I retired from personal blogging in July 2008 but you can find me over at blog.xero.com
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As Peter reports, the iPhone has been given the thumbs up.
For us in New Zealand, and in corporateland, it’s going to be frustrating to look and not touch. AT&T even lock the iPod features until you register and the minimum is a $US60 per month call plan. And in the iPhone case SIM locked really does mean SIM locked.
Exchange support won’t really exist (it will do iMap) and no push ala BlackBerry. So for now I still lust after the BB8800 which is pending (I hope).
I wonder:
- Is Vodafone NZ looking at the iPhone yet?
- Is there anyway at all to use it in NZ?
At least by the time it gets here it will be 3G and hopefully have some enterprise support.
An worthy event for the diary is a cocktail evening on Wednesday 11 July to mark the launch of Extenda.
University of Auckland’s Centre for Software Innovation (CSI) has created the Extenda program to provide software development companies with the understanding and tools they need to exploit research activity in their business and to develop a research led approach to business development.
I’m speaking and really looking forward to finding out more about the program. There is such a payback for taking the time to do R&D in software and I’m excited to hear what people are working on and what we can learn.
 http://www.csi.ac.nz/extenda-launch
Another thing that I didn’t know I need and now must have.
This is interesting …
The non-exclusive partnership will create a branded TVNZ ‘channel’ on YouTube, offering a range of New Zealand-made short video material from current programming and the archive, reflecting the style of content popular with YouTube users.
I like that this means that TVNZ does not need to reinvent the wheel and hooks its content into an international community. Very progressive - for an SOE :)
Communications Minister David Cunliffe’s address to the 8th Annual Telecommunications and ICT Summit
in Auckland this morning had an interesting softening of language ….
So, the government remains optimistic that competitive pressures, combined
with a balanced and prudent approach to policy settings, will see total
telecommunications investment increase, not decrease, over the next few years.Will there be gaps in the marketplace? Yes, I don’t mind betting there will
be. Does this mean there may be a need for government investment? Possibly.
But we need to be very judicious about this.It is not the business of government to crowd out private investment. These
are big issues. They are billion dollar bets and we risk putting the cost on
the taxpayer if we are injudicious about our approach.I do not want anybody to think that means the government is not sensitive to
these issues and that it will not do more for all New Zealanders,
particularly rural New Zealanders.But what this government will not do is act with undue haste, or imprudently
disguise underlying market failures, before the appropriate commercial
realities are clear and all the options have been carefully analysed.As minister, I am not afraid of tough calls. But I also believe in getting
the best data and analysis to ensure that they are the right calls - not
just the temporarily expedient ones.
I believe Cunliffe has done a good job of respecting the process. But I also believe he understands the business case for the people of New Zealand to invest in some parts of the network. If I am correct in this belief then the language of this speech is consistent with that.
There is not doubt that the Digital Summit in October is setting itself up as an important time for our industry.
(From Simon) An academic in Australia goes a big step further …
OPINION
Australia needs fibre to the home
By Dr Nicholas Beaumont
June 13, 2007.Australia faces an important decision: should we build a national optical fibre network?
There are four questions:
*Is the demand real or just blue sky?
*Should we choose fibre to the node (FTTN) or fibre to the home (FTTH)?
*Who should control the network?
*How much will it cost, who will pay for it, and what should users pay?The demand is probably real.
The Internet has been more quickly accepted than any other technology. There is huge demand for technology that enhances personal contact (the mobile phone and SMS). Emails have been augmented by instant messaging, photos and videos (youtube.com), videophone telephony will become the norm. The Internet is a universal encyclopaedia and convenient way of transacting.
Business is moving advertising, transactions and relationships from paper to the Internet. E-education and e-health (eg monitoring people in their own homes, instead of their occupying expensive hospital beds) are emerging applications. Telephony should be moved from Telstra’s copper network to optical fibre, saving appreciable network maintenance costs.
Tomorrow’s child may enjoy a birthday party in a room of which one wall shows life-sized three-dimensional images of besotted grandparents projected from another hemisphere. In 2015, households will use the Internet to tune in to any one of the world’s thousands of television stations and wonder at a world in which most people could receive only four channels.
We should choose FTTH. The FTTN model requires Telstra’s copper to join homes to the node. Aside from technical limitations, this would give Telstra an effective monopoly. Prices would remind remain high and innovative uses would be stifled.
A national network should be treated as infrastructure and controlled by a body different from, and independent of entrepreneurs using the network to provide products (phones, PDAs, home security systems, software) services (VOIP, downloading films, Internet access, TV, multi-person games, video conferencing, , e-education etc).
