That's pretty slick: the Massey University College of Creative Arts will offer a glimpse on their marine craft design for visitors to the Boat and Fishing Show at Mystery Creek 11 – 13 August 2006.

Four personal water craft from the fourth annual Yamaha Design Challenge will be a part of the show. The aim of each craft is the same, to carry a single passenger through a series of straight line and circuit races at speed, but the boats look completely different from each other an anything else on the market.

Overall winner Spypedo (below) is a wave-piercing displacement catamaran that takes a minimalist approach at just 69kg including the 8hp Yamaha outboard. 


Other boars, like the Xplora and CSX also offer a multihull design, while Chopper should be popular with visitors with a design based on a waterbourne chopper-style motorcycle.


Very nice and geeky!

Here it is, the easiest way to understand the whole Net Neutrality debate, with John Hodgman, the guy that plays "Hi, I am a PC" in a series of Apple Mac ads:



Some language may offend, but not much...

The guys at Vodafone New Zealand brought into the country Dr. James Cantor (www.futureguru.com). The main event was a lunch here in Wellington, where Dr Cantor presented his views on future trends to an audience comprising mainly government officials involved in IT projects, and a minority of IT managers involved in other areas.

I am happy to have been invited to the main event (which was attended by about 120 people, I’d say), and also for a one on one chat with Dr Cantor, before the lunch.

Dr Cantor and I talked about our earlier experiences with Technology. He was, for example, part of the initial Apple’s Mac team, as part of the corporate marketing group. We had a bit of geek talk, about how technology changed in all these years since the initial Apple Mac project, how technology is so prevalent these days that it’s not a surprise to us (or anyone else) what possibilities it brings to life. How people accepts technology as a enabler of knowledge and wealth.

Dr Cantor being a futurist, of course I had to ask him about what trends are related to telecommunications, and mobility in general.

He made a point that currently the global economy is a non-location economy, and 2/3 of US and EU economy is driven by IT, nano, neuro, bio technologies. The wireless broadband can and should be used as an accelerator for the ubiquitous and innovative enterprise, helping it touch clients.

In terms of acceptance he commented that government (which seemed to be the main Vodafone focus during the whole event) is the slowest one to adopt the idea of non-location, followed by large enterprise, with SME being the quickest segment to start using wireless technologies.

So, what’s the wireless paradigm? Better solutions, wealth, new business models and market opportunities, a global market space, all facilitate by this non-location economy.

Of big impact on this is the organisational culture. Companies and government should be able to risks and experiment, posing low resistance to changes and opportunities.

What customer relationship areas companies should work on first? According to Dr Cantor, CRM (Client Relationship Management) is the first area that can benefit of a wireless paradigm. The main benefits would customer intimacy, responsiveness and business intelligence. Other areas that can benefit are supply chain and logistics. And government, of course.

You should think of this as “don’t sell me things, know me better and suggest things I might need”.

Dr Cantor goes as far to say that 25% of jobs should be redesigned on a wireless platform to be more effective.

The main event was a full of energy presentation, with Dr Cantor going through concepts, explanations, and some interesting ideas on how to use all this in the wireless field. Of course most of the examples were targeted at government in general, because this was the majority of the audience.

It was actually a very interesting chat, and I can't complain about the food served during the lunch afterwards either. I think it was (the whole thing) appreciated by everyone there.

I've first visited Cambrian House a month or so ago, and didn't pay much more attention to it since then. At that time I read about Cambrian House because they were the crazy folks who sent pizza to the Googleplex.

I read about crowd source before, and other companies experiences, including some articles on Wired, etc.

Today I read a post on Ivan's blog "Now here's an interesting idea with good tips on raising starting capital for your idea" and his comments are good, and a list of tips, from... Cambrian House.

This made me visit it again, and I plan to have a look around it for some more insights. You never know when you will need this knowledge, or how you can apply some to your own business, right?

C'mon guys. You can do better than this... I am talking about ICONZ, the company hosting Geekzone.

I have just made a payment to ICONZ, on a bill I really don't think is fair. I am not going to delve into the technical details on why and how.

