Archive for November, 2008

Diligent Shareholders Consider Fight

Published by Ben Kepes on November 28, 2008 in Compliance, IT, New Zealand, New business and Strategy. 8 Comments

Around the same time that Xero listed on the NZX, fellow tech company Diligent Board Books did also.

Diligent is a web enabled service that provides board members with all the information they require, while still meeting all the requirements of Sarbanes Oxley in terms of record keeping and audit. I told the tale of Diligent a few months ago.

While if truth be told it’s reasonable to say that neither IPO set the world on fire (Xero is hovering around a $0.75 shareprice, Diligent way down to $0.15) – Xero shareholders for the more part have been realistic and understood that it takes time to build a business – there have been no grumbles (or not many) and no large scale sell offs.

Diligent however has been a tale of woe. Their case wasn’t helped when it was discovered that CEP Brian Henry had failed to disclose his involvement with failed 1980s company Energycorp.

Now shareholders are considering a class action suit against Diligent, claiming that the failure to disclose Henry’s past had a substantive effect on the Diligent shareprice.

Not surprisingly a vulture law firm, Wakefield Associates, is spearheading the action. They’re working on a “no win, no fee” basis but…. they’ll charge double their usual fee if the action ultimately proves successful.

The broker who headed the IPO, McDouall Stuart, has come back saying of the letter to shareholders from the Wakefield Associates;

In its letter, Wakefield Associates has incorrectly highlighted the substantial loss of principal suffered by the IPO subscribers as being as a direct consequence of the failure of the offer document to disclose Brian Henry’s past association with Energycorp.

However, in our view, the current equity market turmoil is more likely to be found to be a more significant contributor to the difficulties Diligent has had in meeting its forecasts

Which is bollocks – sure the equity markets are falling but

a)Diligent has underperformed since day one, before the current crisis and

b)other IPOs from around the same time have held their pricing much better than DIligent

Surprisingly, and in something of a case of shooting themselves in the foot, Wakefield Associates have stated that;

When you look at the forecasts, and the complete failure to come anywhere near them, it makes me think they really weren’t ready for their public debut

Ain’t that the truth. A bunch of excitable guys, steeped in the 80s high flying era. Some hugely optimistic sales forecasts and some dumb investment decisions are to blame for this – not the fact that Henry has a pretty murky past.

Caveat Emptor in my opinion.

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LeftClick Scores a Coup

Published by Ben Kepes on November 27, 2008 in Business, Efficiency, New Zealand, New business and SaaS. 1 Comment

Great to see some press time for LeftClick, a company I’ve had a bit to do with in an informal advisory role.

LeftClick’s motto is “Make Every Click Count” and that’s what they do – increase the return on investment for web businesses by ensuring that more visits convert into the desired outcome.

Anyway – LeftClick are now responsible for the rebuild of Harcourts real estate websites worldwide – both back end and customer facing.

I’ve posted previously about a new product LeftClick is developing, they’ve also just moved to a swanky new office (they’d have been better five doors down but never mind ;-) ) and now they’re getting press time for their wins.

Well done Alan, Sally and the gang!

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Stink – Blame Winston and his Cronies for this one

Published by Ben Kepes on November 26, 2008 in New Zealand and Society. 0 Comments

Christine posted about an unfortunate experience her young daughter had on a public bus in suburban Christchurch. It seems that xenophobia is alive and kicking – at least here in the Garden City.

My parents were immigrants to New Zealand. 50 years ago they were refugees from the Hungarian revolution and came here to find a better life for them and their (future) children. So I can appreciate the sacrifice that immigrants make to secure a future for their families.

I also know that many immigrants (my parents included) avoid teaching their children their mother’s-tongue in an effort to increase the chances of them being “real kiwis” – remember real kiwis play Rugby, Drink Beer and don’t speak any language other than English.

Remember people – other than Tangata Whenua we’re all immigrants going back only a few short generations – if your self confidence is sufficiently low that you need to put someone else down to bolster yourself – maybe step back and think about what you’re doing.

Unfortunately the small mindedness of Winston Peters and the Grey brigade feeds this sort of attitude – somehow it’s easier to blame the successful, hard-working immigrant for our woes than to take a look at our own failings.
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The Future of Accounting – Guest Post, Rod Drury

Published by Ben Kepes on November 26, 2008 in IT, PaaS, SaaS and Web x.0. 2 Comments

As part of an Accounting 2.0 series I’m compiling over on CloudAve, I reached out to some accounting software visionaries to give us their take on the future of accounting/business software and how the eco system would look five or ten years out.

Well know local (local in New Zealand) luminary Rod Drury, Founder and CEO of Xero agreed to contribute to the series.

His ten broad predictions can be seen below – check out the full post here.

1. Online accounting won’t exist as a product category for long

2. Bookkeeping will go away, slowly

3. Governments get very interested in online accounting

4. Business Internet Banks will emerge

5. The Accountants channel becomes more important

6. New global leaders will emerge

7. It really will become software plus services.

8. The channel changes

9. API standardization

10. Microsoft will enter the market

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Xero gets its first win over the ditch!

Published by Ben Kepes on November 25, 2008 in IT, New Zealand, SaaS and Strategy. 3 Comments

Congratulations to Xero who have just announced that the first of the Australian banks has come on board and is providing direct automatic feeds into Xero. As Lucy says;

NAB will be providing this integral and innovative service in December for NAB customers using Xero.

As soon as the feeds are live, we will let you know how to add your NAB account to this convenient service.

Achieving the link between bank and Xero is not a trivial task and it has taken many months to get to this point.  Thank you to the many staff at NAB who have worked with us to make things easier for small business owners in Australia.

