10 August 2006 in Business | Comments (2)

I find the details about the MySpace deals quite extraordinary.

As some of your may recall, Fox acquired MySpace (a social networking site with 33 billion page views per month) for close to $600 million US. In the last few days however, Google has entered a deal to pay $900 million US to be the search and advertising provider on the MySpace site for the next 3 years.

What a fantastic way to cover your purchase price (even if it is over 3 years). That doesn’t take into account any other revenue making systems they have in place.

Not bad if you can get it

Yahoo News has the low down.

– JD

25 July 2006 in Business | Comments (2)

It’s now official, AMD & ATI are to merge (as much as a 5.4 billion dollar transaction is a “merger”). The deal is still subject to approval by ATI shareholders, court approval and regulatory approval however this deal has been in the wind for the last few months.

For more information about the deal check out the AMD page about the deal (which is exactly the same as the ATI page). Also there is a slashdot story about the merger.

Following the announcement Intel revoked ATI’s license to make motherboard chipsets etc for Intel chips.

- JD

20 June 2006 in Business | Comments (3)

Stumbled accross an interesting article on the stuff business pages this evening about the NZ tech sector. This includes all sectors in technology and provided an interesting break down of the relative sizes of those sectors:

Top Technology Sectors by size:
1 Appliances ($1, 088 million)
2 Navigational Aids ($540m)
3 IT services and Support ($463m)
4 Healthcare Products ($440.5m)
5 Biotech ($277.4m)
6 Electronics ($259.4m)
7 Software Development ($243.8m)
8 Agritech ($240m)
9 Digital Media ($172.4m)
10 Production Equipment and Materials Handling ($164.8m)

Overall I don’t think software is actually doing all that well in this list. Admitedly once you combine development with IT services and support it gets to second place but we should easily be taking a first position place.

To read the full article click here

– JD

16 June 2006 in Business & Microsoft | Comments (0)

Ray Ozzie joined Microsoft as their CTO when his company, Groove Networks, was acquired in March 2005. Effective immediately he has taken over as the Chief Software Architect, the role that Bill Gates has had since stepping down as Microsoft CEO.

In two years time Bill Gates will cease working at Microsoft full time and start working full time for the Gates Foundation.

This will be interesting since Ray Ozzie is so focused on web based delivery. Very clever guy but I’m sure the share price will slip a bit on this news.

- JD

27 May 2006 in Business | Comments (2)

This is fantastic, I was just viewing the source of a page on TradeMe and embedded in the page is this:

<!–
If you’re looking at our HTML source, you’re exactly the person
who should send us your resume.
View current vacancies at http://www.trademe.co.nz/careers
–>

How cool is that?

– JD

10 May 2006 in Business | Comments (0)

So lately I’ve been trying to network a bit more with some folks in IT and business in general. I met up with Ben Nolan of ZoomIn.co.nz on Monday after work and checked out their premises at CreativeHQ. I really liked the atmosphere at CreativeHQ (both professional yet fun) even though it was pretty empty at that time of night. It was great having a chat with Ben and finding out more about what they’re up to and sharing some ideas.

Later we headed off to Matterhorn for some drinks and started talking with some random guy and his partner who were sitting at the same table as us (bars seem remarkably full on a Monday night!). Anyway, after some talking we found out he was looking into an IT venture and talked about a friend of his at this local company we might have heard of – Intergen Surprising how small the world is – this guy didn’t even live in the North Island.

It’s great to find that even with such a basic start to networking with some like minded folks at how quickly it grows. It’s almost viral. Tonight I went out for some Butter Chicken to kick back after a software release that I’d been part of. Shortly after Ben turned up with a few friends including a guy (Nathan Torkington) from O’Reilly. He seemed like quite a character even in the few moments of chatting. Grabbed his card and did some googling now I’m home, so if you want to read the first ever review of Shortland Street magazine then check out this link: Shortland Street Magazine Review. I’m sure that’s how he got to work for O’Reilly I enjoy people who don’t take themselves too seriously.

All in all I’ve found it to be a fantastic week for networking – now to just see if I can keep the ball rolling.

– JD

3 May 2006 in Business | Comments (4)

Telecom will be unbundled – government announcement.

News Story Here: Telecom to be unbundled

Anyone want to take a bet on how far Telecom slides down the sharemarket tomorrow morning? $5.55 at close today.

- JD

3 May 2006 in Business | Comments (3)

As a follow on from Tim’s recent post I thought I’d post an entry about ZoomIn.co.nz (and their Australian Map site) to help get some Google love for them. Ben is the Technical Director of Project X Technology Ltd and spoke at code camp recently about Rails (he managed to get a few laughs too – always good ).

I’ve been really impressed with what has been happening in Wellington in the last 18 months. We’ve had some great software companies pop up (Aftermail), some great sales (TradeMe, Aftermail. Existing IT businesses have been growing strongly. Some of the IT high fliers have moved here and the buzz is building.

Having ZoomIn starting up is also great to see – one of our first Web 2.0 companies. Ben is positively bouncing off the walls to try and get people to start more Web businesses as well.

Considering the popularity of the business session at Code Camp it seems that lots of people have ideas they’d like to turn into businesses. Perhaps an IT entrepreneurs (and those interested in becoming one) user group type thing would be a good idea? Certainly we’ve got the interest – the challenge would be ensuring that people actually take some action to launch businesses so it didn’t become stale. The networking potential would be fantastic in itself.

On the networking front, does anyone have some good suggestions on events to attend?

Thoughts?

– JD