I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
Almost embarrassed to say but we won another Award last night. The TUANZ (Telecommunications Users Association of New Zealand) SaaS Award sponsored by Fronde
We entered most of the awards months ago. We enter awards for two reasons.
- It’s good PR for an early stage company
- We think it’s important to support the industry and industry events
While grateful to win a few awards I think it’s obvious that there are too many awards in the New Zealand industry right now. And that the industry is actually quite thin. That’s not a good thing.
So we’ve hung up our Tuxedos for a while - at least in NZ anyway.
So now it’s time for us to give some Trophies for our Trophies.
Best Bling Award - goes to the Microsoft Partner Trophy - A solid chunk of gold colored metal. Very heavy.
Weighty matters Award - goes to the TUANZ Innovation obelisks. They look good in pairs. They were actually hard to get through security and on the plane they were so heavy.
Consistency Award - goes to the Hi-Tech Award trophies that have been the same for the last 5 years. (Someone in the 2002 committee must have got a discount on 5000 trophy blanks.)
Best Award we haven’t won yet Award - goes to the Hi-Tech Awards Flying Kiwi Trophy. That is a great looking bird.
Most fru fru Award - goes to the Wellington Indoor Sports Queens Wharf Lunch-time Netball Autumn 2007 Division 8 Minor Finals Runners Up Trophy (yes we really did win that).
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Man those TUANZ rocks are heavy all right. I damn near dropped one on stage once. And as for the whereabouts of Mr Barton’s block, only Peter Griffin and a team of police divers can answer that one!
ahem.
heh - I’m visiting ‘work’ at the moment (it’s in the US, so a very long commute), downstairs, in a glass case are two Emmies both of which I nominally own a share, they are very highly polished, I’ve never been allowed to touch one
(they are ‘Technical Emmies’ it’s not like we won “best geek crowd scene” on The Office or anything like that)
Yeah - nice one Paul - You must be at looking at the Apple Computer Lobby…excellent!
Rod - lift your game…time to get an Oscar!
Well Rod thankfully I saved my congratulations on the clipboard, so I can just freely paste them in the future without all of that repetitive typing.
Sigh : here goes :
Congratulations.
Again.
I am interested to know what you mean when you say that the industry “is actually quite thin” … care to elaborate ?
John
nope, not Apple - we got them for the innovative UI on our cable settop boxes
Absolutely agree that there are too many awards. Many years ago we (IDG at the time) started the Computerworld Excellence Awards as there was nothing in the market celebrating excellence in the use of technology. Now we have a plethora of user awards and awards for vendors/developers etc and some that cross the boundaries (like TUANZ awards). I would like to see consolidation for a number of reasons.
1. Too many awards dilute the value that can be derived from each by those winning
2. The press start ignoring the awards as there are too many and therefore give little coverage to some of the great companies that succeed
3. Many of these awards programmes are totally reliant on sponsorship dollars, there are only so many of these to go around, more awards doesn’t equate to more sponors but does equate to dillution
What other industry has so many awards???
It’s time that as industry we get this sorted. Two award programmes, one for users and one for the industry players. More impact, bigger events and more coverage!
The multitude of awards also reflects the fact that there are way too many organisations in this sector - something that the Minister has called on ICT-NZ to fix.