Planet NZTech

Excluding files from git archive exports using gitattributes

Francois Marier @ February 09, 2010 09:23 AM

git archive provides an easy way of producing a tarball directly from a project's git branch.

For example, this is what we use to build the Mahara tarballs:

git archive --format=tar --prefix=mahara-${VERSION}/ ${RELEASETAG} | bzip2 -9 > ${CURRENTDIR}/mahara-${RELEASE}.tar.bz2

If you do this however, you end up with the entire contents of the git branch, including potentially undesirable files like .gitignore.

There is an easy, though not very well-documented, way of specifying files to exclude from such exports: gitattributes.

This is what the Mahara .gitattributes file looks like:

/test export-ignore
.gitattributes export-ignore
.gitignore export-ignore

With this file in the root directory of our repository, tarballs we generate using git archive no longer contain the selenium tests or the git config files.

If you start playing with this feature however, make sure you commit the .gitattributes file to your repository before running git archive. Otherwise the settings will not be picked up by git archive.

I do not stand for John Key’s defeatist talk

Jack Yan @ February 09, 2010 06:01 AM

I’ve heard it all before. In the 1980s, the New Zealand Government promised that, with the introduction of Goods and Services’ Tax (GST), people would be better off, because it would mean more money in our pockets.
   With the proposal to hike GST to 15 per cent under the current government, Prime Minister John Key is singing a similar tune: that somehow, this will be better for us, offset by a reduction in income tax.
   It’s the same tune that was sung 25 years ago by another technocratic government, clueless on actually how to grow the economy without stealing from the general public.
   Economies are grown through innovation and creating circumstances that allow that to happen, which was what the National Party promised with its broadband strategy. We’ve since heard less about that and more about putting some cycle tracks through the country for tourists—all short-term projects from people who have never had to start a long-term business in their lives.
   Unemployment is now up to 7·3 per cent. Before you say it’s not that bad compared with overseas, it’s still pretty terrible. It’s why this has been the core of a lot of my mayoral campaign messages: we need to get unemployment down. How? By creating the environment through which innovation can be fostered.
   In Wellington, that means building on the creative and technological clusters people have been creating. What this city should have in the next three years is a mayor and council that support this—because it is in the national interest.
   When Dr Alan Bollard, Governor of the Reserve Bank, said we should not bother trying to match Australia’s standard of living by 2025 because we lacked the natural resources, I was shocked at what I would call a defeatist attitude—one that the PM seems to share with trying to take from everyday New Zealanders.
   I hope that Dr Bollard can inform me of the context, as I was out of the country when he made his statement on television.
   But I will say that we already are among the most innovative people in the world, both out of our natural creativity and out of necessity.
   We also know that economies are built on industry clusters—something that already exists in Wellington and needs just enough encouragement from a supportive mayor and council.
   We also know that in the 21st century, trying to grow an economy based around primary products and natural resources is an outmoded idea. They are important, of course, and New Zealand will always need a vibrant primary sector, but the real growth is in intellectual capital—something which people in national politics seem to lack.
   What we don’t have are enough people seeking public office who can see this. People who want to grow the economy. People who believe enough in the intelligence and innovation of New Zealanders.
   Well, I believe in us, and I believe in our potential. I also don’t believe in robbing everyday New Zealanders of their hard-earned cash.
   While some rates’ increases are already planned by this current administration, let us try to minimize future increases by creating real businesses for Wellington, and for this city.
   Let’s also show the defeatists that they are yesterday’s men. We know better, and we can do better.

Surprises on the press freedoms’ map

Jack Yan @ February 09, 2010 05:37 AM

This map (via pedroelrey on Tumblr) is food for thought, about international press freedoms:

   Those of us who enjoy a free press need to use it and not take it for granted. We might not always like what’s being said, but we should embrace the fact that we can say it at all.
   I was surprised to see that the US did not have a fully free press, according to this map from Reporters sans Frontières, which classes it with Chile, Argentina, France, South Africa and Japan.
   In fact, there are few of us that seem to be in the white—especially when you factor in the small populations of Australia, New Zealand and Scandinavia.
   The fact there are still countries in the black—the colour used here to represent a grave situation for press freedom—is also disturbing. Some communist nations, parts of the Middle East and Africa and several former Soviet states have very little press freedom.
   Anyone want to come up with some theories on why the US, France and Japan—developed countries I would have thought would come up in the white on such a map—are in second place when it comes to press freedoms?

Manawatu Investment Group and SCIF put $1m into Speirs Nutritionals

Dave Moskovitz @ February 09, 2010 04:32 AM

Manawatu Investment Group (MIG) has successfully led an investment in excess of $1 million into functional food business Speirs Nutritionals Partners LP. Speirs Nutritionals is commercialising Massey University developed technology that allows very high loadings of beneficial Omega 3 oils to be included in every day food items, with no impact on the product’s smell or taste.

In March 2009 Speirs Nutritionals signed a world-wide distribution deal with Croda International, a United Kingdom based publically listed company. Through Croda’s international market channels Speirs Nutritionals’ Omega 3 technology is marketed under the brand Omelife.

Dean Tilyard, Chief Executive of Manawatu Investment Group described the investment as a significant capital raising for an early stage New Zealand technology business. Tilyard says ”the climate for early stage capital raising remains tight and this investment reflects the strong technology underpinning Speirs Nutritionals and the significant progress the business has made in establishing a global marketing channel”.

In addition to Manawatu Investment Group the investors include the New Zealand Venture Investment Fund and K One W One Limited.

Speirs Nutritionals Chairman Rodney Wong welcomed the involvement of the new investors adding that the new capital comes at a time when the business is transitioning from a focus on technology development to one supporting sales activity through its international partner.

Related posts:

1. Trans Tasman Commercialisation Fund signs on as SCIF partner
2. Powerhouse and SCIF invest in Indigo

Abbey at VALA 2010

Paul Reynolds @ February 09, 2010 04:15 AM

VALA 2010, the big Australasian bi-annual conference has just started in the brand new Melbourne Convention Centre. The old one is next door, mothballed and silent, while the new one blushes in red paint and carpet. It reminds me of the Seoul convention centre without the basement city of shops.

Hatton Hotel
Melbourne is putting on a brilliant show. The weather is perfect - albeit a hot 35C. I arrived yesterday. I'm staying at the Hatton. Definitly worth your attention - boutique hotel in South Yarra - a tram ride to the arts precinct and Federation Square.

Abbey
The video above comes from the opening showcase. Great messages.  Will be interesting to hear what the conference audience thinks about them. And, crucially, whose job it is to make them happen?

Yellow Recognition

Zenbu @ February 09, 2010 01:31 AM

Yellow is currently doing a user survey of their iPhone app users. One of their questions is Do you use other search applications to find businesses on your iPhone? Yellow AroundMe Google Maps Findit Zenbu Which, as far as I know, is the first official recognition Zenbu has received from Yellow. We must be doing alright! PS. Yellow Chocolate has hit the stores [...]

Green Goose: Save Money Using Sensors

Richard MacManus (ReadWriteWeb) @ February 09, 2010 01:17 AM

Green Goose is a new financial management service that launched today, which connects sensor activity to your savings account. At first Green Goose sounded a little gimmicky. Using green Internet-connected eggs, it measures how much energy you expend on your bike or how much water you use in your shower - and transfers amounts from your checking account to your savings account based on the 'savings' you made doing those activities.

What's interesting though is that the savings are calculated based on the actions measured by small battery-powered, wireless sensors. You stick these sensors on your bike, thermostat, showerhead "and even your keychain."

Sponsor

Green Goose is a web-based service, along with "a very low-cost set of Savings sensors." - these are literally green eggs (see picture to the right). The web site tracks specific actions and behaviors from users - then computes that into dollars saved.

Co-Founder Brian Krejcarek told ReadWriteWeb that's "like a Twitter feed of personal green savings."

Here's how the sensor part works: the sensors communicate with a "Green Gateway" that then sends messages to the web site. The Green Gateway - which is also "egg-like" - has an Ethernet port that connects to your network hub via a router. The bike sensor measures miles ridden. Green Goose also plans to offer sensors for your automobile, shower (hot water), and thermostat (heating and cooling).

In the future, Green Goose might also be able to pull savings data in "from open APIs like that proposed by Google Power Meter for savings earned by using less electricity." It also plans to eventually move beyond energy to capture savings earned from making "other lifestyle decisions."

You can get started today with a "Green Goose Bike Sensor Kit," which retails for $49 plus $10 for postage. The Portland and San Francisco-based company is currently in talks with the BTA (Bicycle Transportation Alliance) in Portland and they're already installed "in a number of coffee shops."

As well as consumers, the service is targeting employers with a "a unique sustainable savings benefit" offering for their staff. One of the features for employers is managing and auditing details for the IRS bike commute tax credit.

Green Goose is currently in pre-production and running beta trials. Right now it's offering 100 Savings Kits for bicycle owners.

Eventually this type of connection, between sensors and mainstream services like banking, will be commonplace and probably won't need to rely on gimmicks such as green eggs. But for now, Green Goose seems like a cute, interesting Internet of Things service for green conscious early adopters to try out.

Discuss

New Zealand's ACTA negotiations in Mexico

Brenda Wallace @ February 09, 2010 12:42 AM

New Zealand's Ministry of Economic Development have released from documents on the ongoing ACTA negotations.
http://news.business.govt.nz/news/strategic/article/9761

Smarter people than me have read these, and found nothing new revealed.

The last round of negotiations was in Mexico - the next round of talks is right here in New Zealand.

quick recap:

ACTA (anti counterfeiting trade agreement) is a treaty currently being negotiated by the world's weathiest countries, including New Zealand. It is officially about things like stopping the fake prada handbags trade - but there's also been leaked documents showing that big media have been asked for their wishlist such as 3 strikes internet disconnection that we protested so loudly against in NZ's s92a of the Copyright act.

It would be disastrous to have stopped such New Zealand laws that give out punishment (internet termination) without trial or appeal, like the s92a did, only to have it implemented anyway via a treaty that our parliament ratifies. Now is the time to make noise.

This need to stop fake prada is so important, it's been classed as "National Security", so none of us lowly citizens are allowed to know what's actually being negotiated. This also is not standard practice for treaty negotiations to be secret.

All Official information act requests, in several countries, have been unsuccessful in finding out what they're putting into this treaty - cos, you know, national security.

The next talks are in Wellington in April - standby for more info later on citizen action.

