I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
Had a fantastic day in Christchurch today.
After spending a lot of my business travel in Europe and the US for the past few years it was great to do business in country.
Kicked off with the NZTE Breakfast session. Michael blogged it live, which was mildly disturbing ,but he has the good taste to take a few edges off. The Christchurch tech scene is exciting. A lot of electronics and hardware and some serious innovation. They are very networked. A large percentage of the people were exporters and business owners. Great to see.
The energetic Larry from CDC whisked me around to HitLab. I had met Mark and the team before at events but it was good to see what they were doing. My three takeaways were
- It is very cool that they are pushing 3D digital story telling to school kids. When they are 20 they’ll have 10 years experience with augmented reality. What a resource.
- The AccessGrid and 3D conferencing stuff they are doing is a fantastic, horizontal technology. We need to build more nodes (thoughts on that developing).
- They are right at the pointy end of Augmented Reality research. Some awesome stuff with great commercial potential.
CDC seem to have really pulled off Public and Private sector partnerships. I couldn’t get my head around all that was going on but it was sure motivating and shaped a few more thoughts around what we can do for Wellington 2.0 and then connect to the regions.
Larry noted that there is not the Presentation and Publications specialists (like Shift) that we’re used to seeing in Wellington. Good opportunity there for one of those companies to do a South Island branch I’d suggest.
I caught up with the Eurekster guys. Vertical Search. Watch that space. They are rocking.
The highlight of the day was sitting next to Mark Solomon, the Chairman of Ngai Tahu on the plane. He is a cool guy and one of those business leaders you instantly respect. I’m probably the palest Ngai Tahu descendent in the country but it was great to spend a relaxed flying hour hearing what he was doing and picking up some great common sense advice from what he was saying. [I'm kicking myself for not listening more to my dad who is right into this stuff so I could of had something more interesting to say.]
As a country we’re proud of our heritage. I hope I’ve convinced him to start a blog and feel if I need to leverage my tribal connnections for some investment money I have my in. Seriously though it was a buzz to talk to someone who blends business and Maori culture and I could see many aspects of what he was saying in my own approach. Maybe it’s just common sense.
So I found today was really stimulating. Spending time with new people really got the creative juices flowing. Lots to do.
blog
Thanks for coming down Rod … it was great to hear what you say. Thanks for being willing (??) to be a live blogging subject. I know from personal experience that what is said in a small room doesn’t always translate perfectly into a written blog post, hence the sanitisation.
All the best,
M.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3868275a13,00.html