Monthly Archives: September 2008

September 23, 2008 Posted in Business, Economic Development, Efficiency, New Zealand 4 Comments

NZ Government taken for a (train) ride – surprised anyone?

By Ben Kepes

I posted a few months ago about the fact that the NZ Government had purchased the national rail service (that they sold a few years previously but that’s another story). At the time I said that; Bear in mind that this is the same rail network we sold years ago,

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September 22, 2008 Posted in Business, Design, Efficiency, IT, Strategy 2 Comments

OpenSource and Free – two very different things

By Ben Kepes

At the recent office 2.0 conference I had the good fortune to listen to a panel on which Doug Harr of Ingres spoke. I’ve swapped a couple of emails with Doug and came across a post on his blog where he discusses Open Source software and whether or not it

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September 21, 2008 Posted in Design, Efficiency, IT, Strategy 1 Comment

I’m all for disruption but….

By Ben Kepes

TechCrunch waxes poetical on the threat to Microsoft, and in particular the exalted position of Outlook, that Facebook poses. TechCrunch says that; Facebook succeeds because it is the killer web application for communications and personal information management. Facebook Mail is not without its problems, but the combination of Facebook Mail,

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September 20, 2008 Posted in Blogging, IT, SaaS, The Cloud 2 Comments

CloudAve weekly summary

By Ben Kepes

The end of our first week! CloudAve launched on Monday after lots of behind the scenes work by people all over the place – we’re stoked to be here (or more correctly there) and hope you’ll join us for the ride. As you’ll see below it’s been a busy week

September 20, 2008 Posted in Business, Design, Efficiency, IT, SaaS, SocialMedia, The Cloud, Web x.0 2 Comments

Joining the microblogging legions….

By Ben Kepes

Legions of different applications that is… At the recent Techcrunch50, Twitter-for-enterprise startup Yammer took out the top prize. I was interested to read a post by Bernard a couple of days later where he uncharacteristically lashed the decision. Basically Bernard calls Yammer a "me too" offering that offers little that

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September 19, 2008 Posted in New Zealand, Society, Strategy 3 Comments

Digital natives gone wild

By Ben Kepes

I see a labour party supporter has used her web savvy to seed the Google search results for "clueless" such that a NZ specific search brings up the leader of the national party, John Key. It seems like a case of an overly exuberant labour Party member (OK OK she

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September 18, 2008 Posted in Business, Economic Development, Efficiency, IT, New Zealand, Society, Strategy 2 Comments

Is there any hope left for ICT in NZ?

By Ben Kepes

Just finished reading (and being depressed by) this report on the ICT issues panel. From Maurice Williamson saying that what he said wasn’t actually policy to David Cunliffe’s no-show we get a fairly good indication of just how important this stuff is to the mainstream political parties. Williamson’s very inspiring

September 17, 2008 Posted in Business, IT Leave a comment

Calling all high-school students…

By Ben Kepes

I ran into someone from the BlackBerry partners fund over in San Francsico a couple of week ago – they’re an investment fund specialising in applications, service and support for BlackBerry and other mobile devices. They’ve just launched a competition for high school students. Details as follows; Competition Details Applicants

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September 17, 2008 Posted in Business, Design, Efficiency, IT, SaaS, Strategy 6 Comments

Saasu to New Zealand – it’s only fair

By Ben Kepes

I posted a couple of weeks ago about the imminent entry of Xero into the Australian market. In what can only be described as a fair development, Australian SaaS accounting provider Saasu has announced the roll out of some internationalizations of it’s product. For New Zealand customers this includes New

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September 16, 2008 Posted in Business, Design, Efficiency, IT, Strategy 8 Comments

How can Apple get away with being evil?

By Ben Kepes

Heard the story of podcaster? Seems a guy had a great idea for an iPhone app – an app that allows the downloading of podcasts independently of iTunes – makes sense huh – allows the users to slice and dice it however they wish? Unfortunately that sort of slicing and

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The Author

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.

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