Quotes from the MED release make it clear, this is a internet copyright treaty:

Section 4: Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement in the Digital Environment

This section of the agreement addresses some of the special challenges that new technologies pose for enforcement of intellectual property rights. Elements under discussion in this section include the availability of remedies:
in cases of third party liability, without prejudice to the availablity of exceptions and limitations;
related to infringing material online, including limitations on the application of those remedies to online service providers;
related to the circumvention of technological protection measures, including the availability of exceptions and limitations;
related to the protection of right management information, including the availability of exceptions and limitations.

Some recent press
NZ trade may face closer scrutiny under ACTA - computerworld NZ
Acta talks in 'bits and pieces' - Dominion Post
NZ has no place in anti-democratic ACTA dealings - Tech Liberty

My blog post from last year on the leak of a draft version of this treaty: http://coffee.geek.nz/acta-its-bad-very-bad.html

ION e-Letter Jan/Feb 2010

Paul Spence @ February 08, 2010 11:13 PM

GeniusNet is proud to host the ION e-Letter. ION is New Zealand’s original virtual community forum for innovators, entrepreneurs, mentors and investors. February and March are looking like hot months for tech, business and innovation events all over New Zealand.

ION is kindly supported by EGL, Revera and iWantMyName.

Collaboration with Start-Up Digest

We are thrilled to announce that our New Zealand biz/tech event listings will be shouted out globally from this month.  TEDxSV social media strategist and Silicon Valley based entrepreneur Chris McCann also runs the highly acclaimed The StartUp Digest and has now included New Zealand event listings within his service offering. It’s more important than ever for New Zealand tech companies to connect offshore and especially in the U.S. market, so if you have an upcoming event or are a technology start-up with a launch announcement – please contact ION about it so we can share.

Don’t forget to sign up for The StartUp Digest to find out about global biz/tech events if you are heading offshore to promote your business.

Webstock – Wellington – 15-19 February

Design, development, mobile, usability, content, community, open data, innovation & inspiration. 5 full-on days. 13 hands-on workshops. 24 kickass international speakers. 24 must-see presentations including Kevin Rose (Digg) and Eric Ries (Lean StartUps guy).

http://www.webstock.org.nz/

Eric Ries Workshop – Webstock – Wellington – 15th February

The Lean Startup: a disciplined approach to imagining, designing, and building new products. Through case studies, exercises, and discussions, Eric Ries will guide entrepreneurs of all stripes through the key areas that determine success for startups: product, engineering, QA, marketing, and business strategy.

http://www.webstock.org.nz/10/programme/workshops.php#ries

NZICT Meeting – Wellington – 16th February

Andy Lark is a director of technology venture capital firm No 8 Ventures and sits on the board of Xero. He also chairs the NZTE technology beachhead in the U.S. market. Andy will speak about a number of themes covering ICT, marketing and communications.

http://www.ict.org.nz/index.php/02022010_wellington-members-meeting/

SKANZ 2010 Conference – Auckland 16-18 February

Reviews recent developments with the Square Kilometre Array, a next generation radio telescope project aimed at probing the universe with a much greater degree of resolution than before. 

http://www.aut.ac.nz/study-at-aut/study-areas/computing–mathematical-sciences/skanz-2010-conference

Accelerate 2010 – Hawkes Bay – 17th February

Interactive one day session for management, founders and investors of high growth New Zealand technology companies. Features ex-pat Kiwi Andy Lark (senior exec at Dell). Good food, wine and music plus workshops covering strategy, marketing and funding. [Sold out - but may consider individual late applications]

http://www.0to60.com/
 

Escalator – Power Pitching – Various venues from 18th February

Interactive workshop where you will learn what investors are looking for in an investor pitch. The course helps you to refine your company “pitch”.

http://angelassociation.trainingplatform.co.nz/courses/1-power-pitching

2010 Shanghai Expo Workshop – Wellington – 26 February

The Wellington City Council invites interested parties to attend a workshop on the 2010 Shanghai Expo. The workshop is a chance to learn more about Wellington City Council’s ideas on sending a delegation to the Shanghai Expo – and the potential opportunities for your business. RSVP by 19th Feb.

More details here >>

Damsel’s Den – Wellington – 9th March

Unlimited Potential  and Angle HQ matchmake angel investors with technology geeks and cool startup founders. Special guest Bill Payne, engineer, entrepreneur and technology investor.

http://up.org.nz/damsels-den-201/

Planet 2010 Conference Launchpad – Auckland 12-13 March Telecommunications industry event offering 10 start-up companies the chance to pitch their business ideas to a panel of judges. The winner will receive $70,000 worth of IT, marketing, legal and accounting services.

http://www.planet2010.co.nz/launchpad/

Spark 2010 Launch – Auckland – 18 March

The University of Auckland Business School Entrepreneurship Challenge kicks off with a launch event on 18th March 5.30pm. 

http://www.spark.auckland.ac.nz/
NZBio Conference – Auckland 22-24 March

The annual showcase for New Zealand’s life sciences sector. Attracting innovators, entrepreneurs and investors from across the agriculture, food, health and biofuel industries.

http://www.nzbio2010.co.nz/home

CloudCamp Wellington – 26th March

CloudCamp is an unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas.

http://www.cloudcamp.org/wellington

Want to add your tech/biz/startup event? Contact us @ Twitter or post a comment below.

A Frockilicious Valentines Day

Decisive Flow @ February 08, 2010 10:28 PM

For those of us who despair at the thought of showering women with expensive gifts on Valentines day, there is still hope!

Love to Roll (brought to you by the lovely ladies from Frocks on Bikes and one of my very best friends Claire Pascoe - who will use ANY excuse to get us on a bike), is a wonderfully frocky Valentines Day event that allows singles, couples and anyone in between to take advantage of the summer sun and take a cruisy ride around the Wellington Bays.

If you register your interest, you are also up to win some pretty fabulous prizes, and if you register your need, you can even borrow a bike.

allaboutthestory.com Feedback Welcome :)

Decisive Flow @ February 08, 2010 10:10 PM

While the rest of you were sunning yourselves (I love Wellingtonian’s unblinkable belief that there WAS sun even when there is no proof or evidence), a group of us were busy putting the final tweaks on our launch version of All About the Story.

All About the Story is the brainchild of Julie Starr, its a marketplace for QUALITY news stories, images and (more recently) cartoons. The point being that in a media world that is increasingly dominated with freelancers and an internet world that makes bad content easy to come by, we fill a vital piece of the puzzle by enabling great writers to connect with high quality publications.

It’s still early days and we know there is a lot more we can do, but we’ve got some pretty cool publications keeping tabs on the articles that are listed, and some pretty nice articles and cartoons on offer.

Would love to hear your thoughts on anything from the design, to your browsing and listing/purchasing experience.

Summer('beer')fest 2010! This Sunday, 1-4pm Worser Bay Boating Club

Mike Riversdale @ February 08, 2010 08:48 PM

Yahoo! My eldest goes to an enlightened school where their fund raising events involve ... beer! Not just the sugary shite that is still the majority of Kiwi's drinking habits but real, proper beer!

Bring your family and friends to an afternoon of sea, sun, beer tasting, wine sipping, savouring local delicacies and other refreshments to tempt your tastebuds.

Be entertained by live music, including jazz duo Sue and Fritz, Pat Higgins and Friends, Gypsy Tandrum Duo, and raconteur beer expert Neil Millar.

Don't forget to bring some cash on the day - all proceeds go to Worser Bay School.

Tickets: Adult $15, children free.

Door sales will be available but pre-purchase your tickets now to avoid disappointment!

Tickets on sale now from the school office or buy them by email - it's as easy as 1 -2 -3 !

1. EMAIL your ticket request to home and school. Provide your name, address, phone number and the number of tickets you wish to purchase in your email. Tell us if you'd like to pick up your tickets or would like them delivered.

2. TRANSFER the money to the Worser Bay Home and School account
   ( 06 - 0513 - 0304691 - 00) putting your surname and initial (e.g. SMITHJ) and the word SUMMERFEST in the bank reference fields.

3. WE'll SEND you an email once we've received your money and arrange pick up or delivery of your tickets!

The Immortals by Martin Amis - Wellington Fringe

Mike Riversdale @ February 08, 2010 08:35 PM

OMG! I know someone, Dan Slevin, who is actually brave enough to get up on stage and perform ... awesome to have such people in one's life. But he needs your support!

I hope you don't mind me alerting you to a show I'm doing, in this year's Wellington Fringe Festival.

It's called The Immortals and all the information can be found here:

http://www.miracle-pictures.com/immortals/

There are only 9 performances and the venue only seats 20. So, as the sharper amongst you will have already worked out, there are only 180 seats for the whole season.

So get in quick and book at BATS.

I have attached an e-flyer should you want to pass the word around to friends and co-workers.

Thank you for your time, and I hope to see you soon.

Cloud Computing And Green

Ben Kepes (Mostly) @ February 08, 2010 08:03 PM

One of the buzzwords we hear in the marketing campaigns of this cloud era is the concept of Green. Some of the cloud providers target our guilt to sell their services. They clearly understand that most of us are very worried about the impact of global climate change and we are willing to do everything possible to stop/reduce it. So, every single cloud provider use the idea of going green in their marketing campaigns giving an impression that anything cloud computing is green. In this post, let us dig through the hype and cut to the chaff.

There are many ways in which we can make IT environment friendly and chief among them are the efficient use of compute resources and reduction of environment impact due to power and cooling. The former could be achieved by the effective use of virtualization and automation. The latter can be achieved by adding efficiency in power generation and cooling and, also, by tapping into non-conventional energy resources. An example for this approach is the new datacenter opened by IBM last week at their Research Triangle Park campus in North Carolina. The data center currently is using about 60,000 square feet of raised floor space consuming 6 megawatts of power, with the capacity to grow to 100,000 feet and 15 megawatts. At full capacity, the facility will be able to handle the computing needs of 40 to 50 clients. This datacenter could save 15% in the energy costs and they do this by increasing the efficiency of how the datacenter is operated.

IBM's Smarter Planet initiative is designed to incorporate greater intelligence into infrastructures—from buildings, transportation systems and utilities to businesses and even cities—to make them run more efficiently. Along those lines, IBM has put in more than 8,000 branch circuit monitoring points that keep an eye on the systems, more than 2,000 sensors that gather temperature, pressure, humidity and air flow data from air conditioners, and more than 30,000 utility and environmental sensors that interconnect with IBM software tools. Data from these sensors can be analyzed to help with future planning for the building and for energy conservation.

Technically, you don’t have to be a cloud provider to do this and even traditional IT can embrace these strategies to reduce the impact on the environment.

