Beijing Trip
Posted on August 18, 2008
Filed Under Travel | Leave a Comment
This post has taken a while to get out the door, but it probably isn’t completely a bad thing because now I can reflect on my trip to Beijing without gushing too much.
As an undergrad I studied some Chinese economic history and I’ve wanted to visit mainland China ever since. I’ve been to Hong Kong on business a bunch of times and have always loved that, but never been to China proper before now.
The timing was pretty good too, we managed to get a great deal on Air New Zealand’s inaugural direct flight into Beijing which was kinda cool with the CEO, Rob Fyfe, and NZ’s Minister of Tourism, Damien O’Connor, onboard to celebrate the opening the of the new route. We even had a Maori welcome party at the Beijing end…
Testing iPhone Wordpress App
Posted on August 1, 2008
Filed Under Tech | Leave a Comment
Been a bit frustrated with some bugginess in the iPhone app store, particularly when downloading apps directly over the air. Still, nothing that a soft restore didn’t fix.
Posting this from the Worspress app which seems pretty sweet..might even me inclined to blog more if I can easily embed pix too.
Superman Vacuuming
Posted on July 8, 2008
Filed Under Comedy, Family, Pictures | Leave a Comment
No reason for posting this except I get a giggle out of it every time I look at it…even Superman needs to do the domestics sometimes.
Vodafone New Zealand iPhone Plans
Posted on July 7, 2008
Filed Under Business, New Zealand, Tech | 6 Comments
So I was refreshing the Vodafone New Zealand site this morning at 10am along with the rest of the country (and probably lots of people beyond) to see what the iPhone plans were going to be for the release of the new Apple iPhone 3G locally. Of course Vodafone were woefully underprepared and the site crashed instantly (Lance calls it amateur hour).
Lucky for Vodafone Mauricio was on to it and managed to keep Geekzone alive despite the traffic jam so we all got to finally see the plans and the initial reactions were not good. Twitter lit up with a roundly negative response…it’s been funny to watch Summize update with peoples opinions. The Geekzone forum has had a similar tone.
RSS feed borked fixed
Posted on June 27, 2008
Filed Under Comedy, Tech | 3 Comments
If you are reading this in a feed reader can you please leave a comment on my blog to let me know. My RSS feed appears to be broken, so I suspect no one is getting updates, but then again some people report seeing all the latest so it is a bit odd.
UPDATE: Thanks Justine. All good now…problem was between the chair and keyboard :)
Francis & The Lights
Posted on June 26, 2008
Filed Under Music | Leave a Comment
This reminds me I need more music in my life.
You can download the EP here.
The devil’s in the detail
Posted on June 17, 2008
Filed Under Business, Tech | Leave a Comment
This post has been sitting as a draft for weeks now, but this morning Dylan Bland’s post about focussing on the details prompts me to push it out there. I had been meaning to add some more thoughts, but I’ll probably never get around to it so here we go, as is where is…
–
Stephan posted awhile back about being turned off by uninspiring business pitches which get lost in the details…
What typically happens is that the person gets lost in the weeds - caught up in the small details such as what the site will look like or what they are going to call it. That isn’t what I want to hear. You need to be able to tell me three things… [read the rest]
Of course I totally agree about the need to be able to pitch an idea focussing on just the problems solved and the benefits delivered rather that the minutia. The point being that you really can’t expect people to grok the details in the first five minutes, rather you need to get them to that ‘Aha’ moment so that they understand the value proposition.
That said, I also find the opposite to be true. The number of times I have had conversations with people about business ideas (typically web based) which exist only at the 30,000 foot level. Regardless of whether they can succinctly describe the business in such a way that gives me that aha! moment, I find it incredibly frustrating when they haven’t thought through even the simplest of details.
Flynn pwns my laptop
Posted on May 29, 2008
Filed Under Tech | 2 Comments
Today was the first time I was not able to access my laptop because Flynn was using it with serious intent…playing pairs on uptoten.com :)
He turns 4 in August and he’s going to need his own computer before long…hmm, an eee PC in our future I see.
Weezers new video
Posted on May 23, 2008
Filed Under Cool, Music | 1 Comment
Weezer have a history of innovative videos and their latest for Pork and Beans is very cool…
via Waxy
Context is everything
Posted on May 5, 2008
Filed Under Business | Comments Off
Amongst all the handwringing and talk of Yahoo’s stock price plunge Jason Kottke makes a pretty salient observation…
On Jan 31, the day before Microsoft offered $31/share for Yahoo, YHOO was at $19.18/share (market cap: $26.4 billion) and MSFT was at $32.60/share (market cap: $303.6 billion). At the close of trading today, YHOO closed at $24.37/share (market cap: $33.5 billion) and MSFT was at $29.08/share (market cap: $270.8 billion). In other words, the Microsoft offer increased the value of Yahoo! Inc. by more than $7 billion and decreased the value of Microsoft Corporation by almost $33 billion.
Read the rest of Jason Kottke’s post, Yahoo stock plunges?.
Certainly Yahoo’s stock price wasn’t on fire before the Microsoft offer and Yahoo has issues, but personally I’m erring toward the don’t sell side of the fence. Not because I don’t like MS (I do and I use MS Products all day long), it’s more because I like the idea that there are three big guys competing in search, I really like lots of the Yahoo products, I think they’ve brought lots of great talent in many of their acquisitions, and I want to see them have a chance to pull it all together.
I have no skin in this fight and I have no real insight to most of the big issues here (eg. cultural fit, technology fit, people fit), but selling doesn’t feel good for the internet.
Check out this 10 year chart of YHOO stock prices. That sure puts the recent fluctuations in context.
keep looking »