Monthly Archives: October 2007

October 31, 2007 Posted in Business, Economic Development, New business, New Zealand, Strategy Leave a comment

Growing fast..

By Ben Kepes

Tonight I’m attending the Deloitte/Unlimited Fast 50 Award ceremony. The Fast 50 recognises the 50 fastest growing businesses in New Zealand and is an expression of the fact that Hi-growth is the way ahead for New Zealand. I’l report back on who which names made the grade and hence who

October 31, 2007 Posted in IT, SaaS, Web x.0 Leave a comment

How to fast-track IMAP enablement for Gmail…

By Ben Kepes

I’ve been sitting around wondering when my Gmail acount would be IMAP enabled. Getting bored I played around with the settings and selected English (US) as my Gmail display language. Et voila – IMAP is enabled and working – I’m now just going through the slow and laborious process of

October 31, 2007 Posted in Business, Design, Efficiency, IT 2 Comments

OLPC and MS

By Ben Kepes

Introduction – OLPC aims to create a USD100 rugged laptop for use in developing nations. To get a laptop that cheap it has to take advantage of free and open source software. OLPC have Microsoft developing a very cut back XP operating system that will function at very low power

October 31, 2007 Posted in Business, Economic Development, Efficiency, IT, New Zealand 8 Comments

Fonterra outsourcing IT

By Ben Kepes

Mega company (by New Zealand standards anyway) Fonterra has just announced that it will be outsourcing some IT functions to India. Fonterra’s outsourcing strategy is aimed at reducing duplication of backroom support functions such as human resources, information services and finance across its various brands and commodity businesses and will

October 30, 2007 Posted in Business, Governance, IT, New business, New Zealand, SaaS 2 Comments

NZX scores a coup…

By Ben Kepes

News just in, US company Diligent that provides a SaaS product for board members to access meeting papers will list on the NZ stock exchange. Diligent already has a division in Christchurch and is looking to leverage the increased profile it will get on the local market compared to the

October 30, 2007 Posted in Business, IT, SaaS, Society, Strategy, Web x.0 Leave a comment

Web 2.0 for small business…

By Ben Kepes

Those visionaries at Xero are at it again – they’ve got an event coming up in a few weeks to discuss business in this new participatory era. Kudos to them for getting this dialogue going – I’d love to be there – oh the tyranny of distance……. Upcoming Xero Event

October 30, 2007 Posted in Business, Design, IT, Web x.0 Leave a comment

Gartner and the great big paper shuffle…

By Ben Kepes

Following on from my post yesterday questioning the value of the big analysis houses, it was interesting to read this on ZDNet. Even more interesting was a comment a reader had made; What would be a 2.0 replacement of Gartner analysis? A mashup of actual implementations of said technologies, aligned

October 30, 2007 Posted in Business, New business, New Zealand, SaaS Leave a comment

Another Kiwi SaaS startup…

By Ben Kepes

ActionThis is a project management solution delivered via SaaS. It has some big hitters behind it, Ed Robinson formerely from Microsoft, and Tony/Tim/Derek from Intergen/Glazier/AfterMail. At very first glance it looks like a nice solutions – there seems to be a little overlap between them and PlanHQ but then again

October 29, 2007 Posted in Business, IT, New business, New Zealand, SaaS, Web x.0 Leave a comment

Here’s a good little service…

By Ben Kepes

http://builderscrack.co.nz/ is a new site where home owners can log building work they need doing, and tradespeople can quote on the job. It also has a neat little estimation tool that gives a spread of prices on some common work. It half way between web 1.0 and web 2.0 –

October 29, 2007 Posted in Business, Design, IT, New business 3 Comments

Analysis in the modern age….

By Ben Kepes

The unreasonablemen posted over here about analysts, and whether they hold much relevance in these days of citizen journalism. It’s a good post and got me thinking. UM state that in their situation; I personally rely more on the blogging community than the annual, out of date documents put out

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.