Having being on both sides of the startup equation, in my opinion strong guidance and mentorship for founders and to be quite frank for all of the first round employees is so crucial.

The New Zealand SmartCamp event, hosted by IBM is designed to develop an early stage ecosystem to support emerging innovation-led companies on their journey to become leading brands in their own right.

The New Zealand Smart Camp is a great way of creating an entrepreneurial advantage and supercharging your startup. SmartCamp participants get to take advantage of networking with other startups, entrepreneurs like themselves and importantly receive mentoring from industry experts and introductions to IBM’s global innovation ecosystem including venture capitalists.

I’ve tweeted about this many times and encourage you to sign up.

Here is the press release http://www-03.ibm.com/press/nz/en/pressrelease/47514.wss

And here is the signup page http://www.smartcamp2015.com/auckland/

Creating an entrepreneurial advantage in New Zealand was originally published in Think Exceptionally on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Here’s a bit of analytics in advance of the 87th Academy Awards … the folks at Vocativ mined all 1,396 acceptance speeches currently archived on the Academy’s website to find out which members of Hollywood’s power elite can lay claim to the ultimate in Oscar bragging rights: most likely to be name-dropped and there are five people in Hollywood who can say they’ve trumped God — at being mentioned in more speeches, at least.

“The Academy” gets respect in 43 percent of all speeches, and Mom and Dad are recognized 28 percent of the time. However, the most thanked person in Oscar history is Steven Spielberg, who has been thanked a total of 42 times not only by people who starred in his movies but also by those who were simply inspired by him. And as for God? S/He’s only been thanked 19 times.

I spend a fair amount of my time at work tinkering with text analysis technology to transform unstructured, textual data into meaningful pieces of information that can be used within the business context. Unstructured data can improve the quality of existing analytics, or, in some cases, is the key enabler for new types of insights. In a recent TDWI survey, data management professionals were asked which types of data and source systems feed your data warehouse three years from now? The respondents expected a huge increase in unstructured data as a source of warehouse information in the next three years. Really, this data included all manner of content — email, call center transcripts, documents from content management systems, and extranet content from forums or blogs.

So when I see any form of analytics performed on unstructured data from the mainstream, understandably I get overly excited. Unstructured data mining is still a fairly new domain in the business context and I feel technologies like the ones I’m fortunte to have access to (like IBM’s Classification Engine, Watson Explorer, Watson Analytics etc) really go a long way in helping to analyze large volumes of unstructured information in order to discover knowledge that is relevant and useful.

I’d like to thank the Academy for talking Unstructured data was originally published in Think Exceptionally on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Some time in the early 2000s Dennis Ritchie posted the source code to what really is the first C compiler on his home page. When I talk about the C compiler (alright in its many different forms) a little lump of nostalgia builds in me, firing off happy neural activity! Long before his passing in 2011, the venerable Ritchie wrote about the effort to find, recover and preserve the early work on C here .

So like me, if you consider nostalgia a great place to visit log onto Github … yes indeed the compiler has been published in a github repository. These are the same set of files as posted by Dennis Ritchie on his home page, so there’s nothing entirely new to comment (ha!) on, what is does however is perhaps preserve a piece of computing history at the same time exposing it to a wider audience.

A quote from Dennis Ritchie: “In looking over this material, I have mixed emotions; so much of this stuff is immature and not well-done, and there is an element of embarrassment about displaying it. But at the same time it does capture two moments in a period of creativeness and may have some historical interest.”

If you do sport an interest in computer history then have a gander of the paper on “The Development of the C Language” presented at Second History of Programming Languages conference, Cambridge, Mass., April, 1993. Also the Brief history of the Creation and Restoration of First Edition Unix by Australian Warren Toomey of Bond University is a must.

Computer industry paleontology was originally published in Think Exceptionally on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Meetings sometimes just cannot be avoided. Over the last few (many) weeks as the year kicked off I have been in a fair share of meetings and it got me thinking as to the metrics of meetings.

It seems that the average American office worker (I could not find stats for folks outside of America) spends more than nine hours of every week preparing for, or attending, project update meetings, according to the results of a survey released last week by the software firm Clarizen and Harris Poll. That’s up nearly 14 percent from the last survey four years ago.

