Last year I attended Xero Con 2011 – New Zealand’s largest accounting conference run by Xero. While spending a day in a room full of accountants may not sound like your cup of tea the presentations last year where great – and not all to do with accounting.

Tomorrow is Xero Con 2012 which this year I’m not attending – instead I attended their Developer Session today to get an update on what is going on behind the scenes and a roadmap for 2012. The room we were in was full with probably 100 developers who connect with Xero. This is an often unseen benefit of the Xero Ecosystem.

In light of the big conference tomorrow Rod and the team have made some big announcements over the last week including a revenue update.

Over the last year or so Xero has certainly polarized the New Zealand investment community after they abandoned the strategy of reaching profit in the short-term and instead decided it was better to focus on growth.

Since then every article published on the NBR has drawn interesting comments – to the point where today, when Xero announced a further $20 million investment, there was even some prodding taking place to get things started.

While I can understand that investors would like to see profit and a return, those who are unhappy with the current strategy can probably make a return by selling their shares which have remained at the top end of their trading range – and increased again today on the back of the announcement. I would also suggest people need to take a wider view and not judge a book by its cover, or by simply what they read.

Listening to the team today there is no doubt they work hard on both developing and executing their strategy. The numbers that Xero are reporting are continuing to grow (rapidly) which indicates they are on the right path.

The other thing that many people may not see from the outside but was on show today was the eco system I mentioned earlier. There are many other New Zealand entrepreneurs that are building web applications that integrate with Xero and are able to take advantage of this partnership. Some like Vend are seeing success even though they are still very much a startup. Others are more grown up like Workflow Max that was acquired by Xero today.

While these other businesses don’t necessarily provide a return to Xero shareholders they are in general very good for the New Zealand economy. Xero is not in this game just for themselves and very much take the approach of wanting to lift all boats. While today was predominantly about Xero development there were aspects of the talks aimed at helping people in the room with their own business. This is a great culture to create in a business.

Another way of Xero – or more specifically Rod – likes to give back is through his Accelerate Conference which I am very much looking forward to.

Disclaimer:  I am both a shareholder in Xero and one of their original beta customers and now run 10 organisations in Xero. 

For anyone interested in the state of play in the New Zealand start-up scene, or anyone who likes to read what has worked or not worked when building a business check out Rowan Simpson’s Founder Centric Startups Series.

The series is an amazing piece of work and all credit has to go to Rowan and the contributors for making this happen.

The stories are all good and certainly shows there is no script when it comes to creating / running a startup. What works for one doesn’t necessarily apply to another.

My perspective has always been to read and research material like this and take out what I think may work for my businesses. Sometimes we succeed, sometimes we make mistakes, but the most important thing is we review and we learn.

In parallel with this series both Rowan(as an intro to his series) and Lance (Are you an Angel – probably not and Investing with appropriate speed) commented on the structures that support startups – this stirred up a great debate, one that is extremely healthy as New Zealand strives to grow the knowledge economy.

Just before Christmas Air New Zealand sent me my new Airpoints Card – The OneSmart Card. They couldn’t have done better with the name as it truely is one smart (and useful) card.

Having spent the last week in Melbourne for the Boxing Day Test I was able to test all the functions on the card.

Aside from being my Airpoints Card the OneSmart Card allowed me to:

• Add money to the card as a MasterCard Debit Card
• Once the money was added I created an AUD ‘wallet’ and converted some of my NZD to AUD.
• Once in Australia I withdrew money (though note this was taken from my NZD balance – not sure why but I think this is still better than a standard international ATM withdrawal)
• The MasterCard is also a PayPass card so once at the MCG I was able to ‘tap and go’ at the bars and food outlets. This is similar to what was available at the Rugby World Cup but I didn’t get a card for that as there were a few funny rules around it.
• The card is also a chip based card so when PayPass wasn’t available I could still use it like a standard credit/debit card.

All the transactions (except the cash withdrawal) used my AUD balance so no conversion fees.

The card also can be managed via your mobile phone using YAP but I haven’t had the need to try that yet.

Air New Zealand have done extensive work before launching the card and I am most impressed it the simplicity and cleanliness of the website. I am easily able to convert money to multiple currencies and clearly see all the transactions. I was also able to set it up to email me every time a transaction takes place, and many times the email arrived before I’d even had time to pick up my food and leave the checkout.

