Onwards and upwards - my blog will now be found HERE

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Why diversity - because my life is, my interests are and diversity is a good and wondrous thing…..

Following on from some comments that Rod made to me last night regarding their issues around finding staff, news this morning to confirm that NZ’s unemployment levels have hit record lows.

Rod reported that some of their dev team originate from the UK and SA which begs a couple of questions;

1. Are we producing sufficient IT talent (answer - no)
2. Is our constrained labour market caused in part by people ding low value add work (answer - yes)

Seems like it might be time for the NZ Institute to publish yet another report - Building the domestic IT skill base (or something like that)

In a great example of what telcos need to be doing to compete when their legacy revenue streams dry up, BT Tradespace 2.0 went live the other day. Created by Mural Ventures it is a great example of a trade platform that feeds into some next generation revenue streams for BT.

There is plenty more left to do and I’m sure we’ll see heaps more evolution, and a bit of revolution, in the months to come.

This evening I interviewed Rod Drury, CEO of Xero, to get his thoughts on where they are at. As noted previously the half year report was just released and it offered an opportune time for Rod to make some comments.

I started by talking to Rod about the Xero experience - from offer documents to actual figures. Rod was pleasantly surprised that both cost and revenue sides of the offer document have played out. It’s always easy to “stick your finger in the air” and make projections but it’s nice when you execute and achieve the aims. One thing Xero has been surprised at is the overwhelming buy-in from the accountancy fraternity. Rod made the comment that accountants are notoriously suspicious of software companies and Xero, being a SaaS product, has some real advantages here in that the accountants can see the product development rapidly reacting to their comments and criticisms.

Now that accountants are on board, Rod was keen to reinforce that the next period of time will see Xero build on their product base, and add to it a greater sales and marketing competency. Xero is poised to take advantage of the network effects and Rod (and I) are interested to see who will step up and become the network aggregator for SMEs. Rod commented that the jury is still out (Facebook/MS deal notwithstanding) as to who holds the power - the channel or the application.

In terms of the sales and marketing roadmap, Rod commented that, while the IPO built good enterprise credibility, there is still a lot of work to be done to connect to the SMEs (who don’t tend to read too many prospectii, busy as they are doing the business). Rod said that its all about articulating the value proposition and showing the value add from the product.

In terms of revenue growth globally, UK entry will be similar to that in New Zealand, with a limited release to build credibility and scale, Hamish Edwards has been in the UK for the past couple of months building the relationships, especially those with the banks that Xero enjoys here in New Zealand. Rod did say that the offshore rollouts will be somewhat more automated and hands off than those in New Zealand - in that respect NZ has been a good test bed to develop the systems and processes and those can now be scaled and automated.

On a positive note, Rod commented on the value of having Rowan involved to crunch the numbers (lover of analysis that he is) this has allowed for a very low churn rate and some planning about engaging customers to really make use of, derive the extra value from and, hopefully, become recommenders of, the product.

Some quotes that seemed worth mentioning;

On building a global SaaS accounting company - “It won’t happen overnight but it will happen”

and on SaaS and the ISVs - “the global leaders of tomorrow are not the vendors of today”

Lastly, and in a “oh isn’t that nice” vain, Rod commented on his pleasure at being able to give young people the chance to specialise at a high level and that this is one of the benefits of a well resourced operation - “it’s just more fun”.

Cheers Rod and I look forward to talking further.

Facebook announced its new advertising product the other day. Facebook CEO Marc Zuckerberg said;

“Facebook Ads represent a completely new way of advertising online, for the last hundred years media has been pushed out to people, but now marketers are going to be a part of the conversation. And they’re going to do this by using the social graph in the same way our users do.”

Sounds a little evangelical for me. For me Facebook is about social networking and something like this really turns me off;

Interesting to see who has jumped into this - Blockbuster, CBS, Chase, The Coca-Cola Company, Microsoft, Sony Pictures Television and Verizon Wireless - mainly old world companies that are sufficiently scared of being left behind. The little creatives are already doing cutting edge marketing and Facebook Ads will possibly become a sad, irrelevant and annoying service (and intrusion upon Facebook users).

Or maybe not?

Is here….

Pretty self explanatory and no real surprises at this early stage.

We’ll look forward to seeing these as time moves on.

And an Apple tablet would be uber cool.

Reports here that Asus is prototyping a tablet for Apple.

Imagine coverflow and touchscreen goodness on a 15inch and in a full size OS.

I’m excited…….

Jon Beattie, in marketing a blog post par excellance, headed up his post “Wife 2.0″.

John was actually referring to Backpackit - a service that seems to offer you the ability to……. hmmm, keep a central repository of information.

Now at first I was a little dubious about it all - it seems like a glorified Wiki to me… but then again - Web 2.0 is abut bringing Web tools to the masses. Backpackit is a nice, accessible, obviously usable format - than on its own probably constitutes a valuable offering.

In the past I’ve been one to account some of New Zealand’s economic woes (high consumer spending, high consumer debt, dodgy investing practices et al) to a lack of financial literacy. I’ve posted about it a few times like here and here and here and here!

Well blow me down with a feather, in my inbox this morning was news of;

the release of the new school curriculum which incorporates a strengthened focus on developing students’ financial capability.

Securities Commission (the crowd behind the initiative) member Annabel Cotton says the Look Learn Invest website “draws a lot of material together in one place”.

“It’s covering the basics of what we think smart investors do before they commit their money.”

The site can be seen here.

Or - How to (not) win friends or influence people.

MF over on Geekzone just posted abut some comments that were made in reply to some critical posts abut the ISP Slingshot. Seems the comments originated from two very closely numbered IP addresses which just happen to both belong to Slingshot.

Hopefully it’s not sanctioned by the business itself but it just goes to show - trying to subvert criticism is a dangerous road to go down.