The cost of a national FTTH network might approximate $A20 billion. The Government should pay for it and charge little or nothing for its use. In particular, national phone calls should be free. Public utility will be maximised if (as is the case for education and to some extent for roads and health) we pay for it through taxes rather than for use. Put this figure in perspective by noting that in FY2005-6 Telstra’s ordinary operations reaped $25 billion or about $1,200 from every man woman and child in Australia. Every year the Federal Government alone allocates about $3-4 billion to roads.
A FTTH network would cost serious money to build, little to manage and almost nothing to use. Social and business utility will be maximised if every residents’ and business premise was connected. There should be a modest connection fees and a modest annual fee covering maintenance and administration.
Consider the social benefit of elderly and immobile people being able to telephone their friends, participate in chat groups, see real-time images of their grandchildren, and access education and health services for free. Society as a whole would be poorer if less well off households were excluded.
- Dr Nicholas Beaumont, Department of Management, Faculty of Business and Economics, Monash University
I think this is ‘a bridge too far’ and free is not necessary as business and consumers are, I believe, happy to pay for the Internet. But we want tomorrows Internet, not yesterdays. We know that all developed countries are looking at this issue and my fear is that we get left behind. Wouldn’t it be great to lead the world in this technical and social policy, exploiting our small size to get coordinated.
I presented with David Skilling in Napier last week. It was disturbing that by any measure New Zealand is disengaging from the Global Economy. A key statistic was the amount of Foreign Direct Investment from New Zealand which really nailed our inward focus.
The Wellington Cable Car Challenge business planning competition begins tonight.
The prize is $50,000. Including $30,000 of seed capital for your business. Thirty Thousand Dollars. Wow!
Finalists have 4.5 mins going up the cable car to do their final pitch. The return 4.5 minutes is for Q&A. Nice!
PlanHQ is providing the platform so it’s easy to enter and collaborate.
On the radio on the way into work this morning there was the ongoing discussion of interest rates to control housing that was in turn pushing up the Exchange Rate.
David Cunliffe (with his immigration hat on) was being hassled about immigrants causing the demand. Classic New Zealand logic. Lets stop immigration and that will solve our problems. Pah. We are so short of skills.
Then Barry Curtis said that raw land prices were to blame and that the answer is a new town where the land prices were state controlled. Hmmmm.
The real problem is New Zealands systemic investment in property. Rather than rearrange the deckchairs, for New Zealand to grow, we need to encourage investment in businesses. New Zealanders need to be motivated to grow personal wealth by the value of their businesses or dividend returns. We need to move away from this millstone of non productive investment into investment that grows our national cake.
The Reserve Bank really only has interest rates to play with. We need to think about other mechanisms. The taboo of a capital gains tax on investment property is the unspoken spectre lurking just behind the discussion, but it’s going to take something like that. Maybe that is not the answer but right now the discussion can’t even be had.
Politically unpalletable but lets get it up for discussion. If it’s raised as potentially cross party policy then the discussion can at least be had.
Time for more leadership please.
National MP Craig Foss spots the inconsistency
Govt. Debt funded internet expansion
A Government owned data transmission company is using debt to fill in some of the gaps of New Zealands internet network. HHHmmmm…..I have heard the Minister of Comminications rant and rave against using debt for such expansion countless times. Maybe he has changed his mind?
Very clever. Each iPhone user must be an iTunes user, creating a non-carrier billing model.
Computerworld: IPhone users will need iTunes account, Apple says
The move will allow Apple to create its own billing relationship with iPhone customers, rather than collecting payments for any iTunes purchases they make via the mobile operator.
This would have Microsoft concerned as it doesn’t have a regular content billing relationship with most consumers. Nether does Google. The game continues.
Nominations are now open for the NZ Open Source awards.
This should be a really interesting event to see who’s pushing the. Awards are a great way to build profile so I hope we see a good number of entries. I hope we see some .Net entries as well.
I’m looking forward to see how people are using OpenSource as part of their commercial business models.
Apple’s developer conference on today was light on announcements with the main item of interest for me the Safari 3 beta.
Safari is the Apple Internet browser. Lightweight, and well integrated it is my favorite browser, but has poor standards support so many Mac users have Safari and Firefox installed. I use Safari for gMail and Firefox for apps.
Many web vendors don’t support Safari. The issues are mainly around controls like Rich Text Editing.
One of the big announcements was that Safari 3 is available for Windows XP and Vista. Jobs wants to up Safari’s market share to greater than 5%. I can’t see why a Windows user would want Safari. iTunes looks out of place in Windows, so will Safari I exepct. If Steve just made Safari the best browser (and only browser needed) for the Mac that would help.
Apple are using a trojan horse distribution strategy for Windows Safari. Sounds like it will be a mandatory pull down with iTunes. Sneaky. How they try to make Safari the default for Windows iTunes users will be fun to watch (not!).
Web developers all over will be evaluating the standards support in Safari 3 to see what work is required to support the updated browser. This is a pain. If standards supports still suck, it will be quickly dropped. If it is close then vendors will have to decide if they code for Safari. Maybe it will ‘just work’.I hope so but a quick test on some pages we have with FCKEditor doesn’t fill me with confidence. Be interesting to watch the commentary over the next few days.
I guess the Safari work comes out of Apple being now based over Intel. As hardware differentiation becomes less the argument for Apple to do an operating system that installs on any PC gets more compelling. Safari, Bootcamp, Parallels and VMWare show that this is technically possible.
If Leopard stays as a lightweight operating system it becomes a real alternative to Vista which is not getting the enterprise traction Microsoft would like. If I was on the board of Apple I’d be investing big in enterprise features for OSX. Regardless of what you think of Vista or OSX, one of the biggest ISV opportunities right now is making OSX work in the Enterprise. That is a wide, wide open space. Expect one of the systems management vendors to start buying up and aggregating OSX system management technologies. When you see that happening, time to bet big on AAPL.
Other updates for Leopard we’ve seen before. Apple is still calling October for Leopard release.
AndrewS just alerted me to this successful Method of Business patent, developed with the assistance of local Intellectual Property identity John Terry. The patent has been recently licenced to Yahoo.
Kiwi mum of three scores $6.5M in web patent auctionÂ
The patent is available to read here …
Integrated interface for vendor/product oriented internet websites
The abstract reads … A method of effecting commerce in a networked computer environment in a computerized system is disclosed. A database of vendor product data and an associated database interface is established on a first computer. The interface allows remote access by one or more user(s). A local user interacts with the database by querying the database to specify a local users product/service specification. The database provides the local user with a selection of remote vendor network sites, where the selection is determined on the basis of the user querying the database. After the local user interactively connects with one or more of the remote vendor network sites, the user selects products/services from the information provided on the remote vendor network site. The selection of a particular product/service triggers a transaction notification which records the users selection and associated financial transaction data which is transmitted to the database and associated database interface…. which I think means “Any old eCommerce site”
Had the weekend in the Hawkes Bay with no Internet or TV. Just National Radio.
There were some great stories. On Kim Hill yesterday the interview with Spiro Zavos on rugby history was excellent. There was an excellent quote that went something like …
Dancing … is a contact sport, Rugby is a collision one
And this morning Dougal Stevenson on news broadcasters’ pronounciation was brilliant. Worth a listen.
Lots of rumours on Kordia announcing an acquistion tomorrow. I was asked for my thoughts. Two things came immediately to mind.
- Where is Seeby going to have his party?
- Why is Kordia, a State Owned Enterprise, buying a retail ISP?
I would have thought Kordia would be the natural manager of state managed infrastructure, so this move would disappoint me. Regardless, becoming a vertically integrated ISP and competing against private industry doesn’t seem quite right.
Interested in other peoples thoughts.
There are a number of exciting next generation businesses emerging out of New Zealand right now. These are companies with strong business expertise and good leadership who are leveraging technology to change the model.
A couple of recent examples in the financial services space are Maestro and TripleJump.
A competitive advantage of New Zealand is our ability to create multi-disciplined teams, where we combine this deep industry knowledge with technology.
Big day here today as Xero lists on the New Zealand Stock Exchange. We trade under XRO.
Here’s some of our team outside the NZX just before market opening at 11.
A bit on ASB Business this morning as well.
Thank you to our 1167 new shareholders for supporting us. It is a big responsibility but we’re both confident and excited about the journey ahead.
Quest UK buddy, Spanish co-tourist and the only person I’ve met with more gadgets than me, JoeB is featured in enquirer.
I also had a Philips Nino.
Is the date for the iPhone in the US.
New website with 3 ads is up.
Speculation of Exchange support on Engadget.
Another powerful acqusition by Google.
Google buys RSS company FeedBurner
I use Feedburner to track subscriptions to my RSS Feed. With Analytics and now Feedburner, Google is a one stop shop for tracking who’s on your site, which is of course very powerful for advertising.
Google shares over $500 today.
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