All and all I have been most impressed with my new card, while I don’t plan to travel as much in 2012 as I have previously, it certainly made things very quick and simple – great work Air New Zealand.

Following an earlier post regarding the capturing of Christchurch Architecture the HitLabNZ has now released CityViewHR for Android powered smart phones.

CityViewAR is a mobile Augmented Reality application that allows people to see how the city was before the earthquakes and building demolitions. Using an Android mobile phone people can walk around the city and see life-sized virtual models of what the buildings looked like on site before they were demolished, and see pictures and written information.

Well 2012 is just around the corner and while many of you will be simply thinking as far as Christmas now is the time to look a little further and sign up for some of the exciting events scheduled for early 2012.

February/March seems to be the time it all happens which is a good thing as it can provide a great foundation for the year ahead.

To date I have signed up for the following:

Better by Design CEO Summit 2012 – Design your future - first time attending but heard good things about this years event

Accelerate 2012 - always stimulating and a great concert to finish

Webstock 2012 - great content and speakers, but also one of the most well organised conferences I’ve been to!

I’ve also signed up for the Xero Developer Conference – quite a bit more technical than the above but always keen to see how the Xero eco-system is expanding!

With the year coming to a close it was once again time for the NZIA Graphisoft Student Design Awards.

During Tuesday and Wednesday the 12 finalists – 4 each from the architecture schools of Auckland University, Victoria University and Unitec – each presented their project for the three judges.

The finalists were:

UNITEC – Department of Architecture

Warren Nicholson

Erxin Shang

Tess Fenwick

Nick Adams

AUCKLAND UNIVERSITY – School of Architecture and Planning

Jessica Mentis

Raukura Turei

Min Tian

Yunwei Xu

VICTORIA UNIVERSITY OF WELLINGTON – Faculty of Architecture and Design

Sophie Hamer

Te Ari Prendergast

Roger Wilson

Ashton Wright

I attended many of the presentations and was most impressed with not only the work on display but the depth of research and thinking behind the projects.

Wednesday evening saw a lecture from Dr Nigel Bertram followed by the official part of the evening. All 12 finalists were recognised before the winner and two highly commended awards were presented.

Winner

Roger Wilson “Transcendent Site: The Resurrection of Denniston”

Highly Commended

Min Tian “Adipaetopia: The Co-Evolution Between the Born and the Made”

Erxin Shang “A Pulpitumic School”

Being involved in New Zealands’ premier Student Design Awards for Architecture is a great privilege and once again I’d like to congratulate all those who made it through to the finals.

Below is a few photos from the top 3:

Today I got an email pointing out that I didn’t post a single article in October or November!

The last date I posted was actually the 27th September when I talked about how impressed I was with Air New Zealand getting me (eventually) down to Christchurch.

The reason I mention this again is that what took place on the 27th September is largely responsible for my lack of posts in the last two months.

On 27th September 2011, Tracey and I (as directors of Cadimage Group) along with Andrew and Marion Ecker of Cadconsult signed an agreement that saw our businesses merge on 1st October 2011.

Andrew Ecker has essentially been part of the team since 1991 when we first started distributing ArchiCAD. Andrew operated as our South Island ArchiCAD reseller for 20 years. In 1999 Andrew established Cadconsult Limited as a great kiwi owner-operator business. Andrew has had enormous success with ArchiCAD in the South Island. Cadconsult was also the New Zealand distributor for Solid Edge – a mechanical design product from Siemens PLM.

As Cadimage Group has developed the board decided to approach Andrew about merging our businesses. We saw that as essentially a solo operator Andrew was having to deal with significant administration which was preventing him from doing what he loves best – interacting with customers and potential customers.

Over a four month period we discussed options with Andrew and initially signed a Heads of Agreement in mid-August working towards the official merger from 1st October 2011. The merger saw Cadimage Group acquire Cadconsult and in return Andrew received a shareholding in Cadimage Group.

Over the last two months I have put in considerable work merging our businesses which also included establishing a new business to continue the Solid Edge related operations – Cadconsult PLM.