However, cloud providers are uniquely positioned to be more effective in achieving the Green IT. By the very definition of cloud computing, they have

• Multi-tenancy
• Cloud Economics

incorporated in their business strategy. The consolidation of multiple customers using multi-tenancy will lead to lesser use of energy resources and a positive impact on the environment. The very presence of cloud economics, where the cloud providers offer compute resources for literally pennies, will force the providers to be more efficient in their IT and cut costs in every possible way. This means that the cloud providers will find ways to cut down drastically on the power and cooling costs, leading to a greener IT.

In reality, none of these cloud providers like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. offer any raw data to show how energy efficient they are with respect to the utilization of compute resources. Some players like Amazon employ ideas like Spot Instances which gives us some understanding of their strategy to maximize their resource usage. Still, there is no hard evidence available to show us that these cloud providers are much greener than the traditional IT vendors who are employing a good mix of virtualization and automation. Now, if we include the fact that many SaaS vendors don’t use the cloud infrastructure providers for their infrastructure needs and they either use their own datacenters or resort to the traditional managed hosting providers, the green claims gets more and more foggy.

There is too much hand waving going on when it comes to Cloud Computing and Green IT. There are no known hard data and unless the cloud vendors come forward with complete information about their energy efficiency, there is no way we can verify these claims. However, the following factors are clear

• Even the traditional vendors can be highly energy efficient with a proper use of virtualization and automation
• Cloud Computing offers us great opportunity to cut down tremendously on the energy costs
• More importantly, the cloud computing era and the associated awareness regarding the environmental impact of IT has kick started a realization that we need not spend more money on running IT. This, in turn, has forced enterprises of all sizes and shapes to optimize their IT towards Green IT.

I take this post to call upon the cloud providers to come forward and offer some insights to customers by giving some raw numbers explaining their Green strategy. Such voluntary steps from vendors will go a long way in shaping sustainable, socially responsible capitalism.

Website outages (including www.natlib.govt.nz)

LibraryTechNZ @ February 08, 2010 04:58 PM

Final notice: 5pm 8 Feb 2010

After a day of trial and tribulation, all sites are now up and running. Thank you for your patience.

Updated notice: 1.20pm 8 Feb 2010

Our websites are now up and running. However, there are still some problems accessing Te Puna Subscriber Services sites, which are being worked on at the moment.

Updated notice: 11am 8 Feb 2010

We are hoping to have all services restored by 12pm today. Again, we apologise for this inconvenience.

Original notice: 9.03am 8 Feb 2010

Many of the National Library's website are offline this morning because of a server failure.

Affected sites include:

• The main National Library website www.natlib.govt.nz
• Te Puna Subscriber Services sites
• The National Library Catalogue http://nlnzcat.natlib.govt.nz
• Index New Zealand http://innz.natlib.govt.nz
• Find http://find.natlib.govt.nz
• Publications NZ
• Manuscripts + Pictorial http://mp.natlib.govt.nz
  
• Kiwi Research Information Service http://nzresearch.org.nz

Access to Papers Past, TAPUHI and Timeframes is not affected.

This outage is not likely to be resolved before 11am today (8 February). We will update this post as soon as we have more information. We're really, really sorry about the inconvenience caused.

Online Finance – Rigid Segmentation Doesn’t Work

Ben Kepes (Mostly) @ February 08, 2010 01:15 PM

Recently ReadWriteWeb started a series taking a very high level look at online finance. One of the posts discussed the evolving online finance ecosystem. In the post, RWW editor Richard MacManus interviewed CEO of Xero (see disclosure), Rod Drury and repeated Drury’s assertion that online finance can be separated into four distinct types of markets:

1) Personal Finance (e.g. Mint, Wesabe, Yodlee)

2) Small Business Accounting (e.g. Xero, Kashflow)

3) Cloud ERP (e.g. Netsuite, Salesforce)

4) ERP (e.g. Microsoft, Oracle)

Which strikes me as a somewhat bizarre classification system, and not overly helpful in defining the marketplace. While it may seem a semantic discussion, to those of us who live in this world, it’s important to get this stuff right.

Looking at the four groups MacManus defined, it’s patently obvious that two of them distinguish different delivery mechanisms (cloud ERP and ERP), it’s wrong to separate them as the SaaS ERP players would point out rapidly that they’re seeing a major conversion of users from traditional ERPs – just look at the case studies put out by Intacct, Netsuite, Salesforce et al to see the proof of this. Add to this the fact that most of the traditional vendors are dipping a toe in the cloud space and you can see that the differentiation just isn’t there.

As for the rigid differentiation between personal and small business finance, when I posted about this nearly a year ago I said, and still believe, that it’s all just money:

the distinction between personal and business finance is pretty blurred. Almost all micro businesses I know use a personal credit card for business expenses – sure that can be solved via expense claims but that’s not really in keeping with the actuality. Similarly most micro businesses that require funding achieve it by using their personal equity to guarantee debt – again removing personal finances from this business finance model ignores this fact.

I put this to Drury who countered with the sensible point that:

[the] Names probably are wrong but the distinction is
On premise and off premise currently
Netsuite, salesforce are midmarket SaaS – say 10k to 20k+ per year
SAP, Nav etc are Web based enterprise.  Minimum 100k – 1m starting, lotsa consulting
Big SAP will never be SaaS but they will have a midmarket product.

Which is still a little tenuous, but what Drury is getting at is the distinction between midmarket organizations (the $20k spend ones) and larger enterprise – the former definitely getting “cloudy” the latter less so. But again it’s a shifting space.

My classification of the online finance space is somewhat different and follows:

• Personal – products that are generally free to the user and subsidized either as a loss leader for a paid product or cross subsidized by partner organizations (Mint, PocketSmith, Xero personal)
• Micro business – a market of sole traders and freelancers, want a very simple application and don’t have significant money to spend on it – either economically price paid products or cross subsidized products (IAC-EZ, FreeAgentCentral, MYOB, Sage, QuickBooks, Xero)
• SMB – a market of businesses that need “real accounting” but in a simple way. They’re also driven heavily by price. Surprisingly enough this is one marketplace that is really under-serviced. Many of the micro-business products are slowly ramping up their feature set but this is the area of opportunity. Current best offerings are still desktop applications (Intuit (see disclosure), Sage, MYOB)
• Medium business – organizations with many employees, multiple branches and complex operations. Already heavily invested in IT and prepared to spend thousands of dollars on their finance apps (Intacct, Netsuite)
• Enterprise – the big boys, firmly wedded to large on-premises offerings and, frankly, not in a hurry to shift anytime soon. Best opportunity is for cloud providers to find “edge modules” to make inroads with them (SAP, MS)

Survey: How Kids 12 & Under Use Web Technology

Richard MacManus (ReadWriteWeb) @ February 08, 2010 01:00 PM

Yesterday we posted a video from the Teens in Tech conference, looking at how teens perceive technology. Today we're co-launching a survey which aims to find out how children 12 years and younger use web technology. We've partnered with Boston research firm Latitude, who developed the survey tool and will help us analyze the data. The survey will be open for 2 weeks, after which ReadWriteWeb and Latitude will list and analyze the results.

If you're the parent of a child 12 and under, then we invite you to participate in the survey by clicking here.

Sponsor

The study is open to all children aged 12 and under. It's important to note that you DO NOT need to reveal the identity of your child. We're super conscious of the privacy issues regarding children on the Web, so you may enter a nickname into the survey instead of your child's real name.

In a nutshell, here's how the survey works. With you (the parent) always at the controls, the survey will ask your child to draw his or her response to a question. There is a special tool for you to upload the resulting drawing, in JPEG format. The survey will then gather some general information about the child's computer use, which should only take 5-10 minutes.

As explained in a background post by Latitude's Kim Gaskins, the survey aims to discover how children use and understand Web technology, the environmental factors that contribute to these understandings, and the extent to which children can think 'innovatively' about web technology. The study also intends to deduce real-world applications from the drawings that the kids create.

Click here to begin the survey process.

Latitude is a research-driven consultancy for technology and media companies. It works with clients to discover and develop opportunities for next-generation content, software, and communications technologies through a combination of web-based applications and innovative research methods. Visit life-connected.com for other Latitude studies, or email ischulte@latd.com to learn more about working with Latitude.

Discuss

Facebook Getting a Facelift, Full-Featured Webmail

Sid Yadav @ February 08, 2010 12:15 PM

Facebook is redesigning their home page, at long last.  Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, announced a teaser to the changes on the Facebook Blog last night in celebration of the social media site’s 6th anniversary and 400 millionth user.  Later, on the same blog, Jing Chen introduced the new updates.

Some of the new improvements include putting more core features right on the front page in easily-accessible menu options.  The features are rolling out slowly, with about 100 million users having it as of this writing ...

Virgin Racing, the ultimate digital design test?

Robin Capper @ February 08, 2010 10:38 AM

There’s lots of talk about virtual design/manufacture/prototyping but starting next month it gets an extreme test. Virgin Racing recently launched their first Formula 1 car, the VR-01, for the 2010 season. Its a computer designed/tested car without the usual wind tunnel model validation. In a sport where hundredths of seconds count it’s severe test for those CFD equations.

Virgin Racing - www.virginracing.com

The VR-01 is the first of a new breed of race car, designed exclusively using CFD – computational fluid dynamics. This radical all-digital design approach is driven by Virgin Racing technical super-brain, Nick Wirth.

From mountain to road with a light heart

Miraz Jordan @ February 08, 2010 09:30 AM

A couple of years ago I bought an electric bike. It’s a tellow mountain bike with a motor powered by a rechargeable battery.

18 months down the track I’ve realised this was not the right bike for me. I’ve ridden it a bit — probably well less than 200Km in all that time — but I don’t really enjoy it much. I used to love cycling, but I mainly just dread getting up Mt Victoria, even with battery assistance.

Women’s geometry

If I’d done my homework better — or even any homework at all — I would have bought something like the Avanti Aria 1, with its women’s geometry.

Well, it might be 18 months late, but that’s what I bought the other day. My photos here show it standing on Oriental Parade by the harbour, and in the back of our rather small Honda Jazz (known as the Honda Fit in some places).

Apparently women’s bodies have different proportions from men’s bodies and that affects the ideal ‘geometry’ for a bike frame:

When it comes to cycling, on the whole women are different to men — especially physically! On average women have shorter torsos, shorter arms, and longer legs than a similar sized man. Shoulders tend to be narrower, hips tend to be wider and hands and feet tend to be smaller. And, yes, the sit bones are wider too!
These differences mean bikes for women need to be designed and made in a specific way to ensure good comfort, fit and performance – for all kinds of female riders.

