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3.31.2014

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Xero Square

Its great hearing the successes of New Zealand companies. Even more so when there are partnerships (okay integration in this case) between cool little New Zealand based companies and cool little US based companies (use of the word little is not quite so accurate is it!)
Square can make accepting credit cards easy for small businesses. Things get less simple, however, when it comes time to do the books for those businesses -- something that often involves painstakingly inputting Square transactions into accounting software manually. To lessen that misery, today the company announced integration with Xero.

From Xero's website

Square actually solves more pain points for small merchants than meets the eye. Complicated fee structures, expensive hardware and merchant account underwriting requirements were the norm for many years. These archaic demands made it impossible for many small businesses to even qualify, let alone afford a merchant account. Not only did Square remove all of these issues, they did it via a tiny piece of plastic and customer cell phones. In short, Square effectively democratized payments for the small guys, giving every person in the US with a mobile phone access to a point of sale system!
With this integration, Xero will automatically sync all of the previous day’s transaction data from Square, summarize it and create an aggregated transaction in Xero – allocating any payments, refunds, fees and sales taxes to the appropriate account. Sellers and small businesses can now save time, which was previously spent manually inputting sales.



Read more here http://www.xero.com/nz/square/
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1.11.2014

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Yummy things yet to happen for this new year

I had quite a funny post on my Facebook wall to welcome in the new year, it ended with "So think back to the wonderful things that happened this past year, and enjoy the anticipation of the yummy things yet to happen for this new year." (I had, what I thought, a clever play on words where I earlier mentioned anticipating scoffing into a cake that my wife had baked).

Some days later I was shuffling around some of the books on the book case and found myself flipping pages over an old "History of Philosophy" textbook where I found myself spending time reading on Stoicism. Wikipedia has them down as teaching "that destructive emotions resulted from errors in judgment, and that a sage, or person of "moral and intellectual perfection," would not suffer such emotions." More importantly to me "the Stoics presented their philosophy as a way of life, and they thought that the best indication of an individual's philosophy was not what a person said but how they behaved." Perhaps there was something here that could be applied to life in the 21st century.

Turns out that one of the most important Stoic philosophers Marcus Aurelius, the last of the Five Good Emperors penned what is now titled the "Meditations (of Marcus Aurelius)". Initially written to himself as a source for his own guidance and self-improvement, the writings run over 12 books that were written during the various periods of his life. Admittedly I have yet to read the works, or even a digest of his works ... but one of the (many) themes of his writings is of "maintaining focus and to be without distraction all the while maintaining strong ethical principles such as "Being a good man"". Now that is something that I can get behind! I did however peruse the many reviews and reflections on his works and the extracts (of translations) were powerfully eye opening (and quotable).

  • If thou art pained by any external thing, it is not this that disturbs thee, but thy own judgment about it. And it is in thy power to wipe out this judgment now.
  • Not to feel exasperated or defeated or despondent because your days aren't packed with wise and moral actions. But to get back up when you fail, to celebrate behaving like a human—however imperfectly—and fully embrace the pursuit you've embarked on.
  • Let it be your constant method to look into the design of people's actions, and see what they would be at, as often as it is practicable; and to make this custom the more significant, practice it first upon yourself.
  • When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine.
  • Never regard something as doing you good if it makes you betray a trust or lose your sense of shame or makes you show hatred, suspicion, ill-will or hypocrisy or a desire for things best done behind closed doors.
  • Begin - to begin is half the work, let half still remain; again begin this, and thou will have finished.

Great to reflect on as we anticipate all the yummy things yet to happen this year!




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10.28.2013

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Innovation New Zealand

Innovation of a nation tends to have a strong correlation with economic and social success. This tends to be reflected both when comparing to a trend of a nation's performance as well as an indicator of its performance on a global stage. Reputable research organisations, either as consortiums or or stand alone authorities have over the years published rankings (or indexes) of innovation. Measurements of innovation is a hotly contested area with various metrics and quantifiable elements forming an ongoing debate amongst academics and industry pundits. Regardless of the 'fluidity' of definition and research method, from the work carried out in conducting and building these rankings and from the material presented in the accompanying reports it does become painstakingly clear that the measure of innovation is an important attribute of a nation's success.

