30th May2006

Make the Most of Now

by Jon Beattie

Vodafone has just posted a £14.9bn loss only a couple of months after bowing out of the lucrative Japanese market. This was part of the statement put out accompanying the results; “Vodafone has met or exceeded expectations, outperforming its competitors in an increasingly challenging marketplace,” said chief executive Arun Sarin. Errr, yes, you’ve outperformed your competitors in the area of writing down assets that you seriously over paid for. Nice work.

Perhaps the current very expensive looking “Make the Most of Now” advertising campaign that they are running, which has so far made absolutely no sense to me, is in fact an internal comms exercise. Make the most of now before we axe your job! They have announced 400 jobs will be going as part of the move to reduce costs.

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28th May2006

MTV Back Again

by Jon Beattie

Looks like MTV is coming back to New Zealand again. Check out this article by Scott Kara, exceptional journalist and all round nice guy.

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27th May2006

Rakon Gets Slammed by the Herald

by Jon Beattie

The tall poppy syndrome strikes again. The New Zealand Herald has just done a number of newly listed tech company Rakon. Their 4 page investigative special in the weekend paper attacks them for supplying their GPS technology to manufacturer Rockwell who in turn supply guidance systems for the US military’s smart bombs. I think this an amazing achievement for an amazing achievement for a company based in Mt Wellington.

The inflammatory article suggests that this is somehow wrong, because the Labour led government chose not to support the war in Iraq. The last time I checked, this is a democracy, and just because the government says something isn’t right, doesn’t mean all the citizens, private or public, have to agree.

Nobody wants war, but the fact remains that many major technologies were originally developed for military purposes and why shouldn’t New Zealand companies be involved in this? The article suggests that the government should intervene. Yeah, that’s a great idea, let’s force another fantastic New Zealand company to move offshore.

I can only hope that the damage from this is not too great for Rakon.

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27th May2006

Telecon.co.nz

by Jon Beattie

Did Telecom plan to foresee the deliberate misuse of their name? Looks like they did if you do a whois lookup on the domain name and see that they registered it years ago:

% New Zealand Domain Name Registry Limited
% Users confirm on submission their agreement to all published Terms
%
version: 1.23.0
query_datetime: 2006-05-27T18:07:32+12:00
domain_name: telecon.co.nz
query_status: 200 Active
domain_dateregistered: 2004-02-19T10:17:12+13:00
domain_datebilleduntil: 2006-06-19T10:17:12+12:00
domain_datelastmodified: 2006-05-19T23:45:21+12:00
domain_delegaterequested: yes
%
registrar_name: Xtra Limited
registrar_address1: Private Bag 92028
registrar_city: Auckland
registrar_country: NZ (NEW ZEALAND)
registrar_phone: +64 9 355-5200
registrar_fax: +64 9 355-5281
registrar_email: soa@xtra.co.nz
%

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25th May2006

Telecom Trys to Rid WWW of Telecon Video

by Jon Beattie

The brilliant spoof of the Telecom 3G tv ad is consumer generated media at its best. This was originally on YouTube.com but the diligent lawyers at Telecom obviously forced them to remove it. It then popped up on Google Video, but has since been removed. You can see it here though. They clearly don’t understand that it is not that easy to get something off the WWW, just ask Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee.

What is even more amusing is that I was Googling “telecon” and I found this press release about an actual company called Telecon Communications Corp.

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24th May2006

Don’t Buy TV Advertising

by Jon Beattie

Excellent article by Jeremy Lockhorn, group director at Avenue A | Razorfish, about the future (or lack there of) of traditional TV advertising. Like me, Jeremy has a vested interest in seeing more marketing budget being allocated to interactive, but nonetheless, he makes some excellent points.

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23rd May2006

Blogging Tools

by Jon Beattie

I am currently evaluating different blogging tools like crazy at the moment trying to decide what is best. I originally tried TypePad, but when it came to MoveableType and running it on my own servers, Perl? Seriously who still uses Perl? Too hard for me. Blogger, is pretty good for the price (free) but quite limited and badly in need of a major upgrade, which must be in the works, but I can’t wait. As for desktop tools, I’m a Mac user so it has be Ecto, even though everyone talks about Zoundry (Windows only). I think Ecto rocks actually. But what to use at the server side?

Andy Lark, a leading blog expert, tried to steer me in the direction of WordPress weeks ago. I stupidly didn’t follow his advice. WordPress is fantastic. It has restored my faith in PHP applications. An installer is included to help you get set up in 5 minutes. Never have I come across an open source app that is so well put together. Andy, I was wrong, you were right.

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22nd May2006

And So It Begins…

by Jon Beattie

I think it might be a little bit early for 9/11 movies, but apparently Oliver Stone does not agree. He has screened a special preview of his new movie “World Trade Center”. This is due for release on 9th August 2006. FoxNews.com has the story, which I found via the Drudge Report.

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22nd May2006

Telecon

by Jon Beattie

I have a rule. Don’t say anything to anyone that you wouldn’t be happy to have plastered on the web. Apparently Theresa Gattung, CEO of Telecom New Zealand, not only did not follow this rule but she let it be recorded and then published the press release on her website!

Checkout this video, consumer generated media at its best. This was originally on YouTube.com but the diligent lawyers at Telecom obviously forced them to remove it. They clearly don’t understand that it is not that easy to get something off the WWW, just ask Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee.

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20th May2006

Battlefield 2 on Mac

by Jon Beattie

Battlefield 2 is questionably one of the best online multiplayer military games ever released. It is really the only reason I have a PC at home. When my new MacBook Pro arrives I intend to install Boot Camp and then I should be able to play BF2 on it. I hope so, having just spent the majority of my Saturday night this week rebuilding my PC from scratch, I am ready to throw in my lot with Apple/Boot Camp for good.

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