Aussies tend to be a little like sheep – the first one through the gate is the hardest – my pick is that a bunch of other banks will follow suit and within a short space of time the majority of the major operators are on board.

It’s a great progress pint for Xero but even more interesting is how much extra leverage this will give within the UK market where the banks there have been somewhat backwards in coming forwards.

Watch this space!

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Come and see the violence inherent in the system….

Published by Ben Kepes on November 25, 2008 in Humour and Society. 3 Comments

Many commented on my birthday last week (I tend to forget these things but the joys of technology ensured others didn’t let me).

An old school friend pointed out that we’re now in a position to empathise more fully with Dennis. As Evan said;

I like Dennis. I like his approach to life. He’s a filth-shoveller by trade and he’s ok with that, although he dreams of greater things. He knows what he thinks. He speaks his mind. He believes in something and stands up for it.  He’s found a partner in life who understands him. Most importantly, he’s not afraid of standing up against authority and challenging it – especially if he thinks an injustice is being done.

But most of all I like Dennis because as of today we are the same age. “I’m 37 – I’m not old!”

Who, you may ask, is Dennis. Well for those over 30 or so, I present, and remind you of the great (well lowly) man himself.

Enjoy…

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Get Thee To Space…

Published by Ben Kepes on November 25, 2008 in Business and New Zealand. 0 Comments

Well it beats a nunnery I guess!

Over on Geekzone Mauricio scored a coup and is giving away a trip to space (well zero gravity anyway).

You have to be in New Zealand and the trip happens in February.

Enter online here.

Only there’s no point, ‘cos I fully intend to win it!

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The Pictorial Benefits of SaaS…

Published by Ben Kepes on November 24, 2008 in SaaS. 2 Comments

With a hat tip to one of my personal flock of tipsters, David Macgregor, Check out this great (yes frivolous but great nonetheless) video from the Google docs team.

It’s summer in New Zealand so ice crystals are smewhat irrelevant, and I’m an agnostic so Yuletide greetings are somewhat irrelevant as well, but enjoy anyway…

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What NZ SMEs really need….

Published by Ben Kepes on November 21, 2008 in Business, Economic Development, Efficiency, IT, New Zealand, New business, Society and Strategy. 1 Comment

Rod posted about their report into productivity gains for the New Zealand SME community. As Rod pointed out – this is an extremely important issues given that;

Small Business contributes $50b to New Zealand’s GDP!  We believe online technology is the key to improving productivity in the sector. The numbers are simply staggering. Minor productivity improvements can grow GDP by $500m or more.

The Xero report made several recommendations to Government, including;

  1. Educating SMEs on the benefits of being online in all agency communications.
  2. Promote www.business.govt.nz as the business to government website.
  3. Allow high quality New Zealand solution providers to be certified and profiled on www.business.govt.nz
  4. Encourage the Small Business Advisory Group to play a larger role in the design of the www.business.govt.nz portal so it meets the needs of small businesses on an ongoing basis.
  5. Look to expose key government information as web services so that application providers can integrate government activities into the workflow of their solutions. Individual government departments do not need sophisticated transaction websites. This work is incremental and can start immediately. (For example filing of GST returns as a web service.)
  6. Establish a single business identification number for all trading entities to facilitate commerce between New Zealand small businesses.
  7. Work with the private sector to take a global leadership position in Standard Business Reporting.
  8. Accelerate the Standard Business Reporting project, starting with an opt-in voluntary service.

Xero should be applauded for producing this – while it is partially fuelled by self interest it is also very much in the interests of the country at large.

As I commented on Rod’s post, I’ve long felt the best place for business advice is out of the hands of government and leveraging the peer relationships that SMEs have.

To this end I believe a business advisory site which is neutral and independent is preferable to the likes of business.govt.nz and the other Government business sites. The fact is that a Government run site has to be sufficiently “high brow” as to limit the ability for robust, off the wall and challenging discourse.

Which is where the project I’ve been working on for around a year comes in. I wasn’t going to say anything until we’re actually live but Rod’s post upped the ante somewhat. In a matter of a few weeks NZ SMEs will have such a vehicle – we’re working hard to create it and hope the community will come and utilise the platform we’re building.

As we say in our business case – we’re here to help the ninety-six percenters, namely the 96% of businesses in New Zealand that fall into the SME category.

We’re a community site targeted at New Zealand small and medium sized enterprises. We aim to recreate the peer-to-peer conversations that currently occur around a barbeque or beer. Founded by SME owners we aim to fill a hole in the market.

I’ll post more about what we’re up to late next week. Until then – keep your eyes peeled and think about what value an open SME site could bring to your business.

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The Perils of an Echo Chamber

Published by Ben Kepes on November 20, 2008 in Business, Design, SocialMedia, Society and Strategy. 4 Comments

I love social media – it allows me to have interesting relationships with interesting people whom I otherwise might not know. But sometime the send/post/update key is just too easy to tap.

Case in point the recent storm around an advertisement. Motrin is a US brand of painkiller and their (formerly methinks) high paid ad agency decided on a campaign which extolled the virtues of Motrin for parents who use baby slings and in doing so get sore backs. So far so good – I mean the ad concept is kind of lame, but it makes a change from pushing pain killers for period pain I guess.

The ad, for reference and posterity’s sake is below;

It seems however a bunch of mothers (and some father no doubt) see this as an insult, an affront to their front baby wearing preference and an utterly erroneous claim.

Which is fine – they can continue to wear their kids on the front, back or otherwise. They can use another pain killer. They can stop watching the Motrin ad.

Or they can start a social media storm that involved dozens and dozens of blog posts, thousands of tweets and the requisite Facebook page.

Does anyone else out there think that perhaps this is a little over the top?

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