New Zealand features on several of these global studies. Often quite successfully ranking ourselves against comparable and at times other highly performing nations. A detailed look inward at the differently structured industries and quite often unique attributes of our No.8 Wire approach in working within these industries has however been something that to date has not garnered much study.

IBM New Zealand, as a locally driven initiative, first embarked on formulating and building a New Zealand Innovation Index some years back. The results were interesting to say the least. Whilst we pride ourselves on a strong innovation culture, the study seemed to indicate that this measure didn't quite stack up to our own perceived notions.

This year's Innovation Index (http://www-07.ibm.com/innovation/nz/) took our methods and lessons of study from the previous year more in an exploratory direction. The publicly available static report lays out our findings clearly and in a manner that is easily digestible. The Innovation Index website, presents a dynamically interactive platform in which to explore the various data sets. This approach to presenting our findings has generated a rigorous conversation and commentary around New Zealand innovation that was not as prevalent in previous years.

I believe that in studies of this nature a continuous improvement in definition and method is important to a cohesive and in context view; but paramount to this is the importance of debate and discussion on the subject itself. Have a read and exploration of our findings and highlight the viewpoints that are important from your perspective.

Edit: IBM has posted a summarised version of this post on their Business Insight blog http://ibm.co/19TkXRX

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8.28.2013

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Commenting

After much fiddling around I have finally got the commenting on blogger (that hosts thinkceptional) working in harmony with Google+ comments. It is rather neat. Humm ... is'nt it about time that the blogger platform was absorbed into Google+
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8.05.2013

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Vegemite story to become a movie

The story of Vegemite is about to be turned into a movie!
A book on the life of it's creator Jamie Callister has been written by his grandson, who has sold the movie rights. Mr Callister was a chemist, who lived through the Depression and both world wars.

Here's the history of Vegemite as edited in Wikipedia
In 1919, prior to the introduction of Vegemite, the Sanitarium Health Food Company in New Zealand began manufacturing and shipping to Australia a version of Vegemite's biggest competitor, Marmite. Vegemite was invented in 1922[3] by food technologist Cyril P. Callister when, following the disruption of British Marmite imports after World War I, his employer, the Australian company Fred Walker & Co., gave him the task of developing a spread from the used yeast being dumped by breweries. Callister had been hired by the chairman Fred Walker.[4] Vegemite was registered as a trademark in Australia that same year. Callister used autolysis to break down the yeast cells from waste obtained from the Carlton & United brewery. Concentrating the clear liquid extract and blending with salt and celery and onion extracts[5] formed a sticky black paste.

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7.08.2013

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The wizarding gene



Andrea Klenotiz sent JK Rowling a paper "explaining how the wizarding gene could be singular, autosomal, and dominant despite the protests of a bunch of fans who stopped learning genetics after Punnett squares."

Fantasy and Science laid out in a well written and referenced article. Surely there's a journal somewhere that could publish this!
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6.27.2013

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Café-cum-incubator

I came across this article in Idealog #45, page 8 ... Galen King, founder of Lucid Design and of Kiwipay has setup a cafe slash incubator (or supported workspace maybe a better description) where folks with ideas can come around to and chat and bounce their thoughts. The idealog article has further details as well as some commentary by Galen.

Do we have something similar here in Auckland? I get that we have group meetups, creative mornings and the like. I recall, very many years going to a LUG that has a strong sense of community, as with may other group community meetings I have been to since then. 

My question was around if we have a location here in Auckland where folks with ideas at any slice of a spectrum could come to and interact with the like minded. A fixed place. If not, then why don't we?
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