Tim Calder

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.

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.

I am extremely excited to read that iPhones are on their way to New Zealand. I have had the opportunity to have a play with a couple of these devices through the people that have purchased the imported hacked models. What is even better though is that we NZers will be able to purchase the very new 3G model right away! iPhones hit the Vodafone stores on the 11th of July. I am positive that the iPhone will revolutionise the way we currently do business in NZ as the ability for one device to handle so many applications will mean that we will always have everything we need with us wherever we go.

Travelling as a Koru Club member has made the whole experience much more enjoyable and productive. Being able to jump the long check in lines, and having your bags produced first on the baggage carousel helps make tackling the airports and proceeding on your way easy. When in between flights the luxurious lounges with vast resources create an excellent business environment. Special thanks needs to be made to Air New Zealand Global Lounges Manager Kieran Turner for his support with helping my business partners and I to develop our business interests around New Zealand and abroad.