Experts say (and I am pretty sure that you don't need to be an expert to make this obvious observation) poorly run meetings grind away at employee engagement and make companies less reactive by bogging decisions down in human red tape.

http://www.clarizen.com/about-us/press-releases/item/clarizen-survey-workers-consider-status-meetings-a-productivity-killing-waste-of-time.html

“Survey results continue to show that status meetings do not boost employee productivity,”

“In today’s modern workplace, where demands are constantly changing, employees need easy, real-time access to their discussions, work content and processes. This is what fuels employee productivity and quality work, not sitting in status meetings or preparing lengthy status reports.”

Additional Survey Findings:

* 60 percent of status meeting attendees reported that preparing for a status meeting takes longer than the meeting itself.
* 46 percent of employed Americans would rather do any unpleasant activity than sit in a status meeting, with 18 percent opting for a trip to the DMV and 17 percent choosing to watch paint dry.
* 35 percent of status meeting attendees called status meetings “a waste of my time.”

Al Pittampalli an author and an expert on “meeting culture.” says at their best, meetings are the lifeblood of an organization. “They’re the place where we make the most important decisions, express the most important messages, the most important communications on the most important matters of the day,” he says. Pittampalli sees meeting culture run amok. He sees “not just marathon meetings, but meetings that are done to prepare for meetings, and meetings that are done to prepare for meetings to prepare for meetings. It is a waste of time ”

He goes on to explain that “One of the biggest problems in organizations is that the meeting is a tool that is used to diffuse responsibility,” He says meetings alleviate the anxiety of making tough calls by delaying decisions, instead of making them.

Bad meetings also recur because, in many cases, the people leading them don’t know how to run a good one. There’s a lack of self-awareness among meeting leaders. The vast majority self-report that they believe they’re conducting meetings well, while the vast majority of participants disagree. Yet Pittampalli says no one speaks up.

And so the endless meetings go on, and on, and on.

A book that explores the work habits of a large number of well known artists and writers and scientists found that almost all of them were unapologetic workaholics. The book, written by Mason Currey titled “Daily Rituals: How Artists Work” goes into some detail of the work routines … here are some choice extracts

William Faulkner:

During his most fertile years, from the late 1920s through the early ’40s, Faulkner worked at an astonishing pace, often completing three thousand words a day and occasionally twice that amount. (He once wrote to his mother that he had managed ten thousand words in one day, working between 10: 00 A.M. and midnight — a personal record.) “I write when the spirit moves me,” Faulkner said, “and the spirit moves me every day.”

Maya Angelou:

Sometimes the intensity of the work brings on strange physical reactions — her back goes out, her knees swell, and her eyelids once swelled completely shut. Still, she enjoys pushing herself to the limits of her ability. “I have always got to be the best,” she has said. “I’m absolutely compulsive, I admit it. I don’t see that’s a negative.”

H.L. Mencken:

His compulsiveness meant that he was astonishingly productive throughout his life — and yet, at age sixty-four, he could nevertheless write, “Looking back over a life of hard work … my only regret is that I didn’t work even harder.”

Musician Glenn Gould:

From the time he retired from public performances in 1961, when he was thirty-one years old, Gould devoted himself completely to his work, spending the vast majority of his time thinking about music at home or recording music in the studio. He had no hobbies and only a few close friends and collaborators, with whom he communicated mostly by telephone. “I don’t think that my life style is like most other people’s and I’m rather glad for that,” Gould told an interviewer in 1980. “[ T] he two things, life style and work, have become one. Now if that’s eccentricity, then I’m eccentric.”

Alexander Graham Bell:

As a young man, Bell tended to work around the clock, allowing himself only three or four hours of sleep a night… When in the throes of a new idea, he pleaded with his wife to let him be free of family obligations; sometimes, in these states, he would work for up to twenty-two hours straight without sleep.

Van Gogh:

“Today again from seven o’clock in the morning till six in the evening I worked without stirring except to take some food a step or two away,” van Gogh wrote in an 1888 letter to his brother, Theo, adding, “I have no thought of fatigue, I shall do another picture this very night, and I shall bring it off.”

Artist Chuck Close:

“Inspiration is for amateurs,” Close says. “The rest of us just show up and get to work.”

