I see from Xero that Sam Morgan has joined the Board as a non-executive director. I must have missed this announcement - or it is old news? Xero is ready to fly and represents an exciting investment prospect when it eventually moves to a public listing.

It would be really cool to do an entire digital listing with only online and text. Does anyone know if the law precludes this idea? Surely the Electronic Transactions Act allows for an entire start-to-end listing process to be conducted online.

Just passing on this event information on behalf of my usability colleagues …

PROTOTYPING TOOLS FOR WEB DESIGN
After a slow start to the year, the Wellington UPA group has an exciting series of events planned for 2007! Thanks to some new members on the organizing group we are glad to announce regular monthly meetings for the rest of the year with a topic presenter/s at each meeting. We will have each UPA meeting on the first Tuesday of each month.

To kick things off, our next meeting is Tuesday April 3^rd and will be about prototyping tools for web design.

A rapid iterative prototyping process is often used with user centred design methodologies. With web based UCD designs we find interaction designers using a variety of tools to create, refine and test prototypes. With so much to learn about each tools advantages/disadvantages, it can sometimes be helpful to simply talk to someone who has used the tool.

Come along to the next Wellington UPA meeting to listen to 6 speakers talk for 10 minutes each on a tool that they have used for prototyping.

The speakers are:

1. Dave OBrien, Optimal Usability, talking about Microsoft Visio
2. Lulu Pachuau, Hansel, talking about Omnigraffle
3. Nicole Kaufmann, Optimal Usability talking about Axure
4. Isha Hartono, Provoke talking about Microsoft Expression Suite
5. Tim Norton and Natalie Ferguson, Plan HQ talking about Adobe Flash
6. Mary Sue Severn, Effacy, talking about their own tool Simplar Studio

Details of the event are:
When: Tuesday April 3^rd, 12 noon to 1.30pm
Where: Hansel, Meeting Room, Level 3, 56 Victoria Street, Wellington

NASA has released images of Mt Ruapehu before and after the Lahar.   Very cool.

It’s amazing what some guys do to watch a kiwi programme after seven days. I’m not condoning this but it is not surprising that the DRM for TVNZ’s OnDemand programming has been cracked already.

Andrew is looking for more weblog consulting.  Andrew gave advice, set up the initial default dev site, did the stylesheet work based on superb design and the keen eye of my colleague, Ben.  Managed the implementation on Dreamhost, sorted the Feedburner, RSS feeds & Akismet plugins.  Yeah, I probably could have pulled everything together myself.  Maybe.  But why?  That’s why there are specialists for these things.  You need Andrew.

My old mate Steve who’s running Tomizone has praise for Auckland Airport’s wi-fi policy.  Thought this deserved a plug also.  C’mon Wellington Airport.  Catch up.  You’re in the innovation capital.

Finally pointed my host name servers to the blog last night after a couple of weeks of tweaking.  24 hrs later and still dns caching problems.  Andrew G has been brilliant thou, slaying the beastly bugs on my behalf.  A true rockstar in the local blogosphere.

So bear with any defects over the next few days.  I wasn’t aiming to go live until April so we’re more than on track.  And thanks for reading & commenting.

Also look out for an article on JOOST soon.  I’ve been collecting material over the past couple of weeks and I’m really excited about this new software.  I’m hoping it will revolutionise webtv for mainstream computer users in the same way that YouTube has become mainstream for user-generated content.  And make the new Apple tv just make so much sense …

Summer rolls on.  I’m working from home today.  It’s 27 C outside.  It’s been 27 C for the past three days.  March must be the best month to be in the Marlborough Sounds.  My rooftop yagi antennae is connected to my Telecom 1XRTT aircard so I’m uber-connected.  Life is good.

M-Net reports: “Lukas Svoboda, one of New Zealand’s leading experts in Enterprise Architecture, will take up a new position with Fronde in Auckland” … today.  I hear they have two senior people jumping over from Microsoft, plus another from Fonterra, and a couple of others also joining this month.  Seems the Fronde is unfurling … gotta be good for Wellington.

Wow - I love the way Aussie just wades in and solves fundamental economy issues. Check out this New Zealand Herald article.

CANBERRA - Federal Labor has unveiled plans to raid the Future Fund to build a A$4.7 billion ($5.4 billion) national high-speed broadband network …