Tim Calder

Although I have banked with Rabobank for as long as I can remember and still use them for my personal and trust accounts, I am pleased with my decision to start using The National Bank as my specialised business banker. I have enjoyed working closely with Business Banking Manager Matthew Elliott who has supported me with the right advise which has allowed me to move forward productively. With Matthew’s authority as a Banking Manager and ability to easily access, I have avioded costly delays in waiting for approvals to be made, instead additional short term funding has been promptly provided. Matthew has also been quite flexible with bank charges over the first 6 months of operations and continues to assess charges depending on our business situation. Matthew’s genuine interest the businesses I am involved in supports The National Bank’s image as a bank that works for your businesses best interests.

Bain Capital Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners have combined their investments and have given LinkedIn a $53 million round of funding which creates a valuation of $1B.

I use Linkedin frequently and have found the professional applications of this site useful when making, sharing and recording contacts where Facebook isn’t suitable. I have recently added my Linkedin profile to the footer of the Bio page of this blog so that colleagues can add me to their network and share my contacts. I feel New Zealander’s are only slowly catching on to this Professional Networking Application as many of the people I deal with are still yet to register. Many of my older (and often more valuable) contacts don’t even check their own email so would battle with the concept of joining an online professional network.

“If LinkedIn is able to achieve its goals and objectives in the coming years, this valuation of a billion dollars will be looked upon as very cheap,” stated Mark Kvamme, Sequoia Capital partner/LinkedIn Board of Director.

I believe that Linkedin will continue to be successful as they have managed to obtain a strong first mover advantage with no known competitors. Although people may have several social networking profiles in order to fit in with different sets of friends, everyone will only require one professional profile, and that will be with Linkedin.

The UPSTART Business Incubator is an excellent facility for all developing entrepreneurs to receive support and guidance for their high growth businesses. UPSTART was initially formed and funded by the Dunedin City Council, University of Otago, Otago Polytechnic, New Zealand Trade & Enterprise (NZTE). Within only four years UPSTART has produced many successful companies that have gone on to continue growing which is a positive testament to their incubation programme.

I have been fortunate to work with both Norman Evans (CEO) and Murray Downes (GM) on business ideas that partners and I have had. The team at UPSTART are very good at what they do because they too are entrepreneurs so know exactly what needs to be done with any developing business. I have just finished speaking with Norman about a business I am developing at the moment called NetPosition. After I gave a fairly average pitch, Norman was quickly able to establish the strengths of my business and some potential areas of difficulty.

This years NBR Audacious Business Plan Competition has finally arrived. Dunedin is very fortunate to have well organised business competitions like this. Last year I was a finalist in this Business Plan competition with my business Foot-Print-Free which attempted to develop a system whereby paper based receipts would be replaced by digitally chipped cards which transferred the detailed information produced at the point of sale to an online storage system. I have taken the advice from last years Judges on board in this years entry by attempting to produce a simpler, more cost effective solution. Last year’s winner, Craig Smith, is developing his own software company called LanguagePerfect which designs Language learning tools to assist with NCEA.

After a little bit of configuring I have now setup up my Twitter account. I first came across Twitter in the new STARTUP magazine which reports on new innovative web based businesses. Wikipedia’s definition of Twitter is:

“Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users (also known as twits) to send updates (otherwise known as tweets) which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.”

Twitter is very easy to use and is following the growing movement of blogging in general. Until I get an iPhone, and can remotely use Wordpress, I will use Twitter to make micro posts which can be read by followers on Twitter or on my Facebook page through FeedFinder. As technology develops so does the need to change ones current habits, instead of writing a new idea down you can send a ‘tweet’ to Twitter to hear what your followers think…

MomentumPlus Ltd is a company formed by Darryl Goad - Health and Fitness professional, and Andrew Hamilton - Chartered Accountant, as a one stop shop for small business owners who find themselves under considerable time pressure and stress because their businesses are running inefficiently as they have ineffective systems in place. Both Andrew and Darryl have seen first hand people battling with work life balances, some have very successful businesses but poor lifestyles where others are putting off dealing to escalating business problems. Andrew lectured the Tax Accounting paper on my Master of Entrepreneurship course. What made Andrew’s lectures understandable and interesting was how he could apply the academic principles through real life, recent examples that we as a class could relate to. Andrew and Darryl’s seminars are a must for any business owner as they provide the tools to develop a healthy life and successful business.

WordPress has just launched an Open Source app that lets you write posts, upload photos, and edit your WordPress blog from your iPhone or iPod Touch. Wikipedia describes WordPress as a blog publishing system written in PHP whereby all data is stored in a MySQL database. Since iPhones have recently been released in New Zealand I would suspect that WordPress’s new application will support the growing movement of people starting to blog. I never thought I could get into this personal opinion/information sharing type of thing, but the WordPress interface makes it very quick and easy to write & publish a post online. Now that this system has been made possible using an iPhone (which now operates on a 3G network) the extended coverage will allow for faster information sharing whereby posts can be made instantly from the time of first thought.

Price Waterhouse Coopers have yesterday released a very interesting report which they have conducted on the complete economic benefits of stadia titled “From dressing rooms to conference rooms”. This report identifies key findings which relate to drivers for their development, increased attendance, multi-use applications, community/commercial benefits, funding structures, opportunities and risks, and planned stadia expansions/developments. This is a ‘must read’ for the antis out there as it encompasses both the economic and accounting aspects which are important to be considered together. Thank you to the Otago University for forwarding the Our Stadium Supporters club this information.

My Hero:) Rod Drury has today retired from personal blogging.

I was first introduced to Rod at the University of Otago, School of Business, when he came to speak to the Master of Entrepreneurship and Otago MBA classes. I was inspired by Rod’s successes with Aftermail and with his current global, online accounting software Xero. After listening to his lecture I started following his blog where I enjoyed reading about his opinions and learning from his developments. As an enthusiastic young entrepreneur myself I am keen to follow in his footsteps with some of my web based ideas.

Rod Drury will continue posting occasionally at http://blog.xero.com

It took me a while to get into but now Facebook has become something I look forward to viewing and has changing the way I keep in touch with friends. There is growing opinion that Facebook is heading into troubled waters as employers are starting to view their employees profiles which has begun to restrict the content that the university student base users are uploading. I can understand this concern as I monitor what I upload and filter comments from friends that could offend others. I believe this common concern may create an avenue for another player to enter the social networking web platform as Facebook’s focus becomes to broad. I have just finished launching my second group on Facebook where people are able to join the Our Stadium Supporters club to grow our membership numbers. This is a perfect example of where Facebook is crossing over between personal to business use which is restricting users true personalities in response to those that could be watching and judging.