Or we might just spend two weeks at Castlepoint - who knows?
Either way I’ll be somewhat out of touch for a couple of weeks. My trusty co-founder Ruth will keep the fires burning at bizchat, Zoli and Krish will do the same at CloudAve, Pete is manning the fort at Cactus and guy will sort out the buildings should they need it.
The sheep, chooks, orchard and veggie garden are taken care of as well so everything is, as they say, ship-shape.
I’m an agnostic sort of a guy so I’ll refrain from wishing you all a happy Chanukah, Christmas, Sylvester or whatever festival takes your fancy - suffice it to say that I hope you’ve all had a great 2008 and will join me in having what I’m sure will be an even better 2009.
Xero promised a global version in 2009. They’ve just announced that as of Monday, over a week earlier than the promised earliest date, they’ll be releasing their international version.
Sage has just released the first iteration of their new on-demand accounting product.
Names SageLive, the product has some really smart features, along with some glaring holes.
The biggest question is whether a traditional vendor can really commit to a subscription based product on an ongoing basis - Sage are adamant that SageLive won’t cannibalise sales but I’d not be so sure.
I’ve got two school-age sons and I’ve spent a fair amount of time observing the way New Zealand schools are run.
By way of background, the Labour government of 1984 put in place the “Tomorrow’s Schools” ethos. Part of this new way of thinking was a move to Boards of Trustees being formed to govern schools. The thinking went that it is the parents of the children at a school who are best placed to run that school - regardless of their knowledge of education, finance, governance or employment.
It’s a model that has come under a fair amount of criticism, clearly running a business is a difficult job. Running one with dozens of employees, sometimes hundreds of students, funding constraints and a robust central Government regulatory structure all conspires to make it a difficult job.
My brother is the chairman of a primary school board of trustees, and he also has two sons at a high school that is in the process of coming through a $1.7million budget deficit. yesterday on National Radio he and a couple of other people were interviewed about the high school issues in particular, and school governance in general.
It’s a really interesting interview - check it out here (it’ll probably only be available for the next week)
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