Rowan Simpson

Congratulations to Tim and the rest of the team at PlanHQ for picking up the “Emerging Gold” at the Wellington Gold Awards this week. The list of previous winners of this category is quite impressive, including Icebreaker in 2001 and Virtual Katy in 2005. Hopefully PlanHQ will live up to the billing and go on to great things.

Celebrations aside, there were a couple of ironic moments for me during the evening …

The last time I attended was in 2005, when Trade Me was nominated in the “Cyber Gold” category.

The speaker that night was the Brazilian Ambassador. So, of course, we all went dressed as Brazilian footballer supporters. I was Rowanaldo (on the right):

It wasn’t such a successful night. Maybe we got ahead of ourselves, but on the night we didn’t even win our category.

If you wanted to be really cynical you might say that it didn’t help that at the time we were completely eating the lunch of the major sponsor (in fact just a few months later, said major sponsor would acquire the company!)

Bit, of course I wouldn’t be so bitter and twisted! :-)

I did have a quiet laugh to myself last night when the introduction video to the same category trumpeted the achievements of Sam and Trade Me, going right back to the famous heater story.

Anyway, it was a good night this time around and we all dressed much more sensibly.

Congratulations to Kiwibank and the other 2008 winners.

Disclaimer: I have a small stake in PlanHQ and also generally support Brazil (unless they’re playing England).

John Lewis posted this great timelapse video looking out over Evans Bay towards Miramar and the airport from a house he’s been sitting (actually if you look closely I think you can see Rod getting home from work about 24 seconds in ;-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azLBbSiQf2w

Nice.

It’s been a glorious summer in Wellington. Hopefully it’s not done yet.

Two Festival shows in two nights this week.

And two VERY different versions of Life On Mars by David Bowie.

First up on Thursday, The Bad Plus. (the quality is pretty poor on that video, but this will give you a better idea of their funky sound)

Then last night, The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain.

Good fun! :-)

PS I also recommend Cirque Ici (if you can still get a ticket?), although he didn’t play any Bowie.

I spotted this down by Te Papa this morning:

As Jeff says:

“They’ve added a new statue on the Wellington waterfront.

Cool, but weird.”

Sometimes “they” do some really good stuff, don’t you think. :-)

Hadyn Green has some more photos here.

I went along to watch the Wellington Phoenix kick off their A League season at the Westpac Stadium yesterday.

They got a crowd of 14,421 people to show up.

Apparently this is the biggest crowd to ever watch a football game in NZ. The previous record was also at Westpac Stadium when the Kingz (one of the Auckland-based predecessors to the Phoenix) played in Wellington in 2001.

I’m a sucker for the buzz generated by a big crowd, but the atmosphere really was awesome.

The Yellow Fever were in fine voice.

The best chant of the afternoon was easily “Same old ozzies, always cheating!”. :-)

We were all on our feet for the last 10 minutes, when the Phoenix came back from 2-0 down to draw the match 2-2 and then have a couple of close chances to win.

The star of the show was Brazilian substitute Felipe. You can always tell a player is good when they only have one name! I tried to find out more about him, but his player profile on the web is pretty elusive.

As long as they keep playing well, I have a feeling that this crowd record will be broken again soon!

Congratulations to everybody who played a part in bringing the Phoenix to Wellington.

StarNow is a Wellington-based company started in 2004 by three guys who all worked at Trade Me: Cameron, Nigel (who also started FindSomeone) and Jamie.

They had a good idea: to build a website where people who want to be famous can advertise themselves, and where reality television producers can go to find the next sucker star.

And, they’ve done a great job of executing and have grown the site into an excellent business, which they now call a “global talent casting service” covering actors, models, musicians, dancers, entertainers and photographers.

This is how Matt Cooney described their business in Idealog:

“For New Zealand, this might be the perfect business. Almost every cent is earned offshore. Start-up and infrastructure costs are low, there are almost no transport costs, no expensive offshore offices to maintain, no worries about import duties, foreign exchange hedging or oddball tax regimes. No factories, no shelves to stock, no resource consents. Marketing is largely through word-of-mouth and the business scales beautifully. It’s proof that three guys with some brains, a great idea and a couple of hundred bucks for marketing can literally invent a business in a few weeks.”

Disclaimer: that’s a bit of a vanity link, as Matt also interviewed me for the same article.

I got their latest newsletter and had to smile when I read that Cameron, who is now CEO of StarNow, was asked to be a judge in this year’s Miss England pageant.

It’s a tough job … but somebody has to do it, I suppose. :-)

A couple of weeks ago Russell Brown from Public Address visited the office to talk to us about what we’re up to at Xero.

The segment includes an interview with me and also with Darryl Gray who is the brand manager at Xero. It aired on Radio Live last week and has now been posted on their blog for you to consume at your leisure …

http://www.publicaddress.net/system/topic,605,pa_radio_ground_xero.sm

Enjoy!

