Tag Archives: New Zealand

June 4, 2013 Posted in Business 2 Comments

ActiveState Acquires Appsecute – Job Done, Now Back to Work

By Ben Kepes

(Disclosure – I was an investor and director in Appsecute and am an Adviser to ActiveState) Around 18 months ago I was introduced to Mark Cox and Tyler Power, two smart guys from my hometown who were building a PaaS management product around the Cloud Foundry ecosystem. The fact that

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May 27, 2013 Posted in Business 1 Comment

Xero Rolls Out Payment Services – Closing More SMB Loops

By Ben Kepes

The advent of cloud computing brought with it the promise of increased efficiencies for small and mid sized businesses. These efficiencies were to be created by the very fact that the software, situated as it is in the cloud, is by definition connectable with other products and services in the

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May 10, 2013 Posted in Business Leave a comment

Location Based Services Not Just for Consumers – Location as an IT Service Desk Enabler

By Ben Kepes

At Interop this week I sat in a keynote where a Cisco executive explained how their location based technologies are enabling the MGM Grand resort in Las Vegas to have deeply contextualized and personalized interactions with guests in the resort. That got me thinking about location within an enterprise and,

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May 8, 2013 Posted in Business 6 Comments

New Zealand Defies International Pressure and Makes Software Non-Patentable

By Ben Kepes

I’m immensely proud to be a New Zealand. Despite being a tiny country at the end of the earth we have historically shown the fortitude to make the big calls before others were willing to do so. The first country in the world to offer women the vote and the

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April 12, 2013 Posted in Business Leave a comment

OneNet Rolls Out LiveVault Service Provider Tools

By Ben Kepes

Perhaps one of the least sexy, yet most important parts of building a strong service-provider ecosystem is ensuring that all the infrastructure and tools needed for service providers to… provide their service, are in place. OneNet, a cloud vendor based in New Zealand, recently rolled out a series of tools

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April 5, 2013 Posted in Business 3 Comments

On Small Business Accounting, Yodlee, Perceptions and Critical Mass

By Ben Kepes

UK (and global, to an extent) SMB accounting vendor FreeAgent recently announced that it was rolling out automated bank feeds for its customers. For those of you who don’t follow the space, automatic bank feeds (the ability for a small business to have all it’s transactions show up within its

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March 27, 2013 Posted in Business 1 Comment

The Xero Share Price – One Pundit’s Analysis

By Ben Kepes

In recent weeks the share price for listed cloud accounting vendor Xero has risen at an incredibly fast rate. The company, which has around 140000 paying customers globally and is yet to turn a profit, is now valued at close to $1.5B. This is a staggering achievement and something I

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January 24, 2013 Posted in Business Leave a comment

Airline Customer Service 2.0

By Ben Kepes

I’m writing this email 30000 feet or so above the Pacific Ocean upon an Air New Zealand flight to San Francisco. I’m also somewhat agitated because I inadvertently left my wallet (and all of my credit cards and other essentials) at home in my office. As I fly along in

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December 16, 2012 Posted in Business 1 Comment

Fairfax Selling Remaining TradeMe Shares–My Two Cents

By Ben Kepes

Big news in Australasia this weekend was the planned sale of the remaining 51% that Fairfax still holds in TradeMe. Lance Wiggs has been doing the rounds of the media outlets with the view that the move is “absolutely bonkers”. At first look it’s hard to argue with that, until

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December 4, 2012 Posted in Business 10 Comments

On Angel Investing–and Karma

By Ben Kepes

This technology lark has been pretty good to me – in the past handful of years since deciding on this path I’ve met some incredible people, journeyed far and wide and enjoyed the financial rewards that are particular to this industry. One thing that always troubled me a little however

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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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