But what's not fair is their "customer service". I asked my "account manager" about this invoice as soon as it arrived, 14 days before the due date.

He didn't return my calls, my voice mails, my e-mails. It took him 12 days to answer my questions, with basically a "talk to the boss".

Which I did, but with not much results. Except for the first e-mail received from her (which was just a foward of the e-mail I had already received from the account manager), I did not receive a reply to my questions, all very pertinent to the case in point.

We are talking about a NZ$6700 invoice here. It is not like John Doe asking about his hobby site. And this is not an old accumulated account. It is a single month bill.

I would expect a lot more consideration from a provider when dealing with a customer paying a bill this size. Actually any customer, regardless of size.

Not really, but since I was tired of some people, I decided to create a page to use as an "Internet Recycle Bin".

Simply point someone to http://www.devnull.geek.nz with a parameter and the visitor will be redirected to the /dev/null device. Try http://www.devnull.geek.nz/some_creepy_person's_name_here for example.

As I said, not really...

This one looks interesting: Attensa has released a Web Feed Server. While it looks good, I wonder how much better it is than the Newsgator Enterprise Server we have installed here at Geekzone HQ (read our review).

The Attensa web feed server is an appliance, so it's basically plug it, turn it on, configure, use it. It is based on Linux and Java technologies, while the Newsgator Enterprise Server is based on .Net technologies and runs on a Windows Server platform.

The Newsgator Enterprise Server requires software installation, but I really like it. Having all my feeds automatically synchronised to my Microsoft Exchange account, web client, mobile lightweight-client is great.

I wonder if Attensa would send one of their new devices for us to review?

If you are into technology security of any kind, then you should check the new Symantec Security Response Weblog.

Writing in the blog is Symantec team of intrusion experts, security engineers, virus hunters, threat analysts, and technical support professionals. You can check who's who on this page.

The weblog has posts by categories (mobile and wireless, online fraud, malicious code, spam, vulnerabilities and exploits) and RSS feeds - both full feed or by category.

This is not the first security weblog from a major player in this area, but is a good addition to the ranks, which counts the also interesting F-Secure weblog.

Well, I tried hard to find a contact form on NZ Post's website to submit a feedback. You see, I wasn't going to post about this here, but since I can't tell them what's the problem with their new Postcode system, I have to use this little soapbox.

Yes, NZ Post does have a support system, but I want to give feedback, not create an account and trouble ticket on those escalation systems everyone seems to be using now - incuding Air New Zealand, Nikon, etc. I think they are all supplied by the same company.

Anyway, back to the problem at hand (even though not having contact information on their site for feedback is a problem).

We here at Geekzone receive many parcels coming from overseas, with new gadgets and toys to test.

While the new NZ Post Postcode system seems to be a great step into the ease of sorting mail in the country (which no doubt was probably overloaded by the Trademe success story) it seems like even DHL, NZ Post's partner in the courier business, doesn't know about it.

Someone tried to send us a box with some new hardware, just to be advised by DHL in Singapore that "this address is unreachable in New Zealand". Oh, c'mon we are not outside civilisation. Actually, it's just a five minute walk to a rather large NZ Post Shop. And I receive DHL and Fedex parcels every second day here.

But, as soon as I gave them an old, now invalid Poscode - all was clear. The address and suburb was the same, but the person was happy to delivery to this Postcode.

DHL, please fix your systems, load up the new codes, quickly.

NZ Post, fix your systems, make sure your partners are as quick to adopt new technologies and procedures as the public is. Have you guys there thought notifying DHL of the changes? Because the clients are already using the new Postcodes!

Yesterday I had a day full of Vodafone NZ events, including a one-on-one session with a person brought to the country to address government and businesess during a lunch event (which I also attended, and will blog about later), and then a bit of coffee in the usual place, Astoria.

During that coffee I was shown some of the smart devices being tested by Vodafone for release in the upcoming months.

I can't disclose much, but I saw a fair bit of devices of all sizes and makers, with all types of OS.

Just for a taste, you might want to read the information released by Palm yesterday regarding their work with Microsoft and Vodafone (just a coincidence in dates). The release talks about Europe only, but we know better, right?

Stay tunned in the next few months.