[Via : What is WISE?.]

A sturdy mountain bike

My yellow mountain bike wasn’t designed for a woman, as far as I know. It’s sturdy and quite heavy, what with the motor and battery and all. And it has quite fat tires.

Fat, rather knobbly tires hold tight to the road, making it harder to pedal.

All of that means that the bike was too heavy for me, too reluctant to travel by my pedal power. And it was too heavy for me to lift into the car without fearing major damage to paintwork or me.

And that meant I always had to bike back up Mt Victoria, since we live at the top.

I’ve never been good with biking up hills. I grew up on the flat, after all, in Christchurch.

A fly-away bike

The Aria 1 is a road / fitness bike, designed for casual on-road use.

It’s so light I have no trouble at all lifting it in and out of the back of the car. I can easily manouevre it into position.

Yesterday I drove down to Evans Bay marina, parked by the Zephyrometer and biked North down to Freyberg Pool and back. My iPhone tells me that’s a 10Km round trip that took me 40 minutes.

Then I loaded the bike back into the car and drove up the hill to home. Ahhhh.

I loved it. I felt again that joy of cycling I used to have. The bike glided along easily — even a head wind or two round some of the bays didn’t worry me too much.

Gear changes are a dream. On the way back, with a tail wind I was in the highest gear, powering along, feeling that I can put effort into moving.

Achieving great heights

Today I’ve paid the price. Between the ride on the flat yesterday and the previous day’s attempt at a steep uphill I may have overdone things slightly.

Little by little I anticipate achieving further distances and greater heights.

Before long I hope that instead of 6 stops in the space of 300 metres up a particularly steep part of Mt Vic I’ll need only 5 stops and travel 400 metres maybe. One day I may be able to cycle all the way to the top, rather than walking most of it.

Electric mountain bike for sale

I now plan to sell the yellow electric bike. It’s an Apollo Altitude XC, 24 Speed Cross Country Mountain Bike. It’s a great bike, it’s just not the right one for me!

Anyone interested?

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Looking for plums on K Road

Stephen Blyth @ February 08, 2010 08:24 AM

When I’m facilitating a meeting or workshop I like to have something on the table for people to munch on, gaze at wistfully or even turn over in their hands.

A small offering helps pass the time during any dull bits and it makes people feel valued as you’ve gone to some effort to think of their needs. Offering sweets or peppermints is easy. This is perhaps why all the corporate venues have the hard, little white rocks.

When I was walking from Grey Lynn to the NGO I was working with on Thursday I wanted to get some plums. A generous big bag.

Being seasonal fruit was really appropriate for the group I was working with, not to mention the health benefits. A colourful addition to the setting I hoped.

At this time of the year plums are falling off the trees. But not so on my route along Karangahape Road. Not a plum tree, nor did the shops stock them.

I stopped looking in little dairies after number five. The fruit on offer was, well, totally insipid. One shop, whose owner had the audacity to list on its signage the promise of fruit and vegetables for sale, stocked a desultory bag of yellowing oranges in a fridge. About seven bananas, 20 apples and a few more oranges was all I saw.

Nor did I see a greengrocer on K Road, though there are plenty of stodgy bakers and greasy take away outlets. Makes sense I guess. Who is going to opt for a peach or plum when they’re out on the town.

Packaged foods with long shelf lives (ie crisps, sweets, nuts, etc), starch and fatty foods make money, but fruit obvioulsy doesn’t. How can it be that the market provides all this, but ready access to plentiful, fresh and healthy fruit is scarce. No wonder we’re facing an obesity epidemic.

Fortunately, even without a bowl of elusive plums the workshop went well.

And in the end I summoned up a gift for the participants. The night before the workshop I stumbled on the replica of the labyrinth in Chartres Cathedral, created in 1200, at St Columba Church in Surrey Crescent. It’s “a quiet place so that we, who are unable to make long retreats from our busy lives may find refreshment in these small havens of peace.” I thought storing away the idea of a place to step back from the hurly burly of the project (and work as usual) might come in useful.

No plums but maybe something more lasting.

Photo credit: Anushruti RK’s photostream

Springboard Wellington: Kevin McCaffrey talks about effective governance

Dave Moskovitz @ February 08, 2010 08:11 AM

Kevin McCaffrey runs Effective Governance, an independent privately-owned consulting firm that delivers advice on Corporate Governance to clients in New Zealand and Australia.  Kevin will discuss governance across all sectors of society and its power in making a difference. This will include how to do due diligence as a director.

When: Tuesday 16th Feb, 5.30-7.30pm
Where: Russell McVeagh, Level 24, Vodafone on the Park.

We look seeing you there, where you’ll have the opportunity to talk with Kevin and network with your Wellington peers.

Simon Telfer, co-founder of SpringBoard’s national group, who will talk more about SpringBoard and governance.

For more info and to RSVP, see the Springboard Wellington LinkedIn Group.

Related posts:

1. Springboard comes to Wellington
2. Springboard event: Governance – handbrake or accelerator?
3. Startup Governance

Four short links: 8 February 2010

Nat Torkington (O'Reilly) @ February 08, 2010 08:04 AM

1. Kindle Development Kit APIs -- Amazon will release a Kindle SDK. These are the API docs. (via obra on Twitter)
2. rePublish -- all-Javascript ebook reader. (via kellan on Twitter)
3. Peer Review: What's it Good For? (Cameron Neylon) -- harsh and honest review of peer review with some important questions for the future of science. But there is perhaps an even more important procedural issue around peer review. Whatever value it might have we largely throw away. Few journals make referee’s reports available, virtually none track the changes made in response to referee’s comments enabling a reader to make their own judgement as to whether a paper was improved or made worse. Referees get no public credit for good work, and no public opprobrium for poor or even malicious work. And in most cases a paper rejected from one journal starts completely afresh when submitted to a new journal, the work of the previous referees simply thrown out of the window. Some lessons in here for social software, too.
4. Analog IMDB -- The transition is moving slowly, but it’s moving. It’s a fascinating thing to watch. The technology is the dull part: what’s interesting is the shift in perception. You know how sometimes you turn off a certain section of your brain and force yourself to see a word not as a piece of language with meaning, but as a sequence of black shapes and white spaces? It’s like you’re seeing that image for the very first time and suddenly “bird” seems like a very odd thing. I’ve been buying all of my in-print books electronically for a couple of years. Physical books aren’t weird to me yet. But damn, that old copy of the Maltin guide was a freaky and bizarre object. It’s the first time I looked at a book and didn’t see a container for information. I saw dead wood.

Links for 2010-02-07 [del.icio.us]

David Petrie @ February 08, 2010 08:00 AM

• I wish that I could use a stronger password for this site. 8 characters are NOT enough.
  wtf
• chocolate cake recipe
• Neocons on a Cruise: What Conservatives Say When They Think We Aren't Listening | | AlterNet

Damsels Den Wellington 2010: Meet entrepreneurs and angels

Dave Moskovitz @ February 08, 2010 07:55 AM

Unlimited Potential are running a Damsel’s Den event, where you can “get to know local angels before you pitch your brilliant idea to them. Angel HQ and Unlimited Potential matchmake our entrepreneurs and investors.”

When: Tuesday 9 March 2010 5:30pm – 7:30pm
Where: Deloittes 10 Brandon Street, Wellington
RSVP: Unlimited Potential
Special Guest: Bill Payne

I always advise entrepreneurs to get to know their local angels well in advance of even thinking about asking them to invest.  This evening will be a perfect opportunity to network, practice some lines before using them in a pitch, and meet other entrepreneurs and investors.

See you there!

Related posts:

1. Damsel’s Den: the angels pitch to entrepreneurs
2. Bill Reichert’s new rules for entrepreneurs and investors
3. W2W – Wellington to the World 2009

How To Mail Merge Using Gmail + Google Spreadsheet

WaveAdept @ February 08, 2010 06:21 AM

We were set a challenge … we accepted, we succeeded and people were chuffed

So, how do you do it?
With Google Apps Script and following the Tutorial: Simple Mail Merge

We hope you find it useful.

Another MoE job opportunity

Derek Wenmoth @ February 08, 2010 04:15 AM

I’ve had several emails today alerting me to a re-advertised position with the New Zealand Ministry of Education – for a Programme Manager – Broadband in Schools. This position was advertised at the end of last year but failed to attract any suitable applicants, so is being re-advertised.

Because of the importance of this initiative I have decided to use my blog as a vehicle for getting the word out there – please feel free to share this information. I am reliably informed that the MoE are also in the process of putting together a role of National Education Network Manager, which also sits within the Broadband in Schools initiative. More on this when I hear of the details.

As someone who is involved with the developments that are occurring in the city where I live, and also with the network of people implementing similar networks around the country, it is pleasing to see progress being made with these appointments. Also pleasing to see the position being advertised at a time of year that is likely to be read by a wider audience. Hopefully, with such appointments in place, we will begin to see progress on a process for distributing the monies that have been allocated and promised for supporting schools in paying for the ‘drop cost’ associated with bringing the fibre from the school gate to the server.

Birthday week deliciousness

Simone Quentin de Manson @ February 08, 2010 03:22 AM

Hello all, I have been having a lovely week of treats. So far 30 is pretty darn good!

I have been thoroughly spoiled in the last week with TWO (not one) pancake breakfasts, chicken pie, curry, cheesecake, chocolate cake, nachos and more. Yes I do need to go on more runs, incase you were wondering. The gifts that made it my way were happily received (some people know me so well!) Kylie sneaked away to buy some Crown Lynn china that I love so much and developed a bunch of old films I still had in the fridge from Oh…just 2002! (You may see some of those a bit later) Dad brought me a little charm necklace that I modeled on my newly knitted socks for you (finished those about a month ago). I also received two parcels from my ‘other’ mothers. The sewing mum in the USA made me the gorgeous tote and little bag, don’t you just love the colours, embroidered flowers and crocheted and beaded flowers on the tote?  Linen love! Gush gush! The north island NZ mum was quite clever and negotiated Kylie for a parcel pick-up containing a much desired cake decorating funnel (otherwise I may have picked it up early and ‘found’ it unwrapped). The old funnel is very cheap and pretty hopeless. Now I will be looking at learning a bit more about decorating things prettily!

MSBuild, assembly dependencies and the GAC

Oliver Jones @ February 08, 2010 12:49 AM

Today, while doing some .Net development I noticed something about MSBuild that is really annoying.  I’ve seen his before but didn’t know the reason behind it.  Now I do and it is a little frustrating. If you have assembly A that depends on assembly B that depends on assembly C and assembly C exists in the [...]

question and answer

Brenda Wallace @ February 07, 2010 10:59 PM

Q: why do baby clothes have pockets, but women's clothes do not?
A: bebe can carry my cellphone for me.

