Booster Seat is for you – you are up for

• Return flights for 2 people to San Francisco;
• Accommodation in San Francisco for 30 days; and
• Up to 2 desks at the new kiwi run, SOMA district office space “The Landing Pad” to work from during your stay.

The total prize is limited to NZD$10,000, so depending on how schmancy you are with your accommodation, you might have some spending money left over too

NB. This competition is not restricted to web startups. You might have a growing business that wants to enter the USA market or just a great idea that you want to make fly. If the idea is good and the passion is clear then you’re in the running.

Entries close on August 14th 2011 full details on the booster seat site.

There are other competitions in the US such as DEMO and various Launchpad events organised by O’Reilly that would be great to work into the timetable if you win.

I wrote about some of these at “is R & D Spend a useful Measure of innovation?

Being on the ground in Silicon Valley is the very best kind of R & D – big wave to Nicole Fougere & Rich Chetwynd for funding this competition.

I have a dream aims to inspire the whole school and related community by helping a whole class

Scott was one of the founding members of this group. The full video of his presentation is over here on the TEDxAuckland website. Or below (if you can see the embedded video.)

TEDxAuckland 2010 is on again Sunday 26th September 2010 from 10:00AM (Registration from 8.30 AM) at Westlake Boys High School Campus, North Shore City, Auckland. Tickets are $100 from Ticketek (no essay this year) Go here to buy online.

Speakers haven’t been announced but you can be sure they will all be world class. Don’t wait too long to get yours as tickets are going fast.

Paul Matthews at 12:52 on Thursday, July 15. 2010 in NZCS Blog Despite what appears to be a big-budget lobbying effort by the pro-patent fraternity, Hon Simon Power announced today that he wouldn’t be modifying the proposed Patents Bill hence software will be unpatentable once the Bill passes into law.

This is significant. As we’ve previously pointed out software patents aren’t black and white, and there are certainly pros and cons. However on balance, we believe they represent a far greater risk to smaller NZ-based software providers than opportunity, and there are many cases where they have significantly stifled innovation.

We believe it’s near impossible for software to be developed without breaching some of the hundreds of thousands of software patents awarded around the world, hence many software companies in New Zealand, creating outstanding and innovative software, live a constant risk that their entire business will be wound up overnight due to litigious action by a patent holder.

Read the rest of Pauls update over here at NZCS News

It was in the context of a 2 days series on social media and the most significant trend for me was to see how social media thinking has evolved and view some of the structures, tools and thinking around these approaches.

For example Peoplebrowser looks to be very useful in shaping the various use case and scenarios for businesses.

There were many other great presentations but I personally like Laurels sense of humour and her blog is always worth checking out.

“In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TED has created a program called TEDx. TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience.

Our event is called TEDxAuckland, where x=independently organized TED event. At our TEDxAuckland event, TEDTalks video and live speakers will combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events, including ours, are self-organized.

It is being organized by The Department of Doing Ltd under official license by TED.

The first event is scheduled for Thursday October 1st, 2009 at Westlake Boys High School.

Applications to attend TEDxAuckland 09 will be made available via the TEDxAuckland website on 1st August 2009″

“Andreessen, a co-founder of Netscape, knows a thing or two about what young, inexperienced, brainstorming whiz kids might face in the big bad world.

Netscape’s appearance in the mid-1990s is considered the internet’s Big Bang. Netscape served up the first eye-popping IPO of what was to become the dot-com boom and at one point its eponymous browser had 90% of the market.”

Marc Andreessen launched Boutique Venture Capital Firm with business partner Ben Horowitz  VC  fund last Monday with an initial capitalization of $300 million that the pair intends to invest in “anything that involves chips and computers” at a clip of $50,000 to $50 million per start-up.

“they they won’t invest in anything they don’t understand, period. This includes a lot of “cool stuff,” the eternally-boyish Andreessen explains, like clean and nano technology.

If you get to make a pitch a decision won’t be long in coming because it’s only the two partners deciding. But don’t bother to cold e-mail them with your Google-killing idea. You need an invitation to this party  — a referral from somebody you both know and that they respect. This rule, however — more bean-counter than dreamer-friendly — is pretty much disposed of almost as quickly as it is enunciated. “We’ll probably read the e-mail,” they say, shrugging and shooting each other a look after a moment’s reflection.”

Continue reading over here Marc Andreessen Forms Boutique Venture Capital Firm

The awards celebrate business achievement between New Zealand and its second largest trading partner, the United States.  Award winners receive a travel voucher worth NZ$2,500 to be spent through Business World Travel, on air travel to the USA on Qantas Airways.

