Category Archives: Branding

August 24, 2007 Posted in Branding, Strategy 7 Comments

A little dodgy Idealog….

By Ben Kepes

I subscribe to the Idealog RSS feed. I do so because Idealog interests me and the topics they post about are close to my interests. I’m not however looking for a job in the creative industry and that’s why my reader surprised and annoyed me a little this morning. It

August 17, 2007 Posted in Branding, Business, Design, Economic Development, Manufacturing, My businesses, New Zealand, Strategy 4 Comments

Authentically made in China and painted with lead……

By Ben Kepes

Will has a good post over here giving some sag advice to startups to be authentic. It’s a valid viewpoint, especially given the recent cases involving dodgy lead paint, poisonous toothpaste and killer dog food. Recently we have seen a number of products come to market which leverage off some

August 8, 2007 Posted in Branding, Business, Design, Efficiency, IT, SaaS, Strategy, Web x.0 4 Comments

SAP SaaS, or SaaS SAP, or something

By Ben Kepes

News that SAP will offer a SaaS product. They’re intending to service around 100 000 punters, while not cannibalising their existing revenue streams. The unreasonable men pour scorn on the idea over here, saying that “incumbents don’t like disruption because its almost certainly an extraneous force impacting on how they

July 19, 2007 Posted in Branding, Business, Design, IT, New business, SaaS, Society, Strategy 7 Comments

So what actually is Web 2.0? And where does SaaS fall into that? Where is the intersect?

By Ben Kepes

Well, according to Tim O’Reilly, Web 2.0 is when the web shows the following traits; the web as a platform data as the driving force network effects created by an architecture of participation innovation in assembly of systems and sites composed by pulling together features from distributed, independent developers (a

July 15, 2007 Posted in Branding, Business, Governance, New business, New Zealand, Strategy Leave a comment

Vehicle security product from NZ…

By Ben Kepes

In the SST this morning was a piece on recent graduate of the Icehouse, BlackHawk tracking systems. They seem to be an example of what sort of business we should be aspiring to create in NZ. Basically the BlackHawk system allows mobile phone tracking and immobilisation of a vehicle. In

July 11, 2007 Posted in Branding, Business, Governance, New Zealand, Strategy Leave a comment

Telecom help desk outsourcing

By Ben Kepes

Lance had a great post over here with some tips for Telecom in their outsourcing venture. While the situation is a little funny and many jokes will be made about it, the  Telecom situation does beg a few questions for businesses. For years Dell has had all their call centre

July 9, 2007 Posted in Branding, Business, Design, Efficiency, IT, New business, Strategy 3 Comments

Sam’s view on Design as it relates to TradeMe…

By Ben Kepes

I was watching some vCasts of the Better By Design conference the other day and came across this one by Sam Morgan. His points were very much directed at businesses developing internet delivered products or services and, since I’ve been talking about SaaS lately it seemed timely to go through

July 8, 2007 Posted in Branding, Business, Design, New business, SaaS, Strategy 11 Comments

Let’s discuss SaaS some more….

By Ben Kepes

The way I fugure it, there are two distinct types of SaaS business model SaaS for substitution (SaaS/s) SaaS with added value (SaaS/v) Let’s look at the first one – SaaS/s is a situation where a software or manual product is an extremely expensive acquisition or requires significant maintenance. The

July 7, 2007 Posted in Branding, Business, Design, Economic Development, Manufacturing, New business, New Zealand Leave a comment

See – it’s not just Cactus that can still manufacture in NZ…

By Ben Kepes

Maternity wear company Egg is going great guns. They’ve just signed a deal to be represented in Blomingdales stateside. Already they 14 stores in NZ and 8 in Australia with expansion in progress in Singapore and have achieved the milestone of higher offshore than domestic sales. Given the state of

July 6, 2007 Posted in Branding, Business, Coffee, Design, New Zealand, Society, Strategy 1 Comment

Coffee, bean of the gods…

By Ben Kepes

I have in the past been involved in the coffee industry and I have some current associations with it. A discussion I had this morning led me to thinking about the coffee roasting industry in New Zealand. Currently there are a plethora of coffee roasters, all pretty much trying to

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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