Gil Scott-Heron - Me And The Devil

Paul Reynolds @ February 07, 2010 09:57 PM

The maestro is back - see UK Sunday Observer interview

Reality Wins

Robert O'Callahan @ February 07, 2010 08:25 PM

Quantcast tracks all WordPress.com blog stats

Lance Wiggs @ February 07, 2010 07:07 PM

I’ve rather belatedly discovered Quantcast – which tracks a good chunk of the web, but is very US-centric. One thing it does do though is track every WordPress.com hosted blog, including, for what it is worth, mine: There is plenty more there – have a look around and try your favorite site. There are plenty of [...]

Java desktop links of the week, February 8

Jonathan Giles @ February 07, 2010 10:05 AM

Welcome everyone to another week. This week there are some really interesting posts, so take your time to read through these links below and enjoy

Swing

• Alex Ruiz has posted a very good article on IBM DeveloperWorks discussing debugging and testing Swing code. This is a great read if you feel like you aren’t doing enough to test your user interfaces.
• Damien Ielsch has posted some fun code for closing windows using animated transitions. Used subtley, these could provide an interesting feel to appropriate applications.
• Geertjan Wielenga has posted a heap of NetBeans-related posts this week, including ‘Create Your Own Window System on the NetBeans Window System‘, that he integrated MyDoggy (a docking framework) into NetBeans, an interview with developers creating access control software (i.e. fingerprint scanning), and airport management software built on NetBeans. There are other posts, which you can find at Geertjan’s blog.
• Kas Thomas carries on with his graphics-related posts, this week talking about implementing perlin noise using his procedural paint code introduced last week. In a separate post he talks about implementing Voronoi tessellation in linear time.

JavaFX

• JavaFX 1.2.3 was released this week. It’s a maintenance release only (which means there are no new toys to play with). This release had a focus on improving performance, reliability, and download time. Various bugs have been fixed as well.
• Long time employee of Sun, and great advocate of both Swing and JavaFX, Josh Marinacci, has announced that he is moving on from Sun/Oracle, taking up a position at Palm.
• Simon Morris has posted an interesting tutorial on how to do advanced clipping in JavaFX. Clipping is something that becomes useful once you understand how to use it, so I recommend finding time to read this article.
• Drew from Piliq.com continues his exploration intophysics-based games. This week he posted progress in adding parallax scrolling and custom cursors, and also an entirely new demo game.
• Speaking of physics games, Mikhail Gorshenev has posted a fun version of Tetris that spices up the original game by requiring you to simply have two or more blocks of the same colour touch. The kicker? The blocks now exhibit physical properties and fall accordingly.
• Alex Ruiz has posted a new release of his FEST JavaFX Maven plugin, bumping the version to 1.0 alpha 1. This is a Maven plugin for compiling JavaFX source files.
• Vyacheslav Baranov writes about the availability (or not, depending on which OS your software is running on) of Real-Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) support in JavaFX 1.2.
• Rakesh Menon has posted sample code to illustrate how to upload files using JavaFX.
• Kon at Outrospective.org has posted an overview of the JavaFX 1.2 charting features.

Well, I hope you enjoyed the links, that they were informative, and that I’ll see you all again next week

Pane Siciliano

Jeffrey Wegesin @ February 07, 2010 08:47 AM

My second loaf of bread, Pane Siciliano, was complex.

Over the weekend the dough went through three stages of fermentation and proofing. Most of the time is spent waiting for the dough to do something.

Shaping it was tricky, because if I rolled the dough too much, or pushed it too hard, it would degas.¹ If the dough lost the gas created by the yeast, the holes would disappear and the flavor would change.

The bread is pretty good with dips and oils, except the bottom is a bit crispy. Because the loaf is freestanding, I need a buy a baking stone to stop it from burning.

I’m happy with the way it looks and tastes. The book I have is excellent.

_{1. Who knew degas was a word? Because of school, I only see Edward Degas, but I’m guessing it’s de-gas, as in gasoline. I will use it from now on in this context: “It stinks. Did you just degas?”}

Links for 2010-02-06 [del.icio.us]

David Petrie @ February 07, 2010 08:00 AM

• Heel and Toe Downshift
• Home Documentary
• Sketchpad - Online Paint/Drawing application
• Book Review: Yalta: The Price of Peace - WSJ.com

Internet Trash

Cabbage Tree Creative @ February 07, 2010 03:25 AM

Here I am sitting in the office on a Sunday (sad I know) and I get a Twitter alert about New Zealand skiing, best I have a quick look … I have a watch on certain keywords via services such as TweetBeep.

So what do we get, a “blog post” about “family skiing in New Zealand”.  Or is it? Check it out, it’s spam in my opinion.

Well, let’s say that strictly speaking it’s not spam, but what this person is doing is optimising the page on these key words “(Family) skiing in New Zealand”) for the sole reason of getting people to the page, after which they might click a Google ad so he/she can make some money from the click.

Have a look at the article; family skiing, does it offer any value to anyone considering skiing in NZ, let alone family skiing. Categorically NO, and even some of the references are wrong, I think he means the “Cardrona Hotel”, not the Chalet Hotel.

The sole point of this article is to get traffic, in the hope that a small percentage will click an advertisement, and thus some ad revenue will be made.  It’s pointless and as you may guess, makes me mad!  The system is being abused, and no value is being derived for the hapless visitor to the site, they are being used.

You may argue that if Google lets this thing happen, then who’s to stop people doing this. True. We can’t stop people writing trashy articles like this, but we can ensure that we write great content for our sites and do a good job on SEO.

So here’s your challenge. Go to it!  Write some great content and articles articles for your site or others, optimise it ruthlessly (using our new SEO book), ensure people like this so called blogger don't get ranked, and most importantly, add value and offer a real benefit to visitors of your site.

Oh, and by the way, we do have some great articles on family skiing in New Zealand on our www.snowreports.co.nz site ;-)

An Open Letter To NZX ($NZX.NZ)

Valuecruncher @ February 07, 2010 02:14 AM

We tend to get some complaints when we write about New Zealand-based issues. This post is one of those New Zealand focused ones. Feel free to skip it if that isn’t what you are interested in.

Dear NZX

We like your work – we really do. The relevance and professionalism of the New Zealand share market has improved by an order of magnitude over the last ten years.

But we also love the quote from Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) – “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change”

We know you get that – for New Zealand to remain competitive we need stronger capital markets. The Capital Market Development (CMD) Taskforce has some good thinking – which needs the political support to implement. However, looking at the majority of suggestions – they are 20^th century solutions. Do they need implementing – absolutely. But for a small market like New Zealand we need to be looking at different solutions as well – what works in a big market doesn’t necessarily work here. We need to be looking at more innovative solutions – and again, I do think you get this. Adding Rod Drury to the NZX board is a step in the right direction.

We are in the broad equity research space – and we were disappointed by sections of the CMD Taskforce report. The CMD report (from page 69) outlines a situation where there is limited traditional equity research coverage of smaller listed companies. The CMD report offers solutions including public and private funding of additional equity research (supplied by traditional research providers) – because that is what other markets are doing. There is discussion about a “small levy on trades” (page 70).

Really. That is the best solution we have got. New Zealand is a very small market – quoting the CMD report:

“INFINZ data show that 30 stocks are covered by all six major New Zealand brokerages, and a further 37 stocks are covered by some of those firms. There are 47 (41 percent) NZX companies without any analyst coverage at all, and a further 15 have only one or two analysts covering them. There is generally no coverage of small stocks, and no coverage of the companies on the smaller exchanges, the NZAX or Unlisted.”

“All six major New Zealand brokerages”. Unless the plan is to make a significant investment in research (more than one analyst per company) – and that doesn’t seem possible – why are we bothering? The traditional large market research model doesn’t seem to be relevant here. Never mind that most traditional research reports are virtually impossible for the average retail investor to comprehend – anecdotally the consumption of research reports by retail investors in New Zealand is low. NZX knows where retail investor education is in New Zealand – the large electronic ticker going around the NZX Centre in Wellington uses full company names and the share price not ticker codes and the share price. That is the right thing for NZX to do by the way – but it shows how far we have to go.

Why not start with a plan to provide base financial information and valuation resources for the market? Let’s initially make information and tools available - how people use them is the next step. NZX.com is the logical home for those resources.

There will be traditional coverage where the market deems it worthwhile – the largest companies on the NZX only. For the rest not covered by traditional research (in fact for all of the NZX companies) NZX should be following Jeff Jarvis’ rule from What Would Google Do – “do what you do best and link to the rest”.

Most investors in New Zealand go to the NZX website for information on listed companies. NZX has added news feeds from Fairfax to encourage more engagement – but where is the financial information and analysis? NZX should make base financial information and valuation resources available. NZX.com is in a position to be the default portal for listed company information in New Zealand. There are options available to NZX where other parties are providing free access to information and tools to fill the current gaps on NZX.com.

Example 1 – Reuters

It isn’t well known – but the free Reuters website has good coverage of NZX listed companies. We can use New Zealand’s largest listed company Telecom New Zealand ($TEL.NZ) as an example.

For New Zealand companies all you need to add is a “.nz” suffix to the ticker code and there is a quantity of quality free information. The information is comprehensive – and in a single location. Using $TEL.NZ as an example – consensus analyst estimates, historical financial statements, charts and even paid research options. It isn’t only the large NZX companies – for example Xero ($XRO.NZ) even though they have no analyst coverage.

Example 2 – Valuecruncher

At Valuecruncher we provide interactive valuation tools for listed companies. This already includes 156 companies on the NZX. These are comparator based tools. Using $TEL.NZ as the example again.

Valuecruncher Interactive Analyst Report For Telecom New Zealand ($TEL.NZ)

Our algorithms choose the peer group from an international selection. But you can change the peers to a New Zealand focused group. The tools are interactive.

Disclosure: Yes – one of the solutions is Valuecruncher. In case there is any doubt – that is the company associated with this blog.

NZX – do what you do best and link to the rest. What would Google do? Google Finance uses links to Reuters for deeper data.  NZX.com can be the default financial information and valuation resources location for New Zealand as a first step to a potentially bigger future. It is time to look for specific solutions for this market - not simply copying the actions of larger markets.

Regards,

Mark Clare

Valuecruncher CEO

i am wellington visionary of the year... again.

Brenda Wallace @ February 07, 2010 01:11 AM

btw, i won again.. i wouldn't mind being defeated by Jo, but couldn't let myself lose to mauricio.