While we have extensive systems and processes in our business, merging customer databases with over 20 years of history still takes time. Also getting systems in place helps provide a platform for us to build and grow Cadconsult PLM as a key part of the Cadimage Group has taken time, with yesterday seeing the third iteration of our website launched in 2 months! This coming week sees Cadconsult PLM’s first official events with the launch of Solid Edge ST4 in Christchurch and Auckland.

Two months in we are still excited about the opportunities the merger will give us and are looking forward to a strong 2012.

Along with the merger – though not directly as a result of it – we have also recently employed two more people taking our team to 17. It is great to be growing even after another challenging year. For an overview of the Cadimage Group you can refer to our website.

This morning I caught the 6:10am flight to Christchurch or should that be Auckland!

After two missed landings due to fog we ‘diverted’ to Auckland and landed two and half hours after leaving!

Anyway, having landed I proceeded to a check-in kiosk and scanned the barcode for my original flight and found I had already been rebooked on the 10:05 flight!

Within 5 minutes of landing I was rebooked and back through security – impressive.

The only down side to the morning (apart from being late to Christchurch) was the lack of accurate information on the ground regarding the flight.

I was stoked to see tonight’s close up article about capturing as much of Christchurch before the demolition crews move in.

Jason Mill a Christchurch architect is currently capturing HD images of buildings throughout the Christchurch CBD and with the help of Google Sketch Up (I think) he is creating a virtual model of the city. From what I understand Jason has been working on this for a number of years not just since the earthquake and the concept is awesome.

Taking the work that Jason has done Mark Billinghurst from HitLabNZ provides the ability to walk down the virtual street and see what Christchurch was like before the quake.

I have posted about Mark before regarding his work with augmented reality and it was great to see how Mark is combining Jason’s work to allow the imagery to be delivered to a mobile phone that is location aware so you can see exactly what was previously on the empty site in front of you.

While it is great to see this virtual record being created it is also good to see its potential for communication during the rebuilding phase with the ability for proposed buildings to be ‘dropped’ into the site for the public to see and experience prior to the actual construction.

Beyond using 3d models for visual communication for the general public, the rebuilding of Christchurch also offers architects, engineers, planners and the council a unique opportunity to build an accurate BIM representation of the new built environment – more on that in a future post.

“It’s not the big that eat the small, it’s the fast that eat the slow”

On Thursday afternoon I left Webstock to head up to the beautiful Hawkes Bay and enjoy two evenings and one day of mixing it with some of the people behind some of New Zealand’s fastest growing businesses.

2011 is the second year Rod Drury from Xero has held his Accelerate conference at the Black Barn Vineyard.

Thursday night started with a social gathering for those who had arrived in Havelock North already. It was great to catch up with a number of old faces and meet many new ones as well.

Friday the conference proper started and, after a brief introduction by Rod, Sam Morgan kicked off the morning session talking about the importance of the business model. This high level over view was then looked at in detail in conjunction with a series of presentations from the likes of Sonar6, Jucy, Sidhe, Aptimize, Snapper and VoucherMob.

The presentations were awesome and many people shared some amazing insights and numbers and Sam and Rod were able to pull out both the good and bad points of the various business models – some of the presenters certainly have a few tough but exciting calls to make in the near term!

Lunch at a vineyard is never a quick experience and Accelerate was no exception. The setting was great and the networking over a great lunch was very enjoyable.

During the morning various topics came up that were to form the basis for the afternoon sessions where discussions and examples were discussed from off-shore development to staff incentives.

A really interesting example from the afternoon was from Sonar6 and talked about how they have shifted their sales focus from the small end of the funnel (converting leads to customers) to the big end (converting suspects to prospects.) The examples and methodologies discussed were incredible and show the power of experimenting, informing and then a small bit of selling. Interestingly since shifting their focus, Sonar6 has made more sales with less sales people!

Following the afternoon session we had another enjoyable evening of networking which included more food and a concert Minuit in the Black Barn Cellar.

Conferences such as Accelerate are extremely positive. Due to a high level of trust amongst participants highly confidential information is shared freely in an open and stimulating environment where everyone benefits.

It is hard not to leave a conference like Accelerate feeling pumped up and the credit must go to Rod for not only organising a great event but also in the people he attracted. Many of New Zealand’s business angels attended along with a couple of VC’s from Silicon Valley.

You can read more about Accelerate from Rod or from Mark Robotham who has a more in depth overview of the day which has saved me significant typing time!