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.

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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Guinness Peat Group is supporting a takeover for the business in which it already holds a 13.6% stake. It has joined in with another three investors who jointly hold 34% of the company to form a united takeover body.

Even funnier to read was the suggestion that Sage has approached MYOB looking for an acquisition - if ever someone wanted a case of two old world players (very large and profitable old world players it must be said) looking to dance the Samba before their industry dies, this is it. Sage is apparently impressed with MYOB’s investment in cutting edge technology. They must have upgraded the water coolers and coffee machines recently, because there’s nothing obvious with their software which deserves the term “cutting edge”.

My assessment of MYOB is that it’s a highly lucrative business which has however, significant medium term risks that it’s facing.

Like other traditional desktop software companies it needs to make the change, at least in the medium term, to an on-demand delivery method and with that go through the pain in terms of revenue and profit. The potential investors will know this and will either be looking to make an opportunistic purchase while during a time of economic uncertainty or alternatively will be confident that MYOB can ride out the culture shift that it’s going to have to face over the next few years.

My assessment is that the bid is more of the former than the latter and that much underestimation is happening in terms of the impact that Cloud Computing will have on MYOB’s bottom line.

Watch this space!

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Hot pick from the halls of Redmond is that both Yang and Ballmer will leave their respective organisations and hold the co-CEO role at search start-up Cuil.

Neither Yang nor Ballmer were available for comment however sources close to both told of extended visits to Tesla motors to try and convince Elon Musk to develop a family wagon. Talks are apparently under way with Shai Agassi also - possibly a BetterPlace family wagon in the offing?

More news as it comes to hand.

The partial content RSS feed is just one example of this - a feed that purports to be of interest but can only be fully read by linking through to the home site. The inimitable Rob Cottingham posted this ‘toon over on RWW.

It’s pretty rare to find an old media site that doesn’t post partial RSS feeds serious kudos needs to go to a media site that gives fully authenticated feeds - I know of one such case here in New Zealand and I’ll be telling you some more about that in the next few weeks. Overseas the Guardian is leading the charge to do the decent thing.

Of course my other pet hate is dodgy advertising on RSS feeds - a blog network that I have an immense amount of respect for sent me a post a few weeks ago (the post itself was moderately interesting) offering me my pick of Russian brides - I mean if you have to port advertising, at least target it well - a Russian bride offer on a Web 2.0 blog post is pretty marginal.

Rant over - suffice it to say you will never see advertising or partial feeds on my own blog, or over at CloudAve, the site that’s revolutionising the blogging world (well wants to anyway!)

I’d pretty much finished developing the materials for the master-class - so if there are any Australasian organisations out there that are keen to hear what I had to say, and are after some one-to-one time, drop me a line and I can sort you something out (and probably cheaper than attending the master-class would have been anyway!)

The projects where in such diverse areas as online-training, animation and video-ad serving. Reading down the list I couldn’t help but feel that the vast majority of these projects are not in ground breaking areas, but rather seek to enter an already provided for marketplace. As one commenter to the article said;

Nothing seems new here - it is just a government hand-out to a commercial enterprise. I believe that if you can’t raise/work for $64k without a government hand-out, you most probaby (sic) shouldn’t be an entrepenuer (sic)

I’m a little torn by this comment. On the one hand I agree that it’s not the place of Governments to fund businesses in direct competition with existing suppliers. On the other hand, I heard about some pretty amazing research projects last week that, with a financial small leg-up, could go on to take on the world.

So clearly there are two things going on here - this was an emerging technology grant that clearly should be earmarked for truly emerging technology - a number of these businesses may be up-and-coming, but their product area isn’t emerging.

Having said that on a national and regional scale it is the role of economic development agencies to increase the economic activity in their area. Regardless of whether that economic activity comes from a completely ground-breaking product, or from a “me-too” offering is somewhat academic - it’s all about deriving revenue.