It was my first evening out on my own since Casey was born - i was mega tired, and i had no time to prepare. basically had to make it up. sadly I missed out a bunch of stuff i wanted to say about OLPC and ACTA.

my summary of the other speakers:

Miraz: apple will take over the world
Mauricio: microsoft will take over the world
Me: robots will take over the world
Jo: non-geeky people will still not take over the world
Phillip: you're all predicting the obvious

this was organised by the ppl at http://up.org.nz, who alas haven't updated their website with anysummary 2 weeks later. there was someone filming the talks, but these never seem to make it to the web either.

so, you'll have to take my word for it

Weekly Wrapup: The Week in Web Technology

Richard MacManus (ReadWriteWeb) @ February 06, 2010 06:05 PM

The big news of the week was Facebook getting faster - read on for our extensive coverage and analysis of this news. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010, including Real-Time Web, Mobile Web, Internet of Things and Augmented Reality.

New! We've refreshed the format for our longest running feature, the Weekly Wrapup. It now focuses more explicitly on the key trends that ReadWriteWeb is tracking in 2010, as well as giving you the highlights from the leading story of the week. Let us know your thoughts on the new format.

Sponsor

Story of the Week: Facebook Gets Faster

• Facebook Gets Faster, Debuts Homegrown PHP Compiler
• Open Thread: What Do Developers Think of Facebook's HipHop?
• PHP Creator Asks, Is Facebook's HipHop Just a "Nifty Trick"?

More Facebook coverage and analysis

Mobile Web

• Location is Hot: Foursquare Traffic up 3X in 2 Months
• Mobile Ticketing Taking Off: 15 Billion Sold by 2014
• Mobile App or Browser-Based Site? Report Says The Browser Will Win on Mobile

More Mobile Web coverage

Announcing The ReadWriteWeb iPhone App

We're really excited to announce the official ReadWriteWeb iPhone app! As well as enabling you to read ReadWriteWeb while on the go or lying on the couch, we've made it easy to share ReadWriteWeb posts directly from your iPhone, on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow the RWW team on Twitter, directly from the app. We invite you to download it now from iTunes.

Internet of Things

• Sensors to Help You Get Fit - From Nike, Adidas & Others
• Social Networks for Things

More Internet of Things coverage

Augmented Reality

• Open or Closed: What's the Best Path for Mobile Augmented Reality?
• Yahoo! Files for Patent on Geo-Located, Social, Augmented Reality
• Augmented Reality Coming to Video Conferencing

More Augmented Reality coverage. Also ReadWriteWeb is currently working on our next premium research report on the topic of AR marketing. Watch this space for that.

Real-Time Web

• Designers: Show Your Work Fast, Cross-Browser & Without Flash Using Black Tonic
• Open Thread: Dealing With Real-Time Negativity

More Real-Time Web coverage. Don't miss the next wave of opportunity on the Web supported by real-time technology! Get ReadWriteWeb's report, The Real-Time Web and its Future.

ReadWriteStart

Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

• 6 Great Approaches to Public Speaking
• 3 Social Networks For Connecting With Entrepreneurs
• Freemium is Weak, Subscription is Chic

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise is devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' and using social software inside organizations.

• Ironic? New Google Apps Security Features For All Devices Except the Nexus One
• Facebook's HipHop: Impact on the Enterprise May Go Deep into the Code

ReadWriteCloud

Our channel ReadWriteCloud, sponsored by VMware and Intel, IS dedicated to Virtualization and Cloud Computing.

• Some Pros and Cons of a Google Tablet with a Chrome OS
• Send Help: Disaster Response From The Cloud
• Walking Among Giants: Who Wins With Virtualization?

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Discuss

Toyota’s troubles stem from forgetting its principles

Jack Yan @ February 06, 2010 09:35 AM

I was surprised to learn that Toyota still has not issued a worldwide recall of its troublesome Prius NHW30 model, even though one had gone out in New Zealand.
   In layman’s terms, the brakes allegedly don’t work when you want them to. In more complex terms, the software has trouble distinguishing between different types of braking, and drivers may experience a delay in ‘pedal feel’.
   I was always a bit sceptical about the recalls over the unintended acceleration, given that the last time I heard those words, they were in relation to a falsified report from CBS’s 60 Minutes, a show known to me for making up stories (Killian memoranda, anyone?). Hearing them again, I thought it was just another excuse for the clumsy driving of a few individuals who couldn’t figure out where the accelerator was (which was what happened with Audi in the US). But it seems this matter has been around for a long time, and recalls were being done even last year.
   But the Prius matter, something that has not come under a global recall, appears more serious than carpets getting in the way, which is the problem behind the unintended acceleration complaints. AFP reports:

The Transport Ministry has received some 80 complaints in February about malfunctions in the brake system of the latest model of the flagship Prius, the Tokyo Shimbun reported without quoting sources.
   Five of them were actual crashes in which the drivers claimed the brakes did not work properly, the daily said, adding that the ministry would urge the company to launch an investigation.
   It was not possible to immediately confirm the report.

   Already Toyota has been berated by top management for going too far from its core principles by its honorary chairman, Shoichiro Toyoda. The company had been trying to sell big cars in China during the financial crisis, and spent a good part of the 2000s developing large pick-up trucks for the US market. Bloomberg reported last June that a meeting was called:

Shoichiro scolded the president [Katsuaki Watanabe] for being so anxious to boost sales and profits that he’d let Toyota emulate now bankrupt General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC. Toyota had become addicted to big, expensive cars and trucks and had forgotten the customers’ need to save money, Shoichiro said, according to the person’s account.

   In other words, Toyota’s culture has been suffering, and we all know what happens when sales’ volume and profit are pursued at the expense of quality or engineering. (Ask Mercedes-Benz.)
   Toyota may be an example where too many niches were created, simply to get consumers in the showrooms—and now that’s coming to bite it on the rear end. Having too many niches has one immediate drawback: consumers no longer understand the structure of the range. Is the small car the iQ, Ist, Vitz, Porte, Belta or Passo? Do I move from that to a Corolla, Auris, Blade, Corolla Rumion, Probox, Raum, RAV4 or wotsis?
   The mistakes are understandable in some ways. Toyota had to create more new models as attention spans shortened. While a car might be able to be presented as “new” for two years in the Japanese market 10 years ago, consumers expect something else within half a year. To fund this appetite, the company looked for ways to maximize profits in every market—with the US one fuelled by bigger and bigger vehicles. It had to take costs out of cars, especially with electronics (by combining as many functions on to one system as possible) and architecture—and it may be these areas where the Prius suffered.
   But no company can really afford to pursue too many niches—Mazda overextended itself in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as did Nissan in the early 1990s—when times are tough. Toyota should have forecast a downturn, as many business experts did. The question that the company needs to ask itself is: what made it so blind in the 2000s?
   Even ignoring the idea of unintended acceleration for now, Toyota ends the lunar year on a low. It will always have its diehard followers—there are many models not affected by these issues—but the company must refocus its brand for the New Year toward its traditional principles. There is every sign the company knows that, with Akio Toyoda, the founder’s grandson, now at the helm, and doing spot checks down on the production floor. (I’d rather Toyota have someone like that than a “celebrity CEO” who gives good press. The era of the celebrity boss is over for now.) It is simply a pity that the company did not get on to its mounting problems—there are claims that unintended acceleration reports began surfacing with Toyota’s Lexus ES model as early as 2004—sooner.
   Few buy a Toyota because the cars make one’s heart beat faster. They are a default choice for many people who want the simplest conveyance from A to B. Akio’s job has been reminding his own team of that, and reinstituting the ‘Toyota Way’ and kaizen, terms that many of us who went to business school during a certain era recall.

Links for 2010-02-05 [del.icio.us]

David Petrie @ February 06, 2010 08:00 AM

• The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
• GameSetWatch - Analysis: Is Hard The New Good?

Best quotation on the Howard Stern–American Idol tie-up

Jack Yan @ February 06, 2010 02:27 AM

The best quotation in the American media this week? In my opinion, it would have to be this:

Howard Stern is being considered to replace Simon Cowell when he leaves “American Idol” after this season.
   Apparently Satan was out of Fox’s price range.

From Tony Hicks in the Contra Costa Times.

Superbowl Tech & The Extreme Technology Behind the Sweat and Blood of the Game

Sid Yadav @ February 05, 2010 09:15 PM

When most people think of the National Football League’s Super Bowl, they think of two things: parties with friends watching the greatest football game of the year and the worlds most expensive commercials. Amazingly, this game that seems to be all about basic strategy and brute physical force is actually full of cutting-edge technology.

The 2007 Super Bowl in Miami was broadcast by CBS and involved hundreds of crew members manning Hi-Def cameras, long-reach microphones, expert computer technology to handle the play-by-play, hugely muscular data servers to provide up-to-the-second information and ...

Matt Gemmell – how to compete with the ipad

Nic Wise @ February 05, 2010 08:46 PM

Really enjoying reading this article from Matt Gemmell. I especially love this bit:

Closed system. This is the very opposite of what your customers care about. The percentage of your customer base who make a buying decision based on the openness of a system (in terms of system-level customisation options, use of open source software or otherwise) is vanishingly tiny. They’re very vocal, certainly, but commercially they’re irrelevant. Pandering to this segment will most certainly damage your penetration into the market. Be extremely wary about sacrificing large-scale appeal for the sake of a tiny but noisy technical minority. The tablet space is in no way designed for or aimed at such users.

Italic bolding is mine. It’s so very true – anyone else seen “open” handsets doing well? Android is starting to get there, but it’ll never be open enough for some. Nokia has opened up a little, same with some of the others. But in general: most users don’t give a shit. Make it work. Give me a phone that rings and lasts 5 days. KTNXBAI.

State of Victoria in Australia goes Creative Commons by default

Paul Reynolds @ February 05, 2010 03:37 PM

Have just received a welcome Friday afternoon note from Jessica Coates of the Australian Creative Commons, who notes in a downright chirpy summary that :

The Victorian Government has become the first Australian government to commit to using Creative Commons as the default licensing system for its public sector information.
The commitment is part of the Government's response to its Economic Development and Infrastructure Committee’s Inquiry into Improving Access to Victorian Public Sector Information and Data, which recommended that the Victorian Government adopt a “hybrid public sector information licensing model comprising Creative Commons and a tailored suite of licences for restricted materials.”

