I couldn’t help but comment on the news that Telecom and WorldXChange are partnering to supply a FTTH/VoIP service to some new subdivisions currently being created.
As Matt Crockett (no relation of Davy as far as I know!), CEO of Telecom wholesale said;
“In the old world it would have been Telecom Retail as a matter of course but in the new world we are committed to open access in the network”
Competition anyone?
Disclosure - Diversity Limited is a consultant to Telecom New Zealand and its subsidiaries.
I must have received the Nigerian scam email a million times (or variations thereof) that’s why I had a quiet chueckle this morning when I read that the tabled have turned (sort of).
It seems the Nicholas Negroponte of OLPC fame is being sued by company from….. yes Nigeria, for allegedly ripping off a patented keyboard design for use in the XO laptop.
Nicholas - I’ll let you into a deal, if you just email me your bank account number and password, I have the patent docs for the keyboard and I can magically make your problems disappear…..
To very different posts today.
Marc says Facebook is a timewaster and should be banned inside a workplace. He reasons that the time that could be spent Faceboking should be used on high value networking, Salesforce mining etc.
Nick says that Facebook, Myspace et al are valuable disseminators of information in the informal sphere of a business’ operations. That it helps communication in ways that the traditional methods, stuck to the traditional organization chart, cannot.
My perspective tends towards Nick’s more than Marc’s. Times are changing and the very basis of the organisation as we know it today is changing. The new paradigm will, to a certain extent, be formed by, and will form these very new ways of comunicating, collaborating and co-operating.
For that reason alone these services have value and we should be encouraging our people to use, know, understand, develop and be developed by, them all.
I’m sitting here watching the live webcast of the Digital Future Summit. A friend IMd me an said;
this needs blogginghow are we going to bat above our weight in a digital economyI replied; i know - but it’s such a big problem - starts with education but touches all parts of the economy - my answer personally is to create some businesses that give me the ability to push some of this change
To which he challenged me to blog on just that - my personal strategy to help facilitate change.
Rod’s quote sums it up - we need to be able to “build billion dollar businesses from the beach”. He’s right, but the changes to be able to keep creating them are massive and are needed at every level.
So in my own personal treatise on how I’m going to help these things eventuate here’s my plan;
- Do half a dozen create and exit startups to build a tidy capital base
- Using that base have a multi pronged strategy;
- build several create and hold companies (yes a la Rod’s stragtegy with Xero) to employ, train and build our national skill and resource
- champion a grass roots change in education
- champion domestic micro finance and angel investment
- facilitate widespread discussion - both vertical and horizontal to obtain buy-in to a long term vision of where we want to be and how we’re going to get there
Maybe it’s all a dream but if we want to succeed as a nation we need to be all draming and executing some of those dreams….
A few years ago there were dissenting voices about the Microsoft anti-trust case, a good number of the voices will be incredulous with the news today that antitrust regulators, seeking further controls on Microsoft’s activities, dismissed Google, Firefox, Ajax and SaaS as “piddling players” that provide no real competition to Microsoft’s dominance.
Herein lies the problem with regulation of the marketplace - the fact is a businesses competencies gives them the opportunity to garner significant market share - Google owns standard search because it does it best - to regulate against that is nonsensical.
So to with IE and the Win OSs, people are voting with their feet, linux and MacOS are ascendant, technology will render operating systems irrelevant in the medium future, Firefox has significant market share and SaaS is revolutionising the desktop application space.
The current action makes no sense and will be detrimental to ourselves, the users of this stuff
I what is a very worrying development, it was reported recently that Google search results have been seeded with links to malware sites.
We’ve all become more and more reliant on Google search (and its associated services for that matter) and Google compelling proposition is the quality of its search results. It will be interesting to see the speed and the breadth of Google’s reaction to this.
Damn that’s cool.
Rod posted a semi-tongue in cheek look at management. What is really cool though is that his mother posted a comment in reply.
So the questions is, have they yet mapped the gene responsible for an affinity for tech?
Yesterday we received our rating revaluations (for those outside of New Zealand, every three years all properties are valued by local councils in order to levy rates for local body costs). Living as we do in a burgeoning wine producing area, our land value has tripled in 6 years. It was then timely to read this article that suggests that a housing bubble burst and flow on recession is looming in the US.
There seems to be a multiplicity of factors pointing in this direction - the value of the US dollar, oil prices, the credit crunch are all conspiring to bring things down. Unfortunately for the rest of the world - where the US goes economically, we all ten to follow.
In New Zealand it seems to be a disaster in the making - I remember a few years ago when it was totally viable to purchase a property for under $100k that would return $200/week (ie a 10% gross return). Now the same property might costs $250k and return possibly $250/week (a 5% return). With interest rates hovering around the 10% marks, clearly there must be some people out there hurting.
These same people quite possibly bought loss making properties with the belief that capital gain would see them right - a capital gain that looks increasingly unlikely to eventuate.
The flow on effects in the event that these Ma and Pa investors come unstuck would be massive - they’re a good part of domestic consumer spending and if their belts tighten… so to do all of ours.
One to please my friend who enjoys conspiracy theories linking MS, Facebook, Google and the CIA with George Orwell’s visions of big brother. Check out Google share price (and oh how much do you wish you’d bought at IPO time?)
In a fairly revolutionary move (revolutionary for US mobile players anyway), Verizon have introduced an “any app, any device” policy effective next year.
In practice what this means is that one will be able to chose what device and application set they use on the Verizon platform. Sure there will be some conditions (in the same way that when our telecoms market was deregulated, devices needed to display a “telepermit” in order to be connected to the network), but it’s a great move, increasing choice and competition for consumers.
It’s a good response to the AT&T/Apple closed shop play also.
![[Ask]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/ask.png)
![[Bloglines]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/bloglines.png)
![[BlogMarks]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/blogmarks.png)
![[del.icio.us]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/delicious.png)
![[Digg]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/digg.png)
![[Facebook]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/facebook.png)
![[Faves]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/faves.png)
![[Google]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/google.png)
![[PlugIM]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/plugim.png)
![[Slashdot]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/slashdot.png)
![[Sphere]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/sphere.png)
![[StumbleUpon]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/stumbleupon.png)
![[Technorati]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/technorati.png)
![[Email]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/email.png)
Loading ...