Monthly Archives: May 2008

26/05/2008 Posted in Economic Development, Efficiency, New Zealand, SaaS, Society, Strategy 3 Comments

Personal finance

By Ben Kepes

Daniel wrote an excellent post around his ideas for a personal finance web engine. His thoughts around this were in part formed around some comments made by Xero CEO Rod Drury about a Xero “personal edition” that they might possibly be considering. I think the idea (and by extension much

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26/05/2008 Posted in Design, IT, New business, New Zealand, SaaS, Strategy Leave a comment

Interview with Rod Drury – Part two

By Ben Kepes

Part two of my recent interview with Rd – we discuss some of the strategies Xero uses for sales channels and also market factors affecting Xero in terms of competitors entering, both large companies trying to downscale, and small players trying to upscale. We also discuss the functionality roadmap for

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25/05/2008 Posted in Business, Design, SaaS, Strategy 2 Comments

Can Microsoft be rebranded? or are they doomed to the position of ‘nerd’ forever?

By Julian Stone

Rod Drury wrote an interesting post over on his blog about what he would do if in charge of Microsoft. Have a read of the post – here’s the link: http://www.drury.net.nz/2008/05/24/if-i-was-in-charge-2/ But as much as I agree with nearly all his points, I wanted to expand on point number 15

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24/05/2008 Posted in Blogroll Leave a comment

Email syndication

By Ben Kepes

My buddy Kim Potter (aka Vinyl Burns) lives on his Treo, he requested email syndication for this blog. In a continuous attempt to deliver what people want, Diversity Blog now has email syndication – accessed from just below the RSS feed icons on the right hand side of the page.

24/05/2008 Posted in Economic Development, Efficiency, IT, New business, New Zealand, Society, Strategy Leave a comment

It’s not just us that has woes with broadband

By Ben Kepes

Interesting to read this Wired article which laments the patchy roll out of fibre in the US. The article talks abut the fact that fibre roll out in the US is concentrated to areas that Verizon services and local government supported projects. Interestingly the ld chestnut that has been hotly

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24/05/2008 Posted in Collaboration, Design, Efficiency, New business, SaaS, Web x.0 Leave a comment

Online apps are different

By Ben Kepes

At the CeBIT show, Zoho gave a presentation detailing just why online applications are different. At the same time Desire2Learn made a great video showing how easy, and useful, online notebook products can be. Both of these videos reminded me of a discussion I had with an installed applications vendor

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23/05/2008 Posted in New business, New Zealand, Strategy 1 Comment

Is Eurekster dead?

By Ben Kepes

I hope not – it’s be a sad day for Christchurch – Eurekster was the latest in the line of Ryan brother’s startups and it was garenring a reasonable degree of credibility. In March 2007 Tech Crunch reported that they’d got $5.5mil VC funding but as RWW reports, the site

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23/05/2008 Posted in Design, IT, New Zealand, SaaS, Web x.0 14 Comments

How important is design for SaaS offerings?

By Ben Kepes

Yesterday I met up with the team from iPayroll at the small business expo in Christchurch. I’ve been pretty critical in the past of what their offering looks like – the best analogy I can think of is that their offering looks like a Ford Edsel that someone has stuck

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22/05/2008 Posted in Design, IT, SaaS Leave a comment

Xero mobile

By Ben Kepes

This is cool….. Xero haven’t announced it yet but eagle eyed fastchicken and stuartm pointed out Xero mobile (oh and no relation to this). The pic below is a bad one – but it shows Xero on my E61 along with Xero on my Laptop. Cool (and an example of

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22/05/2008 Posted in Blogging, Efficiency, IT, New business, New Zealand, SaaS, Strategy 1 Comment

DiversityTV – Rod Drury interview part one

By Ben Kepes

At the small business expo in Christchurch, Ben took the opportunity to interview a number of businesses. In the first interview to be posted, we talk to Rod Drury, co-founder and CEO of Xero about some of the decisions Xero made about their initial market entrance strategies and some lessons

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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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