PS This post is taken from the Xero Blog. If you want to keep up with what we’re doing at Xero check it out. :-)

There is no shortage of great job opportunities in Wellington at the moment.

The three guys who founded Mindscape are looking to expand their team.

Same for Trade Me (Senior Web Developer & Project Manager) and Xero (Developers, Tech Ops Manager, Business Systems Analyst, Test Analyst, etc) and I’m sure others

If you’re current job is a death march, or just doesn’t do it for you, you have no excuse.

Rod, Jim and Michael have already blogged about it. So, I’d be surprised if there are many readers who haven’t already heard about this.

But, just in case … check it out.

Should be interesting!

I notice that John is looking for some smart students to be part of the next Summer of Code.

(I have to admit, looking out the window this morning it’s hard to imagine a summer of anything, but let’s not dwell on that!)

I really enjoyed presenting and generally just being part of this the last time around.

Looking at the list of companies involved this time around, there are going to be some awesome opportunities for those selected.

If you’re a smart Comp. Sci. student you should be all over this!

I was sorry to miss the recent Webstock Mini event in Wellington a couple of weeks back.

But, the good news is that the presentations are now all available online:

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

If you didn’t get along, make sure you check out the 10×2 sessions.

This is the quote that grabbed my attention:

“The internet didn’t change my life at all.
I can’t remember life without the internet”.
– Josephine Hall

Ouch! That would have stung for some of the older people in the audience.

She is now 18 and talked about using the internet in 1996, while still at school, to research a science project.

I graduated in 1996. It was also around then that I read an excellent book called Growing Up Digital by Don Tapscott, about “N-Gen”, or the net generation. They (we, although I only just qualify!) are the echo of the baby boom, who have grown up surrounded by interactive technology.

From the book:

Technology is only technology to people born before it was invented
– Alan Kay

That’s why we don’t argue anymore about whether the piano is corrupting music with technology
– Seymore Papert

So, if you’re the sort of person who still marvels at the promise of the internet, take a look over your shoulder and see people, like Josephine, who are already taking it for granted and asking what they can actually do with it.

Every now and then Wellington turns on a stunning day, and we all forget about how much the weather bothers us. There have been a couple like that this week.

I took this photo on Wednesday from Frank Kitts park looking out across the harbour, which was like a sheet of glass. In the foreground is the Len Lye Water Whirler (this press release has more details, and more photos showing how it moves). This is one of a growing number of wicked pieces of sculpture and public art around town - mostly the work of the the Wellington Sculpture Trust.

:-)

Sarah has posted a summary of my presso to the Summer of code guys.  Nat also had some kind comments.

We followed that with a BBQ on the deck of the Trade Me office on the waterfront. Good times!

Does anybody have any photos?

IMGP5169, originally uploaded to Flickr by Jreay.

Lance, who is the resident M.B.A. at Trade Me, and heads up the analytics team, is currently travelling in the U.S. and Europe and making the most of the snow.

He’s posted some photos on Flickr and on his blog. It looks like he’s having a great time, but it’s is not really helping those of us back here.

So, after the stunning weather today in Wellington, when I saw this pic of Oriental Bay on Flickr I thought it was time to start fighting back…

;-)

John and Pete have organised to have a bunch of VUW Computer Science students work with the various companies at CreativeHQ over the summer. Borrowing a bit from Google, they are calling it Summer of Code.

Many years ago now, between the first year and second year of my degree, I spent a summer cutting code for a small software company in Wellington. It was good to be paid to do something useful, and a definite step-up from stacking shelves at Moore Wilsons the previous summer. But, I can’t say it was a hugely positive experience. It did teach me a lot about what I did (and more importantly didn’t) want to do after I graduated.

I think it’s a great idea. I hope the guys all make the most of the opportunity (yes, surprise, all of the students are guys - some things don’t change it seems).

In parallel they’ve lined up a bunch of industry presentations, which so far have been excellent. There is a good summary of the presentations so far on the website.

I went along to the opening session, where Rod Drury and Nat Torkington (of O’Reilly Radar fame) spoke about start-ups and the different parts of the software industry in NZ.

Then, before Christmas, we all had a guided tour of Weta Digital courtesy of CTO Milton Ngan. I’m not normally one to get excited by a room full of blade servers, but there is something a little bit magical about Weta.

I’m going to head along this afternoon to hear Milton present on distributed systems. And, in a couple of weeks I’m also looking forward to hear Koz talk about Ruby on Rails.

The students are all going to visit us for a BBQ at Trade Me later in January. I think I’ll talk about some of the important things they don’t teach you in Computer Science which we’ve found to be important.

What advice would you give to a student about to graduate with a technology degree?