPod shuffle. Winner was Julian Thompson from Datacom out of Wellington.
A couple of Vodafone guys (probably on their last day of employment) challenged the Telecom data guys to a speed test at TechEd - at the Telecom stand (what were they thinking!).
Ping test
network/lowest/average
- Telecom / 91 / 133
- Vodafone / 211 / 224
Wake up from dormant
- Telecom 600 ms
- Vodafone 4500 ms
From Vodafone:
“We’re getting a good old fashioned hiding”
“We’ll let you have that one as well”
This is a good show. Small obviously compared to the US, but most significant companies are here. As there are few ISV’s we’re getting great leads and seeing a lot of people we’ve met in formal presentations over the past year and able to give them a good update.
The Segway is a hit. Telecom have a couple of hired ones here as well.
Great to meet up with old friends. The NZ industry is small so everyone knows everyone. A number of people I’ve known for 4 different lives.
No facility for barcoding/scanning of attendees is the only real difference between here and TechEd US.
Had a few blog readers come up and say hi. Great to meet new people.
The Telecom guys in the booth next door at TechEd just upgraded my T3G card for full 3G speeds.
Smoking!
Gary, Nic, Mike and I will around in our Orange shirts. I’ll mainly be manning the AfterMail stand. Please come and say hi.
I’ll have the Segway up there so don’t be shy.
Congrats to Tim Haines who won the NZ .Net User Group Blog of the year.
It’s great to some great Kiwi tech blogs evolving.
Thanks for those who voted. Tim’s mum must have clicked more than mine.
In my last post I have to search over my site for a previous blog entry.
A great Google trick is the site switch. Say to look for some words found only in uk sites you can enter in the Google query …
search term site:uk
The site switch restricts the search to uk domains. To look on my site for a previous posting I entered into Google …
evaluation site:www.drury.net.nz
Which allowed me to search over just my site.
We’ve been working with Phil Cockfield of the last few months. He would be one of the most talented people I’ve met for taking complex technical concepts and making them easy to understand.
I had a quick chat leaving the office yesterday about a model of web sales engagement we have. So Phil flicks me this …
I’ve blogged this before. As we’re evolving the web sales process we’re seeing is
- Awareness - people finding out about you
- Education - learning who are you and why to they need your product
- Evaluation - comparing you to other products
- Purchasing - in our case, passing to a Reseller
- Support - post sales relationship
For each of these steps in the customer engagement the challenge is how do each of these steps more effectively, more convincingly and with greater scale.
Another great toy out of NZ. A 45kg cross between a Mountain Bike and Motorcross Bike.
Under $NZ10k.
I’ll be at TechEd next Mon-Wed. Come and check us out at the AfterMail stand.
We’re about to do our next round of hiring. Especially keen to talk to Technical Consultants (MCSE’s & MCSA’s) and locate a Tech Writer.
If you know someone who would be a good hi-growth Company Accountant please let them know about us.
Here is the pricing for the Heritage in Auckland.
Charges for the use of the Heritage Hotel Auckland Internet Access System are $0.68 per minute, with a maximum 24 hour period charge of $33.69.
Per minute charging! 33 bucks!!
I called the duty manager to tell her that I wouldn’t stay here again. A small act of defiance but if enough of us do it maybe hotels in NZ and Australia will get the message.
Used T3G instead. Productivity cramped because I won’t do big downloads.
David Ten Have of Provoke, helped
out with our first AfterMail podcast.
VS 2005 Web Project System: What is it and why did we do it?
New features of note …
- Doesn’t require FPServer extensions
- Built in Dev Server
- Totally locked down projects (just ship a dll, no .html and .aspx pages)
- Next version of SharePoint uses ASP.Net 2.0
There’s a call do do another beta cycle of VS2005 but official word is till November. Makes the 2005 reference seem silly.
The Quentin Tarantino directed 2 hour season closer for CSI was on last night.
I quite like CSI and it was interesting as a control to see to see the effect a Director can have.
I’m not sure if he wrote the episode as well but it had all the classic QT features.
- non-linear order
- dream sequence
- gore
- imagining an awful scenario and putting you right in it and layering it on. The buried box, the cracks, the ants
- pop culture references like the Dukes of Hazard, Roy Rogers
Plenty of debate on the web about whether it was good or not, but very interesting to see the combination of two things you know well.
We have a formal room (that I’m not allowed in) and we don’t use it that much. But often we don’t want to watch the same thing on TV. (Why doesn’t she like American Chopper?). Anyway we didn’t want to put a TV in there but compromised on a Philips 30″ LCD Mirror TV.
With it’s frame it does look like a mirror, though it’s not as bright a normal mirror. The LCD picture is excellent.
It still hangs out 10cm from the wall so this weekend’s project is to flush mount. I’ve already got speakers in the room for the central stereo so I’ll need to hook into those with a speaker switch.
Good toy!
This is cool. Microsoft are taking a new approach to in car navigation user interface with the Phantom car.
Instead of studying an on-screen map or listening to spoken instructions, the system lets a driver pursue a cartoon car projected onto the windscreen in front of them. The navigation system checks a car’s location and calculates a route in the usual way, but the driver follows the ghost car as if it were the leader of a convoy.
Simple. Clever.
Now you don’t have to be a Telecom customer to use Telecom’s hotspots.
The cost when carriers do wifi …
Internet access at Telecom wireless hotspots costs $9.95 (including GST) per hour for prepaid customers and Xtra dial-up customers.
Compare this to CityLink (who really get the Internet) at $10 per day and per MB pricing.
http://www.cafenet.co.nz/about/services/prepay.html
Probably the last comment I’ll post. DavidH writes …
May I offer the comment of another seller on Zillion?
I have the largest number of listings (1300+) on Zillion and am also continuing to sell on Trademe, where I have the more sales (over 13,000) than any other seller there, so I have had as much use of both sites as it’s possible for any one person to get.
The key point is that Zillion and Trademe are very different businesses, despite the seeming similarities. Trademe is no longer geared towards the interests of either buyers or sellers. Compared to Zillion, selling there is both difficult and time-consuming. The only thing which makes Trademe continue to work for either buyer or seller is its considerable critical mass.
Zillion, on the other hand, is very easy to use, and a fun place to be. The importance of this last point shouldn’t be underestimated. Both Trademe and Zillion are in the retail business, and if retail isn’t fun, it doesn’t happen.
After just over two weeks, the number of listings on Zillion is over 2000 a day, and this number is increasing steadily. Zillion may be a very distant second at present, but I doubt whether it will seem to be an insignificant competitor in six months, or even less. Of course, trademe could change in response to the Zillion initiative, and this is something many of us will hope will happen.
Tim has some analysis of why SauceReader has been discontinued.
Links to the History of Synop.
OK, so what’s the second best standalone RSS Aggregator?
blog