I have been lucky enough to have been invoved in the web industry through what would be termed the shift from web 1.0 to web 2.0 but well before the term was coined by Tim O'Riley in 2004, myself and fellow web geeks simply were just trying to push the boundaries as to what we could do with the emerging technology, new scripting languages, techniques and processes with out a thought as to giving it a shiney marketable buzzword name such as the now often mis-used term "Web 2.0".

Just finished reading this article from stuff.co.nz: http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/5767608/Ready-for-movies-in-the-cloud

Seems the TV and Movie industry is finally recognising they actually need to do something along the line of providing a proper business model around the issues of digital content delivery. Especially after the controversial "sky-net" laws passed here in New Zealand recently.

I am pleased to announce that a major web project I have been working on over the past few months for the New Zealand Young Professionals Network (NZYP) has launched.

In reality it has been almost a year in the making if we factor in the initial consulting and business analysis the took place pre-project when Canterbury Young Professionals (CYP) approached me with their idea to revamp their website. Even though there is no formal NZYP organisation, the idea quickly turned into a joint venture between Auckland, Dunedin and Canterbury Young Professional Organisations (YPO's) as a collaborative project dubbed “NZYP” with the groups working together toward a common set of goals.

Blindly applying technology to business problems is sometimes the bane of my existance as a techology consultant.

I find a large portion of my time in working with clients is in the realm of educatating them about the best options and use of technology for their specific situation but also a good portion of business analysis.

Business Analysis (BA) involves spending that extra time with my clients business and getting to understand what makes them tick, how they are doing things and the formal workflow processes they follow.

All too often during a first meeting and brainstorm I may be asked to slap a technology related solution on to automate an existing process.
"Why do you do it that way? Do you understand the why of what is being done... have you mapped it out?" is often worth bringing up with them at this stage.

I do think we need more meaning in the work we do today and will do in the future.

The millennials will be an interesting generation I think, they are brought up digital natives on the internet, gaming, mobile, instant feedback, less worry about privacy online and communicate via social media and with more frequency.

Are they the victor by having a much more open level of connection with their social graph or are they failing to realise what this all means in the long run? Perhaps older gernations are just being paraniod about online privacy having come through the transition to the technology driven world we live in now.

Just a quick blog post to congratulate Bunchball on winning the AppQuest 2011 Competition.
Bunchball are a company that help drive behaviour on the web through the use of game mechanics such as points, levels trophies and rewards - all increasing the engagement for the end user.

Following on from a post from the other week regarding Rackspace Cloud technology to help businesses affect by the Christchurch earthquake, I can now confirm that with the help of a good friend (an account manager) at Rackspace we have managed to secure a number of coupon codes for free Jungle Disk cloud file storage accounts.

UPDATE: 14 March 2011 - I have been working in with my Account Manager friend at Rackspace and it looks like we have secured a number of Jungle Disk accounts to aid in backups and restoring files somewhere that will be accessable while staff and businesses are working remotely from their homes and temporary office space.
More details to come this week, if you need something like this to help you out, perhaps you have an offsite backup you need to make some of the files sharable to your staff please drop me a line on the form below.
I am also looking and intereseted to hear from any IT support comanies that are on the ground in Christchurch that could do with something like Jungle Disk Cloud Storage to help their customers and just add another tool to deploy to solve a problem.

oogle to the rescue again after the great help and success of their Person Finder and Crisis Response applications during the Christchurch, New Zealand Earthquake. Businesses rely heavily on email communication these days and if you are running an in-house mail server or simply downloading your emails directly to your individual workstations; due to the power outages, police cordons or your building being damaged this may no longer be an option. In fact I have a client that had this EXACT setup which we switched over to Google Apps for them post the Sept 4th quake who are now in this situation with the recent earthquake but are able to still access this vital communication tool. Google Apps is a great email infrastructure not to mention it gives you shared calendars and also wordprocessing and spreadsheet tools via their Google Docs application all available 24/7. It is very simple to setup and transition over to, at this point I will however point out that you will need access to the following:

What can I say, the Christchurch earthquake has been an extreme tradgedy and totally devistating to the Canterbury region and New Zealand as a nation. Having been in Christchurch on business for the September 4th quake last year and experienced the original quake that started this all we were very lucky, no loss of life and business re-opened in the CBD in a relatively short space of time... this time however it is a beast of a different nature. Being stuck here in Wellington while many of my family, friends and clients are roughing it out in the shaken city I thought I could help just a little through my skills of consulting, technology advice and blogging by offering some how-to's and advice for businesses needing to get back up and some-what operational as they start to work out "where to from here?" and start to rebuild and re-open for business. One thing is for sure, this time the CBD will not be business as usual for a very long time.