A lot of this relates to a project I’m involved in that will come out of stealth mode in the next few weeks. It’s a simple concept really, one that seeks to help businesses help themselves and others by providing a medium where they can question, communicate and collaborate with their peers - watch this space for some more information about that.

So - what do you think? What is the role of the Government in business building?

How to publicise the party? You guessed it - he invited all of his Facebook friends.

To cut a long story short - he invited all his friends, had 15 definite attendees and 60 possibles (which in itself is interesting - if I hold a dinner party I’d expect the vast majority of those invited to attend - Hal’s response rate was pretty goddam low)

But it gets worse.

Out of those definites and maybe, you know how many turned up?

ONE

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - a Facebook friend may be a real friend, a real friend may be a Facebook friend but any definitive expectations of that type are unsound.

I listened to Obama’s acceptance speech and was caught up in the moment, I see his election as era-defining and a stark demonstration of how far we’ve come in the past hundred or so years. Despite this I can help but feel a little nervous about the entire situation.

Obama is amazing, after eight years of laughing at an oaf (and to be honest the intellect of a nation that, at an aggregate level, elected him to office) it’s revolutionary to hear someone who is an intellectual, an orator and, yes, statesmanlike. To a certain extent therein lies the problem - I was a little frightened to see hundred of Obama supporters, fists in the air, chanting “Yes we can”. Transpose the scene 60 years, change the colour of the speakers skin, and move to another continent and you’ve got another nation following another man who promised to lead them out of the economic train-wreck they had come from.

We all know the results of that foray.

Now not for a minute am I attempting to draw parallels between Obama and Hitler as men - Hitler was a monster, Obama a visionary. But Obama is being set up for a fall - looking at those fists raised in the air it’s hard to imagine how any human being could possible deliver on the expectations of the nation.

Obama has reached almost God-like status, it was interesting to read this BBC editorial where comic Writer John O’Farrell told of the difficulties writers have trying to satirise Obama - some of this is due of course to the traditional “honeymoon period” - let him make some gaffs and it’ll get easier. But some of it is linked to Obama-mania. Writers feel that criticizing or even satirizing Obama would be as risque as was Monty Python’s Life of Brian - Jesus Christ and Obama, two men you don’t make jokes about.

So let’s peg things back a little. Obama is great, his election is pretty amazing when seen within a historical context. He has some great ideas and policies that will help the US and by extension the world.

But a Messiah he isn’t, he’s too early for Sainthood and please don’t name your children after him.

Most recently Paul Boutin wrote what is, admittedly, a quite interesting post on Wired. The crux of the post is that there is no point continuing to write for blogs, and less point in starting a new blog. Rich media, in the likes of YouTube, Flickr, Facebook et al have made it so much easier to post rich content that no one has time for words anymore. Additionally Paul contends that it’s actually easier to upload a video for example than it is to craft a well written blog post - yeah I guess if you’re a retarded, inward facing cretin who can’t form polysyballic sentences and who considers meaningful dialogue to be pretty much what Homer says on the Simpsons.

They don’t give Pullitzers for YouTube videos Paul.

Paul also contend that microblogging is the new form of communication par excellence and that 140 characters is sufficient to say anything one wants.

And what does Paul do for a living? Yes indeed he’s a journalist (one who uses more than 140 characters at a time) and what forum did he use to preach his vision for the future - you guessed it, a magazine cum blog post!

So sorry Paul but I disagree. I’ll continue to blog (both here and here), I’ll also write articles (with lots and lots of words) for the other dinosaur there, print media. And last but not least I’ll continue to enjoy evenings with a glass of wine, a wedge of my own Roquefort and a crisp, worn and leather bound copy of the most beautiful book ever written.

So I’ll leave you with a quote or two from the same, if your personal bandwidth extends past 140 characters that is!

Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods; time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees.  My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath–a source of little visible delight, but necessary.  Nelly, I am Heathcliff!  He’s always, always in my mind–not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being

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