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A typically deadly commute – let’s fix it
My partner rides a bicycle to and from work. Her town bike has a basket on the front and back, and she is small, wears normal street clothes and obeys traffic rules. This is what a ride home looks...
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What if you knew how to stop cycling deaths. Would you do anything?
Last April Auckland Transport received a report they had commissioned on Why do Cyclists run red lights?“ A decommissioning the report was an excellent move by Auckland Transport. Sadly the report is...
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Picking stocks and housing bubbles
Professor Robert J Shiller won the Nobel prize this year (with Eugene Fama and Lars Peter Hansen) for his work on the analysis of prices of various assets. He repeated his Nobel lecture at the Yale...
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What Board Skills and Experience do you need?
BHP Billiton created this deceptively simple chart on the skills and experience of their Board of Directors in their excellent 2013 Summary Review. I challenge all boards to do the same. The categories...
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UFB progress at 1.5% – who wants other 98.5%?
It’s great to see the UFB project continue, with the Quarterly Broadband Deployment Update for December 2013 showing over 27% of premises passed to date. The real question is how we can increase the...
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The end of Kiwibank?
<updated to clarify this is for Kiwibank’s Core Banking System> Fairfax Media report that Kiwibank is signing up to SAP as their “principal computer platform” provider for their core banking...
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Our new US ambassador has a tough act to follow
The nominee for the USA’s Ambassador to New Zealand is one Mark David Gilbert. Here’s the text from the Whitehouse.gov press release, 4 months ago: Mark D. Gilbert, Nominee for Ambassador to New...
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When broken forecasting means billions wasted
This line records use of a certain item by New Zealand population since 2000. Where do you think it will be in say 20 years time? The statistic went up, and then down, and so the best estimate to me...
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Let’s fix the New Zealand Food System
In 2001, while I was living in the USA, I read the book Fast Food Nation, shortly after it was released. I stopped eating meat. The USA’s food system was so broken that the quality of the meat being...
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Telecom’s burden is marketing: Spark
What does Telecom do? For me it’s simple – as a telco (leaving aside Gen-i) it provides reliable internet and voice connectivity. That connectivity is accessed over the air and via copper and fibre,...
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Telecom’s Broadband – getting there but room to improve
I decided to check out with Telecom’s broadband sign-up page to see how the impact of Telecom’s ongoing transformation is affecting end users. Overall things seem much easier to navigate than...
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Finding great advice and advisors for founders
There are a few different sources of advice for founders, with the most important ones being end users and paying customers. Below I have put a list of sources of advice in order of importance, just...
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No more little children being dropped off by their mummies
When I went to school over 30 years ago the norm was to walk, cycle or take public transport. Similarly a colleague I spoke to yesterday said that when he went to school in Tauranga 20 years that there...
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Do you have your business licenses?
New Zealand rightly gets credit of being an easy place to do business, but sometimes we forget. As a reminder here’s an excerpt from an article on the tax implications of Kickstarter projects: In the...
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$91 million for “new visa processing technology”
Buried in an otherwise excellent report on NZ Tourism (found through this NZHerald article) is the statement: “Immigration NZ is investing $91 million in new visa processing technology that will enable...
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Raising money is about to get a little easier
Via the NBR in print, is Andrew Lewis’s excellent primer on the April and December changes introduced by the Financial Market Conduct Act. It’s a timely reminder. One change is that certain small...
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Should anyone else adopt the Internet Party policies?
The Internet Party‘s website just launched, but sadly for them this is what happened when I tried to play on the video at the top of the site: I tried a bit later and had a different sort of error with...
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Do Oxfam, Amnesty and World Vision support petrol consumption?
Some unsolicited email spam (not to me) from Littlelot, who replace your Android or PC wallpaper with advertisements: Aside from the problems of this email being unsolicited, they also have a problem...
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Signing customers – learning from Optimizely’s website
Optimizely are in the business of helping people improve their websites so they can sign up more customers or achieve other desired results. They just raised US$57 million, on the back of US$28 million...
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How do we solve the Gender Gap?
The #YesAllWoman Twitter stream is the latest voice about the serious issue of the gender gap. There is a lot of coverage elsewhere, but for my part I want to try to summarise what the #YesAllWomen...
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