Specifically, the response (which is under CC BY-NC-ND) states at p.8 that:
The Victorian Government endorses the committee’s overarching recommendation that the default position for the management of PSI should be open access. The Victorian Government further commits to the development of a whole-of-government Information Management Framework (IMF) whereby PSI is made available under Creative Commons licensing by default with a tailored suite of licences for restricted materials.

As far as we are aware, this is the strongest commitment to Creative Commons implementation made by any Australian government.

While there have been a number of excellent CC-friendly recommendations coming out of recent government inquiries - notably the Government 2.0 and Venturous Australia reports - these are yet to be officially adopted.

And while there are some excellent implementation projects - the Victorian Government specifically mentions the Australian Bureau of Statistics and Queensland’s Government Information Licensing Framework - these are still limited to individual agencies..."
Source - CC Australia

In from the Cold - orphan works in digital collections

Paul Reynolds @ February 05, 2010 03:24 PM

In From The Cold

The Collections Trust and the Strategic Content Alliance  from the UK have published 'In From The Cold' - a report into the impact of 'orphan works' on public service delivery. Though focused on the UK, it is of real interest to the rest of the sector, specailly down here in Australasia.  So what's the fuss?

Orphan works -  or works still in copyright but with no known rights holder on record - are  one of the banes of any collection institution - library, or indeed publishers.  And as is know, it is one of the key issues which will eventually make or break the Google Book deal.

Scale of problem startling
As to scale of the problem -  I was startled to learn via various Twitter posts  that accompanied the report's launch, that fully 40% of the national collections in the UK are orphan works!  And as Nick Poole from the Collections Trust in a Twitter post has it, all too often , 'orphans aren't born, they're made through poor documentation practice'

I have no idea what the New Zealand or Australian figures are, but I suspect they are no better.


The effect of the problem
Turning to the effect - the report is clear - " access to over 50 million items held in trust by publicly funded agencies such as libraries, museums, archives and universities are being prevented from being available online due to current copyright laws"

This means that millions of so-called ‘orphan works' - photographs, recordings, texts and other ephemera from the last 100 years - risk becoming invisible because rights holders are not known or easy to trace.

In From The Cold report (PDF)

Passion - It's What Life Is About [vid]

Mike Riversdale @ February 05, 2010 02:42 PM

As I slowly work through the amazing back catalogue of TED Talks I am permanently stunned by quality of the talks such as this from Isabel Allende as she discusses women, creativity, the definition of feminism -- and, of course, passion.

She is funny, heart breaking but mostly inspiring



Perfect companion to Courage And Following Your Dreams - Scary Shit

ParameterExists => isDefined

Kai Koenig @ February 05, 2010 02:15 PM

Another quick regex: to perform a sitewide search/replace that replaces every “parameterExists” by “isDefined”, simply do a:

Search: parameterExists\(([^)]*)\)
Replace: isDefined(“\1″)

That saved me at least 2 hours

ParameterExists => isDefined is a post from: Blog in Black

cfqueryparam / regular expression

Kai Koenig @ February 05, 2010 02:03 PM

Currently, I’m migrating a CF5/Win project to CFMX9/Linux. Apart from the usual path issues, the one who programmed this app yeeears ago did not protect *any single* form- or url-variable inside CFQUERY against misuse or even SQL-Injection. Not one syntax check, no CFQUERYPARAM… *sigh*

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to perform a sitewide search/replace, so I have to open every single file containing CFQUERY tags. To get a list of all the files containing “<cfquery…”, I did a quick

grep -rli “\<cfquery ” > cfqueryfiles.txt

Then, I wrote two tiny regular expressions that make the manual replacing a lot faster:

Step 1: Strings => Varchar
Replace ‘#([^#]*)#’ by <cfqueryparam cfsqltype=”CF_SQL_VARCHAR” maxlength=”50″ value=”#\1#”>

Step 2: Numbers => Big
Replace #([^#]*)# by <cfqueryparam cfsqltype=”CF_SQL_BIGINT” value=”#\1#”>
(Careful! This replaces ANY variable, but does its job inside CFQUERY. Do NOT “replace all”.)

After that, you only have to set the correct sqltypes and/or maxlengths.

cfqueryparam / regular expression is a post from: Blog in Black

Top 10 Web Widgets

Richard MacManus (ReadWriteWeb) @ February 05, 2010 01:00 PM

Widgets are mini web applications that you can insert into your website and/or social networks. They're a popular way to add interesting third party content to your web presence. In this post we look at the top web widgets from Yola and Widgetbox. It's clear from our analysis that widgets are well past the early adopter stage and are now very mainstream.

Yola, the website building service formerly known as SynthaSite, sent us a list of the top 10 widgets for its 3 million plus community - many of whom are small business owners. We compare that list below with the most popular widgets from more consumer-focused Widgetbox.

Sponsor

Yola's top 10 list tells us that Google widgets proliferate (4 of them are in the top 10), media widgets are popular (numbers 1, 4, 8) and communication widgets are well used (2, 5, 7).

1. YouTube
2. Blog Page Widget
3. Google Ad Sense
4. Flickr Lightbox
5. Meebo Chat Room
6. Google Maps
7. Skype Me!
8. Google Video
9. Wufoo Form
10. Collect Donation Widget

It's a little surprising that there's no mention of Facebook or Twitter widgets, but perhaps in a few more months they will be in Yola's top 10.

For a more consumer-focused look at the most popular widgets, we checked out Widgetbox's all-time Most Popular List. Widgetbox provides widgets for social sites - including MySpace, Blogger, Facebook, WordPress, TypePad and iGoogle. Their top 10 shows that gaming, fun and pregnancy tickers (!) are most popular.

1. Super Mario Game
2. Baby Ticker - The Baby Countdown Pregnancy Ticker
3. cyber-pet
4. Mario Time Trial
5. Maukie - the virtual cat
6. Bubbles
7. Baby & Pregnancy Countdown Ticker
8. MP3 Player
9. Swidget 1.0
10. Super Mario Bros (with Luigi)

Neither list is especially surprising, but it's good to see that widgets are being well utilized by mainstream people.

Let us know if you have a favorite web widget and if so, where do you host it?

Discuss

Four short links: 5 February 2010

Nat Torkington (O'Reilly) @ February 05, 2010 11:00 AM

1. The Public Domain Manifesto -- eloquent argument in favour of the public domain. (via BoingBoing)
2. Clear Climate Code -- project to write and maintain software for climate science, with an emphasis on clarity and correctness. What a wonderful way for coders who aren't scientists to contribute to open and better science. (via the interesting OKFN blog)
3. Don't Hash Secrets -- One area of secure protocol development that seems to consistently yield poor design choices is the use of hash functions. What I’m going to say is not 100% correct, but it is on the conservative side of correct, so if you follow the rule, you (probably) can’t go wrong. You might be considered overly paranoid, but as they say, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you. So here it is: Don’t hash secrets. Never. No, sorry, I know you think your case is special but it’s not. No. Stop it. Just don’t do it. You’re making the cryptographers cry.
4. Javascript Grid Editors -- nice wrapup of available Javascript editable grid components, divided into "data driven", "light edit", and "spreadsheet". (via joshua on Delicious)

git-svn? or svn-git?

Nic Wise @ February 05, 2010 10:31 AM

As some may know, I’m doing some work for a rocking email archiving company in Denmark, so obviously, my source repository isn’t local – or even in this country. Luckily for me, it’s Subversion (rather than VSS or TFS).

Up until now, I’ve been using Git (with -svn) to manage my code. This has worked well, mostly. I can check in locally (and hold changes so I don’t disrupt things like customer builds etc), have local history etc. All good. Some of the down sides are around how git-svn works on windows – it’s slow, to say the least. With a patch from Josh Robb, it gets quicker, but still – a check in that takes maybe 1-2 mins in subversion takes 10-15 mins using git-svn, and maybe 5x that without the patch. To check out the whole source tree, with around 2 weeks of history (we have around 2000 revisions in subversion, I’m getting the last 100 or so), takes 8-12 hours, even if I’m on the same lan as the server.

So, I’m looking at what I need, rather than the accepted use of the tools. I was reading this very entertaining post by Rob Conery about using Git as a backup client, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I dont really need git-svn. I need svn and git.

I have two distinct “methods” of working. For my own stuff, I have a remote subversion repo at dreamhost. I use this as an offsite backup for my code, as well as a nice, big undo button. I’m the only developer on this, so I can chop and change between tech here as I like.

The other case is the work with ComArchive. I can’t change the back end (tho we did move from https to http, which sped things up a lot too), but I can do whatever I like on the client end, as long as it works and doesn’t break others. But the main drivers here are that I need to work within the timeframes of the main team (aka Thomas), and I need to make sure my code is backed up incase my VM frys itself. Also, chewing up a work day getting the code down isn’t really viable.

Case 1: Moving my personal stuff to git

This one is easy. Just export from subversion to a local folder, then git init / git add . / git commit, setup a remote git repo on my dreamhost hosting, and push to it. This is well documented pretty much everywhere – it’s normal git processing.

Case 2: Using git as a backup and versioning tool for a local subversion working folder.

This one is not quite as obvious. Git’s main focus is on versioning a set of objects (usually files). A subversion working folder is a set of objects.

So at the top level, I’ve just made a git repo, added all the files in the subversion repo into it (including the .svn folders), committed it, and then pushed it to the remote folder, just like I would with any other git repo.

git init
git add .
git commit -am “message”
git remote add backup git-url-goes-here

then, when I want to push out of the building:

git add .
git commit -am “message”
git push backup master

When I need to, I can just do a subversion commit to push back into the main repository. Git is none the wiser – it’s just a bunch of files. Subversion, more importantly, is none the wiser.

This way, I can use subversion for what its good at – being able to work with just the tip locally, and pushing and pulling things very, very quickly over the wire. And I can use git for what it’s good at, too – a local versioned repo, an offsite backup I control, branches (maybe) etc.

Win win. I hope.

I’m actually wondering if I start using git more as a backup tool. I have a load of business stuff that needs to be kept safe. It doesn’t change often, but if we lose it, and get audited by HMRC, we’re screwed (the whole “keep stuff for 7 years” thing).

Is anyone else using git like this?

T-Shirt Friday #29 – TechSmith

Ben Kepes (Mostly) @ February 05, 2010 10:28 AM

Everyone knows that professional conference goers like myself attend events not to listen to presentations, not to network but to collect schwag. Over the past couple of years I’ve done fairly well collecting tech t-shirts and I decided to create a weekly series critiquing tech companies t-shirt offerings in the expectation that a company with a great t-shirt is a prime candidate to have a great product also. Click here to see the series.