Award winners will be announced at a gala dinner at the Hyatt Regency Auckland on 3 September.

Awards categories are:

• Exporter of the Year to the USA – with export revenues to the USA up to $500,000
• Exporter of the Year to the USA – revenues from $501,000 to $5 million and
• Exporter of the Year to the USA – revenues over $5 million
• Importer of the Year from the USA
• Investor of the Year for New Zealand companies investing in the US, as well as US companies investing in New Zealand

A Supreme Award winner is selected from winners of each of these awards.  AmCham also makes an award to the Supporter of the Year.

NZ Companies interested in entering the 2009 awards can find further information at www.amcham.co.nz or by contacting me on email mike@amcham.co.nz or phone 09 309 9140.

Entries close at 5.00 pm on 30 June. Finalists will be announced on 31 July and the winners announced at the black tie awards dinner on 3 September.

We have changed the criteria and previous winners are now eligible to re-enter the awards.

Previous winners of the Supreme Award have included ZESPRI International, Peace Software, Airways Corporation, HumanWare, Tenon, Orion Systems International, Zeacom, Specialist Marine Interiors & Fonterra.

In addition to AmCham, DHL Express and Qantas Airways, the awards are supported by: Baldwins, Ernst & Young, and New Zealand Trade & Enterprise.

“It (Metro Innovation Project) isolates early stage investing as critical to New Zealand’s goal of getting back into the top half of the OECD’s economic rankings. “Achieving this requires five companies of an equivalent size to Fonterra or 3000 ‘globally capable & competitive’ firms – four times the current number.

Five Fonterras is unlikely and unrealistic, therefore four times the number of ‘globally capable & competitive’ firms by 2015 needs to be the goal.”

That’s the thrust of the Metro Innovation Project chaired by Andy Hamilton.

The investment culture in NZ is different to overseas in that most early-stage companies attracted angel funding first, and then venture capital came later.

Hamilton: “The reality is that the venture capital model is much challenged internationally and in NZ it’s no different. They’re struggling to get the returns and the support from the institutional investors, whereas there’s a lot of angel money and people with angel money out there.”

“It’s easier to get angel money for start-ups: the problem though is that a lot of these angel companies will go on and need a lot of capital, which is where VC comes in and why that is actually very important.”

View full article on NZ Herald site

Despite the usual reservations that go with engaging in another layer of communications it is worthwhile setting up a twitter account to keep an eye on some of the players in your patch.

In a business context having access to a partially qualified SMS style list of “followers” which are like subscribers certainly has some attractions.

I’m told by some Vodafone customers that twittering via their phones is possible / I thought that was an SMS function but might be a different way.

I use Twitterrific which is a mini application on an iTouch and that keeps it all away from the desktop.

From my experiences the real time aspect works best when there is instant feedback on an idea or a question. There is always crossover between business and personal and many of the best tweeters can mix both.

Especially after work hours it becomes more of a social water cooler and can be an instant alert if for example something is on teev that is amusing or there are some good guests on Jon Stewart for example.

Updates or “tweets” that I hate the most are ones which are “something interesting here go to the link. ” Yeah right you’re off my list buddy.

Originally there was a reciprocity concept – if someone follows you you follow them back but now there are so many time wasters on the system that it is better not to “follow” them.

Note: If you don’t follow someone you won’t see their updates.

Because of the 140 character limit it is mostly impossible to know what that link is and also it it way better if the tweet offers some instant information such as “a status” which is what it was designed for.

One person who has written two very useful summaries on the topic is Lance Wiggs so here they are:

How NOT to Twitter if you are a corporation

(VodafoneNZ account got hijacked by an idiot for a project)
and

How to twitter if you are a corporation

Lance is on the money with both posts but check the comments also as this is a fast moving river.

How to take advantage of Twitter

The real power of Twitter is the 1-1 interactions, and yet there are only so many people that sit in corporate relations units. Moreover their job should not be to look after every tech nerd’s customer complaint, nor to understand every bizarre happening on the internet”

Some NZ related tweets you may want to check out are

@lawgeeknz / Rick Shera

@TeamXero / Team Xero

@VodafoneNZ Vodafone – could be safe again if Paul Brislen has that account back but see How not to link first.

@lancewiggs / Lance Wiggs

@bernardchickey Finance – Interest rates

@gnat Nat Torkington – conference maestro

@dialogCRM Jason Kemp which is me by way of comparison. As a media watcher my tweets are fairly random and wide ranging whereas most of the others on this list are more business focussed.

Many people operate corporate and private twitter accounts.