Below is a summary of a post I made in 2013, which I think is somewhat still relevant. (http://www.thinkceptional.com/2013/10/innovation-new-zealand.html)

Innovation of a nation tends to have a strong correlation with economic and social success. This tends to be reflected both when comparing to a trend of a nation’s performance as well as an indicator of its performance on a global stage. Reputable research organisations, either as consortiums or or stand alone authorities have over the years published rankings (or indexes) of innovation. Measurements of innovation is a hotly contested area with various metrics and quantifiable elements forming an ongoing debate amongst academics and industry pundits. Regardless of the ‘fluidity’ of definition and research method, from the work carried out in conducting and building these rankings and from the material presented in the accompanying reports it does become painstakingly clear that the measure of innovation is an important attribute of a nation’s success.

New Zealand features on several of these global studies. Often quite successfully ranking ourselves against comparable and at times other highly performing nations. A detailed look inward at the differently structured industries and quite often unique attributes of our No.8 Wire approach in working within these industries has however been something that to date has not garnered much study.

IBM New Zealand, as a locally driven initiative, first embarked on formulating and building a New Zealand Innovation Index some years back. The results were interesting to say the least. Whilst we pride ourselves on a strong innovation culture, the study seemed to indicate that this measure didn’t quite stack up to our own perceived notions.

This year’s Innovation Index (keeping in mind that the original blog was written in 2013 http://www-07.ibm.com/innovation/nz/) took our methods and lessons of study from the previous year more in an exploratory direction. The publicly available static report lays out our findings clearly and in a manner that is easily digestible. The Innovation Index website, presents a dynamically interactive platform in which to explore the various data sets. This approach to presenting our findings has generated a rigorous conversation and commentary around New Zealand innovation that was not as prevalent in previous years.

I believe that in studies of this nature a continuous improvement in definition and method is important to a cohesive and in context view; but paramount to this is the importance of debate and discussion on the subject itself. Have a read and exploration of our findings and highlight the viewpoints that are important from your perspective. Edit: IBM has posted a summarised version of this post on their Business Insight blog http://ibm.co/19TkXRX

Originally published at www.thinkceptional.com on October 28, 2013.

I had quite a funny post on my Facebook wall to welcome in the new year, it ended with “So think back to the wonderful things that happened this past year, and enjoy the anticipation of the yummy things yet to happen for this new year.” (I had, what I thought, a clever play on words where I earlier mentioned anticipating scoffing into a cake that my wife had baked).

Some days later I was shuffling around some of the books on the book case and found myself flipping pages over an old “History of Philosophy” textbook where I found myself spending time reading on Stoicism. Wikipedia has them down as teaching “that destructive emotions resulted from errors in judgment, and that a sage, or person of “moral and intellectual perfection,” would not suffer such emotions.” More importantly to me “the Stoics presented their philosophy as a way of life, and they thought that the best indication of an individual’s philosophy was not what a person said but how they behaved.” Perhaps there was something here that could be applied to life in the 21st century.

Turns out that one of the most important Stoic philosophers Marcus Aurelius, the last of the Five Good Emperors penned what is now titled the “Meditations (of Marcus Aurelius)”. Initially written to himself as a source for his own guidance and self-improvement, the writings run over 12 books that were written during the various periods of his life. Admittedly I have yet to read the works, or even a digest of his works … but one of the (many) themes of his writings is of “maintaining focus and to be without distraction all the while maintaining strong ethical principles such as “Being a good man””. Now that is something that I can get behind! I did however peruse the many reviews and reflections on his works and the extracts (of translations) were powerfully eye opening (and quotable).

- If thou art pained by any external thing, it is not this that disturbs thee, but thy own judgment about it. And it is in thy power to wipe out this judgment now.

- Not to feel exasperated or defeated or despondent because your days aren’t packed with wise and moral actions. But to get back up when you fail, to celebrate behaving like a human—however imperfectly—and fully embrace the pursuit you’ve embarked on.

- Let it be your constant method to look into the design of people’s actions, and see what they would be at, as often as it is practicable; and to make this custom the more significant, practice it first upon yourself.

- When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine.

- Never regard something as doing you good if it makes you betray a trust or lose your sense of shame or makes you show hatred, suspicion, ill-will or hypocrisy or a desire for things best done behind closed doors.

- Begin — to begin is half the work, let half still remain; again begin this, and thou will have finished.

Great to reflect on as we anticipate all the yummy things yet to happen this year!

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I’m a technologist from New Zealand focused on making great things for good people. With a passion for technology, I practice my craft as a technology connoisseur at a big blue company that is helping to make the world a smarter planet.

I’m still working on trying to have a consolidated place to type up my musings, but for the mean time find me at

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