Monthly Archives: September 2008

30/09/2008 Posted in Business, Design, Economic Development, Efficiency, IT, New Zealand, Society, Strategy 1 Comment

Arthur Grimes sets himself up for crucifixion

By Ben Kepes

Now here’s a brave, brave man. We’ve all been hearing recently of the step change that broadband will bring to New Zealand – it seems to be one of the big election issues with both main parties coming to it from different angles. Both of these angles have however main

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29/09/2008 Posted in Business, IT, New Zealand, Society, Strategy 3 Comments

Big big oops…

By Ben Kepes

From that category of "what a complete cock-up" comes news that ISP Slingshot‘s iTalk VoIP service went dead the other day. The reason? An expired domain – it seemed the Slingshot staffer set the domain up and used his/her personal email address as the contact, resulting in Slingshot not getting

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29/09/2008 Posted in Business, Design, Efficiency, IT, New Zealand, SocialMedia, Strategy 8 Comments

On building communities of interest

By Ben Kepes

It was interesting to read this post by Ben (another Ben) who details the rise and rise of Vodafone’s community forum site. Ben says that there is a reluctance within corporate New Zealand to invest the time to build web communities – possibly due to a fear that they’ll build

28/09/2008 Posted in Business, Design, Efficiency, IT 1 Comment

Knocking against silo walls

By Ben Kepes

A friend of mine is involved in creating a community website overseas and recounted to me an interesting tail. It seems had a preference to using one of the open source content management systems, and maybe going out to the developer community for any tweaks that were required to make

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27/09/2008 Posted in Business, Collaboration, Design, Governance, IT, New Zealand, Strategy 1 Comment

When the Boss Buys In, You’re Bound to Win

By Ben Kepes

  Next weekend I’ll be up in Auckland attending the inaugural TelecomONE unconference. The organisers, in an attempt to explain what TelecomONE is all about, have come up with the following; The Right People + Opinions + Discussions = TelecomONE Innovation Basically the unconference seeks to create a forum where

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26/09/2008 Posted in Business 2 Comments

The natural shift from Code sales to SaaS (Software as a Service)

By Julian Stone

“Code customers only make up 8% of our customer base (today), it shows you the move from code to SaaS, 100% of our customers used to be code” – this was a quote I noticed on a staff members Twitter account. He’s right though. We operate a leading project management

26/09/2008 Posted in Business, Design, IT, Strategy, Web x.0 8 Comments

Sanity returns – and from the Godfather no less

By Ben Kepes

This is music to my ears – at the recent Web 2.0 conference in New York, the father of Web 2.0, Tim O’Reilly, questioned where Web 2.0 is at, and where it is headed. Tim is quoted as saying that; (These are) pretty depressing times in a lot of ways,

25/09/2008 Posted in Business, Design, IT, Strategy Leave a comment

Choice is a Damn Fine Thing!

By Ben Kepes

I posted a few days ago about a guy who created an iPhone app that competed with a native iPhone offering. Apple subsequently decided to withhold acceptance of his application – citing concerns about the competing nature of his offering. My post was under the guise of asking how Apple

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24/09/2008 Posted in Blogging, Business, New Zealand Leave a comment

New Media for Old Media – Congrats to RWW!

By Ben Kepes

Big ups to ReadWriteWeb who along with GigaOm and VentureBeat are contributing to the New York Times‘ technology section. It’s a great win for a New Zealand blog (well OK of the RWW writers, only Richard (and on the odd occasion that I contribute to RWW myself)) hail from New

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24/09/2008 Posted in Business, Efficiency, IT, New business, Strategy 5 Comments

On start-ups and paying CEOs

By Ben Kepes

At the TechCrunch 50 conference Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley uber investor was quoted as saying that there is a ceiling in terms of CEO salary for a startup, beyond which you begin to “have issues”. For a more general take on CEO salaries (not tech specific) check out this article.

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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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