Category Archives: New Zealand

August 24, 2009 Posted in Business, Design, IT, New Zealand, SaaS, Strategy 18 Comments

BNZ, Outsourcing Design to Xero

By Ben Kepes

The Bank of New Zealand is a reasonably significant shareholder in Xero and so many of us expected that they’d be working together on the odd project. What we didn’t expect was that the bank would seemingly outsource their web design to Xero but it looks very much like they

Tagged , , , , |
August 21, 2009 Posted in Business, Design, Manufacturing, My businesses, New business, New Zealand 5 Comments

Yikes! The Ryans are at it again

By Ben Kepes

The Ryan brothers are something of a powerhouse of Kiwi entrepreneurship and innovation. Between them Doctors Shaun and Grant (underachievement obviously being a familial trait!) have set up and been involved in a raft of exciting companies – GlobalBrain, Eurekster, SLI Systems among them. They’re also involved in a bunch

Tagged , , , , , , |
August 6, 2009 Posted in Business, IT, New business, New Zealand, PaaS, SaaS, Web x.0 2 Comments

Trineo – Heading for the Big Time

By Ben Kepes


A few months ago I wrote a href="http://www.cloudave.com/link/making-crm-work-for-verticals"
target="_blank">post discussing some interesting vertical offerings that I’d seen built on top of the class="zem_slink" href="http://www.salesforce.com/"
rel="homepage"
title="Salesforce">salesforce.com platform. I alluded to a new offering that was, at that time in stealth mode – the company behind that offering, Trineo has been invited to San Francisco next week to pitch to a panel of investment and IT gurus, including class="zem_slink" href="http://www.sequoiacap.com/"
rel="homepage"
title="Sequoia Capital">Sequoia Capital, as part of the final selection process for the Force 40 Innovation Showcase competition, run by class="zem_slink" href="http://www.salesforce.com/"
rel="homepage" title="Salesforce">Salesforce.com as part of their Dreamforce conference in November.



Trineo is a development and


Tagged , , , , , , , |
August 3, 2009 Posted in Blogroll, New Zealand, Society 1 Comment

Judge and Jury – Fair Process Anyone?

By Ben Kepes

I posted a few weeks ago about the Clayton Weatherston trial – that post garnered a number of comments, many of which were along the lines of “everyone deserves their day in court and the presumption of innocence). This morning I was reading the NZ Herald and came across this

Tagged , , , |
August 2, 2009 Posted in Blogging, New Zealand Leave a comment

Wordcamp Wellington…

By Ben Kepes

This coming weekend sees Wellington hosting the New Zealand round of WordCamp. WordCamp is a conference that focuses on the intricacies of WordPress – one of the most popular blogging platforms on the web. In something of a coup, admittedly appreciated mainly among those breathing the rarefied air of blogging,

Tagged , , |
July 20, 2009 Posted in Business, Economic Development, New Zealand, Society 3 Comments

Individual Credit Ratings – A Blunt Tool for a Big Problem

By Ben Kepes

News this morning that credit rating company Veda Advantage plans to introduce a credit rating system for all New Zealand citizens. The system will; give Kiwis a score from minus 330 to plus 1000. Most people will rate above zero but anyone with a score of less than 100 will

Tagged , , , , , |
July 13, 2009 Posted in New Zealand, Society 2 Comments

Good Headline, Terrible Content

By Ben Kepes

Today is my day to rant a little about a newspaper article over the weekend that really got me riled up. This week’s pick of the bunch is a headline from the NZ Herald proclaiming that “Leaky house costs owner’s life”. For my non New Zealand readers – there is

Tagged , , , |
July 10, 2009 Posted in New Zealand, Society 19 Comments

Justice For All?

By Ben Kepes

I’m probably in contempt of court for posting this and, yes, it’s way off-topic but I couldn’t resist writing about a murder trial going on here in New Zealand at the moment. A brief introduction – university lecturer Clayton Weatherston is accused of murdering his ex-girlfriend and student, Sophie Elliot,

Tagged , , |
July 7, 2009 Posted in Efficiency, New Zealand, Society 10 Comments

Our Health System Sucks. Seriously!

By Ben Kepes

Warning – this will sound like an off-topic rant. It is, but it’s a cathartic one. My mother had a fall last year during which she fractured her pelvis. This, and a historical neck-of-femur fracture sustained in a fall 15 years ago have led her surgeon to determine that a

Tagged , , , |
June 17, 2009 Posted in Business, Economic Development, New Zealand, Society 2 Comments

Charity Begins At Home – Lending for Small Business

By Ben Kepes

Image via Wikipedia Kiva is a US based peer-to-peer lending system that allows people to temporarily loan money to entrepreneurs in the developing world. Kiva acts as the agent hosting profiles of entrepreneurs for lenders to access, collecting the funds to be distributed through agencies on-the-ground, and, once a loan

Tagged , , , |

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

Subscribe to the Blog

 Subscribe - Posts for all authors

Enter your email address and we'll send our posts to you: