Monthly Archives: March 2008

26/03/2008 Posted in IT, Strategy, Web x.0 1 Comment

BNZ rolls out VoIP, finds added value…

By Ben Kepes

IP services are the way of the future, large organisations however have been fairly conservative to embrace what they can bring to a business. Refreshing to read this morning that the Bank of New Zealand has rolled out VoIP to 5,000 staff, across 186 BNZ branches and six corporate sites

26/03/2008 Posted in New Zealand, Society 5 Comments

20 years to see property capital gains…

By Ben Kepes

Very sobering reading from Bernard Hickey, saying that; New Zealand’s housing market is so overvalued and wages are growing so slowly that we at interest.co.nz expect median house prices will not rise back above their November 2007 peaks until 2018 at the earliest. The size of the bubble is so

26/03/2008 Posted in IT, New Zealand 8 Comments

New Digital Strategy Advisory Group

By Ben Kepes

Announced today that the Government will set up a new advisory group to represent the various interested parties in ICT in this country. IT Minister David Cunliffe said Creating a digital future for New Zealanders requires collaboration from a wide range of stakeholders… The new forum will create partnerships between

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26/03/2008 Posted in IT, New Zealand 6 Comments

Incredulous….

By Ben Kepes

I’m up in Auckland for the next two days at a conference. It’s being held at an up-market, seemingly business-savvy and central city hotel. It’s an IT conference and so obviously the hotel realises a bunch of tech connected peoples will be here. I wanted to connect to a WiFi

25/03/2008 Posted in Design, IT, New business, SaaS, Strategy 3 Comments

Lessons for SaaS vendors..

By Ben Kepes

With a hat tip to Matt, check out this excellent article giving some lessons learnt and thoughts from the authors experience running SaaS businesses. It is in answer to Byron’s Top 10 Laws for Being “SaaS-y”. To summarise, the thoughts/tips are; Make the revenue – if it means offering 12

25/03/2008 Posted in Design, IT, New business, New Zealand, SaaS 11 Comments

On Telecom and internet for SMEs

By Ben Kepes

A press release yesterday announced a new small business ISP soon to come from Telecom. The new ISP, according to the release, will provide hosting, domain name registration, web design and SaaS applications. Over on his blog, Lance has a few positive and a few negative comments on the service.

24/03/2008 Posted in Design, IT, SaaS, Web x.0 1 Comment

More on the move from desktop to web apps…

By Ben Kepes

An excellent post over on TechCrunch got me looking once again at Mozilla Prism. For those of you new to it, Prism is an open source cross-platform prototype of functionality that lets users split web applications out of the browser and run them directly on the desktop. In essence prism

22/03/2008 Posted in Business 1 Comment

Call me mainstream…

By Ben Kepes

In a moment of respite from organising children’s birthday parties, I took the Facebook political compass test. In the words of the application creator, The Political Compass positions you on both an economic and a social axis through your responses to a series of propositions during the next 3-5 minutes.

21/03/2008 Posted in New business Leave a comment

And you thought Ponoko was smart?

By Ben Kepes

(and I agree by the way, Ponoko is smart) But check this out; take one flatbed scanner, some engineering smarts and some edible ink and look what you get; Someone hire this guy – he’ll make you millions… Hat tip to MF for the movie….

21/03/2008 Posted in SaaS 1 Comment

The Babel fish cometh…

By Ben Kepes

RWW posted this morning about the Google release of there machine translation software via API. Apparently the new API can handle language detection, so potentially the possibility is opened up to have cross language IM chats via the software with each party receiving what the other said, but nicely translated

The Author

Ben Kepes is an analyst, an entrepreneur, a commentator and a business adviser. His business interests include a diverse range of industries from manufacturing to property to technology. As a technology commentator he has a broad presence both in the traditional media and extensively online. Ben covers the convergance 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. More on Ben

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