For all those not going to the gold awards tonight here is the ProjectX’s video by Aston Fiacé, renowned Wellington video and music producer.

Enjoy!

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I just want to wish all the of the finalists of the Wellington Gold awards

Good Luck!

Its been an honour to be in such great company. Congratulations to Star Now, Soltius, and Smartlinx3 for making Cyber Gold shine in 2007.

Its going to be a great night!

If you’re at the awards tonight, come over and say hello!

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Want to work for a cool company this summer?

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The Summer of code 2.0 is now open for sign up for Wellington IT students.

We already have 10 companies signed up. Who knows, you might get a summer job at one at one of these great companies:

• ProjectX
• Hirethings
• Silverstripe
• Trade Me
• Provoke
• Xero
• Spikefin
• PlanHQ
• Innaworks

We’ll be at table 22 at the Victoria IT Careers fair on Friday. Come down and say hello.

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We have just released new maps for ZoomIn. The maps show the land or cadastral boundaries of each property at last three zoom levels.

Here’s an post from ZDnet blog in US about the rise in profile and acceptance of SaaS. The post has links to the original article from a couple of McKinsey consultants. Here is one of key messages from the post:

Quoting McKinsey’s research last year that found a jump from 38% to 61% in the proportion of CIOs planning to use SaaS, the authors set out “why this trend seems bound to gain traction where an earlier generation of hosted software failed to do so a decade ago.” Several of their most compelling arguments come down to simple economics: they say that SaaS has less financial risk for buyers, is cheaper to use and yet just as profitable for vendors.

The SaaS is starting to gain some momentum at an enterprise level. This enables lots of opportunities for niche players to reach a wide world wide audience.

Time to getting cracking and release our new our map services

The Wall Street Journal has an excellent interview with the CEO of DoubleClick, he speaks about the opportunities and challenges that lay ahead in integrating video advertising. (Unfortunately, you need a subscription to read the article )

WSJ:…What does it take to implement more graphical and video advertising?

Mr. Rosenblatt: In general, video advertising as a trend is pretty firmly in motion. In spite of that, though, it is still very small. There are somewhere between half a million and a million search advertisers in the market, there are probably only a couple to five thousand graphical advertisers and probably less than a hundred video advertisers. There is no reason for that imbalance to exist. So one of our goals is to increase efficiencies with which people buy and sell video advertising and democratize access to the process in the same way that Google has democratized access to the search market…It is going to be easier to buy video advertising, and therefore many more people are going to do it.

What does it take to implement more graphical and video advertising?

Mr. Rosenblatt: In general, video advertising as a trend is pretty firmly in motion. In spite of that, though, it is still very small. There are somewhere between half a million and a million search advertisers in the market, there are probably only a couple to five thousand graphical advertisers and probably less than a hundred video advertisers. There is no reason for that imbalance to exist. So one of our goals is to increase efficiencies with which people buy and sell video advertising and democratize access to the process in the same way that Google has democratized access to the search market…It is going to be easier to buy video advertising, and therefore many more people are going to do it.

This highlights the opportunities that broadband enables. (Why don’t the ISP see this !) There is a world of new integrated advertising that video can deliver. With Joost now coming out of beta, the age of Internet TV is arriving. Only one problem, everyone including the advertisers are trying to catchup!

Interesting times!

Siggy from Silverstripe has just posted a challenge to mash-up their TV broadcast featured on Close up. The best mash-ups will be posted on the TVNZ site and may even appear on the show!

Let’s show them what open-source is all about!