SaaS, Business, Strategy, Web 2.0, Collaboration and a whole lot more
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 are the faces to watch in the years ahead.
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 getting a couple of Gig worth of archive mails through IMAP.
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 usage levels.
Some within the open source community are enraged that OLPC has gone over to the dark side and are talking with MS.
Nicholas Negroponte - visionary, academic, commentator and more in his “tell it like it is” style, said the following;
“It would be hard for OLPC to say it was ‘open’ and then be closed to Microsoft. Open means open”
I’m with Nicholas on this one - open source is great, but open source to the exclusion of the “traditional” vendors is bad
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 see it use Indian company HCL to run some of its IT systems.
Fonterra exec greg James, expecting the usual New Zealand knee jerk negative reaction sad the following;
“We have always made it clear from the outset that there will be some redundancies and those staff who will be potentially affected have been advised,” said James. “We are still working through the recruitment and redeployment processes with many of our staff and are not in a position to comment on what the final number of redundancies may be.”
Let’s just make a point here - Fonterra is in the dairy business - its core competency and primary focus is the creation, value adding, distribution and marketing of dairy products around the world. Nowhere in that description did I see that Fonterra is an IT company.
Outsourcing IT is a sensible “stick to your knitting” kind of decision.
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 US where its size would not make an impact.
This will put a smile on the face of Mark Weldon, CEO of the NZX!
It’s a very good thing - a stable mate for Xero
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 - Web 2.0 for small business
The advent of social media, the increased uptake of broadband worldwide and the growing choice of communication tools have changed marketing forever - to a new era of customer participation.
Xero, along with interactive agency Marker, invites you to attend a breakfast to discuss this new participatory era and the impact for New Zealand businesses like yours.
Date: Friday 16 November 2007
Time: 7:30 am
Place: Xero, Level 1, Old Bank, 98 Customhouse Quay, Wellington, New Zealand
Register to: Lucy Hempseed lucy.hempseed@xero.com or phone: (04) 819 4837
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 to level of satisfaction of said technologies. Anyone game to set it up?
Great minds think alike huh?
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 its a uge market internationally which is where both of these products are aimed.
Best of luck guys and keep up the good work!
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 - stuff that would make it even better would be;
No doubt it’s a work in progress and there’s more to come….
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 by these places now.
But then ads that;
The only thing lacking (and I mean no disrespect) is the credibility that these houses have, it is very hard to know if numbers put up by [the bloggers] are accurate
And therein lies the paradox. The analysis houses lack the real world breadth of vision to say it like it really is, while the citizen analysts lack the credibility of the big boys.
The answer as I see it will be for the big analysts to embrace a new model, one where meta specialists provide data on their key speciality - the analysis houses will become aggregators and proving houses for analysis rather than hotbeds of analysis itself.
What we’ll see is a Wikinomics type collaborative model being put to an analysis situation. It’ll provide more timely, more accurate and more relevant analysis - and that’s a very good thing.
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