If you’d like your t-shirt reviewed, flick me an email to arrange things. The judges decision is, of course, final and very little correspondence will be entered into (perhaps). 

defrag 2009, occupying a prominent space in the expo area, software vendor (and creator of well known editing software Camtasia) TechSmith demos it’s new visual collaboration offering, Jing and, more importantly, it’s new t-shirt design.

In an edgy move, the TechSmith shirt features a WWII bomber run, dropping parachutes underneath which float slides and filmstrip – it’s a somewhat whimsical and pretty cool approach.

Hot

• The front design is actually pretty cool – kind of Bauhaus, kind of retro and kind of whimsical
• I like bby blue, it brings out my complexion or something (actually it just makes a change from black)
• 100% Cotton

Not

• Way too many logos on the back
• Made in Mexico… but I’ll accept that the fight against third world manufacturing is a battle I’ll never win

Vodafone UK Twitter wasn&#0038;rsquo;t hacked, just a disgruntled employee

Mauricio Freitas @ February 05, 2010 09:20 AM

In an interesting story, The Next Web is telling us about a slip in the Vodafone UK Twitter account. A Vodafone UK employee with access to the company's Twitter account posted "VodafoneUK is fed up of dirty homo's (sic) and is going after beaver". Screenshot on the right, since the tweet has since been deleted (obviously).

Since then someone behind the VodafoneUK account has repeatedly posted "We weren't hacked. A severe breach of rules by staff in our building, dealing with that internally. We're very sorry"." in response to queries from its Twitter followers.

This reminds us all that the power given to employees that face the public are much bigger than before. It's easy to see someone snapped under pressure, or after a more "demanding" customer asked one too many questions. But still is not an excuse for public displays of "affection".

 

 

Should Scientists Use Microsoft’s Free Cloud Services Offerings?

Ben Kepes (Mostly) @ February 05, 2010 09:11 AM

I am a strong proponent of using cloud computing for scientific research. Some of my posts on the topic are listed below.

• LHC Computing Grid and the New Era of Scientific Computing
• Cloud Computing and Science - Mathematica Embraces Cloud Computing
• Cloud Computing and Science - MATLAB on Clouds
• Amazon Tries to Lure Scientific Community into the Clouds
• Academic Research On Cloud Computing Gets Funded
• Scientists And Cloud Computing – Part 1
• Scientists And Cloud Computing – Part 2
• Biotech Companies And Cloud Computing

If you read these posts, you can understand how strongly I feel about the use of cloud computing in academic research, in general, and scientific research, in particular. Cloud Computing can empower scientists and help them accelerate their research while cutting down on the expenses. This is especially true in a country like US where scientific funding has been seriously curtailed since 2001. Using cloud computing is, possibly, the most efficient and cost effective way to do scientific research.

In fact, Microsoft Research has a featured story talking about how cloud computing can help scientists because of the economies of scale and an interesting comment by Prof. David Patterson, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. According to Prof. Patterson, the potential impact of cloud computing is comparable to that of the invention of microprocessors. Absolutely fantastic comparison, in my humble opinion.

Patterson adds that the economies of scale possible with the cloud are just as much about performance as cost. The most exciting part of cloud computing, he says, is the ability to “scale up” the processing power dedicated to a task in an instant.

Even though I am happy to see Microsoft echoing some of the ideas I have been advocating in this blog for more than a year, I am deeply disturbed by one aspect of this article. It is about Microsoft’s attempt to push their S+S approach to the scientists. Here is a comment by Dan Reed, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Technology Policy and Strategy and eXtreme Computing Group

There is a large community of researchers — social scientists, life scientists, physicists —running many computations on massive amounts of data. To use an example many people can understand — how can we enable researchers to run an Excel spreadsheet that involves billions of rows and columns, and takes thousands of hours to compute, but still give them the answer in 10 minutes, and maintain the desktop experience? Client plus cloud computing offers that kind of sweet spot.

It appears National Science Foundation has already signed an agreement with Microsoft to offer American Scientists free access to Microsoft’s cloud computing services.

The National Science Foundation and the Microsoft Corporationhave agreed to offer American scientific researchers free access to the company’s new cloud computing service. A goal of the three-year project is to give scientists the computing power to cope with exploding amounts of research data. It uses Microsoft’s Windows Azure computing system.

Even though I am fully convinced about the impact of cloud computing on Scientific research, I don’t see their S+S strategy serving the interests of Science. Well, actually, I am against this agreement for two reasons.

• In my opinion, Science has to be completely open. Any attempts to lock-in the scientific results in proprietary platforms or applications or data formats goes against the very spirit of openness in science. By locking in the scientific results within Microsoft’s platform, we are forcing the entire scientific community to be dependent on Microsoft, affecting the very advancement of science itself. This is morally wrong and very bad for the scientific community in the long term.
• Secondly, S+S approach is promoted by Microsoft to protect their cash cow. It adds problems in two ways for the scientific community. First, It is not cost effective and, more importantly, it is not an efficient way to do science either. The exorbitant licensing costs for the traditional software used to access these cloud services will put a huge dent on the funding for scientific projects. In my opinion, the huge amount of money spent on such traditional software packages can be better utilized elsewhere. Then, there is the issue of a need for bigger resources to use these bulky software. These resource needs not only make this S+S approach inefficient, it also adds to the cost of computing. What is the point in saving money on the traditional infrastructure expenditure and then spend a part of it on traditional extra powerful desktop (laptop) computers?

Another important point to note from the NYT story is that this agreement between NSF and Microsoft is for three years. In the absence of an indefinite free use agreement, this is just a pure marketing ploy. After three years, these research projects will be forced to spend quite a bit of money on the licensing fees for the traditional software plus the cloud services offered by Microsoft. Not only that, any researcher who wants to either extend these projects or use their results on new projects may end up paying part of their funding money to Microsoft.

In short, this agreement between NSF and Microsoft is very shortsighted and it may as well go against the very spirit of science. I have no problem with Microsoft pushing their S+S strategy in the market. Eventually, the economics and the value add will determine whether S+S or pure SaaS will be the ultimate winner. However, when it comes to altruistic issues like Science where public money is heavily involved and its impact on the public is very significant, it is not a good idea to push a strategy that serves a particular company’s self interest alone. This move is neither good for Science nor for Cloud Computing.

Links for 2010-02-04 [del.icio.us]

David Petrie @ February 05, 2010 08:00 AM

• Neutrophil Chasing a Bacterium - BioChemWeb.org
• How to Get Our Democracy Back
• » Customer Development Interviews How-to: Finding People The Experience is the Product | Better product management and products
• Lost Garden: Nintendo's Genre Innovation Strategy: Thoughts on the Revolution's new controller

Speaking at Flash Platform User Group Wellington (New Zealand)

Kai Koenig @ February 05, 2010 07:20 AM

After the XMas break is now finally over and summer has arrived in Wellington, we’re starting the monthly meetings of the Flash Platform User Group again. Actually we were known as the Flex User Group but went through a bit of self-finding and re-branding and the outcome is a broader focus on the overall Flash Platform. That also includes Flash, AIR, Flash Catalyst and associated things like the Text Layout Framework or Stratus.

The next (and first meeting in 2010) will be held at Natcoll Design Technology in Wellington (thanks to Brett Taylor, who’s the head of department for Interactive Design and Web Development at Natcoll and helped a lot to set this up). Topics will be Stratus, Adobe’s peer-to-peer framework for RTMP communication and Skinning in Styling in Flex 4. Both will be 30 min-ish long introductory presentations, no previous knowledge of either topic will be required.

This is the agenda:

• Introduction in Stratus (Ross Phillips)
  Stratus: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/stratus/
• The basics of skinning and styling in Flex 4 (Kai Koenig)
  Flex 4: http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Download+Flex+4

Date, Time, Address:

Tuesday, February 16 2010 – 5:30 pm for a 5:45 pm presentation start. Anticipated end at 6:45pm-ish.

Natcoll House
2/20 Kent Terrace
Wellington
New Zealand

If you’re attending, please make sure you register at our Eventbrite site: http://wellingtonflashplatformgroup.eventbrite.com

Speaking at Flash Platform User Group Wellington (New Zealand) is a post from: Blog in Black

Facebook Alert Icon

Mathew Sanders @ February 05, 2010 12:23 AM

Related posts:

1. New Facebook Layout – Mega Menus
2. New Facebook Layout – Top News
3. New Facebook Layout – Photos

Google Apps Breakouts At Learning@Schools 2010 Conference

WaveAdept @ February 04, 2010 11:55 PM

If you’re lucky enough to be going to the Learning@Schools 2010 Conference (Wed 24th / Thu 25 Feb in Rotorua) we’d like to take a moment and pass on the following Google Apps breakout sessions as posted by Maria from Watchdog (a Google Apps re-seller focused on Google Apps Education Edition here in New Zealand)

Google kids learn better? – Interactive Presentation
Dave Winter (Project director, ConnectED Regional Cluster & ICT Manager, Southwell School) and Barbara Reid (Teacher & ICT Facilitator)
We’ve heard of google docs and apps. What can they do for students? Together we will discuss literacy in a google world. A few tips and tricks will appear from the crowd as we learn what a google connected class might mean.
When & Where: Breakout 1, Novotel Batten 2

Google Apps in Education – Interactive Presentation
Maria Casale – Watchdog Corporation
This session will cover in reasonable detail how to use the various aspects of Google Apps (Docs, Sites, Mail, Calendar & Video), and demonstrate how they can be used in the classroom, using lesson plans and examples by Google Certified Teachers. Group discussions and questions will be encouraged throughout the presentation.
When & Where: Breakout 2, Rydges Aintree 2, and repeated in Breakout Six, Millennium Room 2

Google Fest – Interactive Presentation
Dorothy Burt – Google Certified Teacher, Pt England School
Everyone has used at least one of the Google Tools and yet none of us is an expert in all of them. There is always lots more new and cool ideas out there. In this session you should come along prepared to participate as much or little as you feel comfortable. We will start out with a short ‘presentation from the front’ but the majority of the session will be a form of crowd sourcing. You will have the opportunity to come and demonstrate one of the Google Apps that you have used in your classroom or in your role as educator if you would like to. If that doesn’t sound like you, then sit back and enjoy learning from a wide variety of people. We tested this session format at ULearn09 and feedback from all bar one (didn’t read this blurb and thought he was coming to a lecture) said was a great session and left with lots of Google ideas to use. If you are coming to the GoogleFest and have something you would like to share, email me beforehand dorothy@ptengland.school.nz or ping me on GoogleWave dorothyjburt@googlewave.com
When & Where: Breakout 2, Novotel Batten 1