Techcrunch have posted about some of the user numbers behind facebook. Paul Francis compiled a spreadsheet of the numbers.

NZ has 250,760 users - 71,600 male (28.55%) and 179,160 female (71.45%) ! Women outnumber men more than 2 to 1!

Looking at those numbers I would guess that we have a lot of ex-pats still calling NZ home. That’s a lot of people using face book! If what they say is true that more than 50% of facebookers log on once a day. That should put it squarely behind Trade me in terms of visits (althought bebo is more popular in NZ than facebook).

So if you’re looking for a captive NZ audience, then launching a facebook app to that audience is very very appealing. I’m not convinced that people pay any attention to the advertising!

I’ve been ranting about how expensive mobile calls and data rates have been for years…. Going back to India, highlighted just how crazy the price gap is. I was in Mizoram, which has only had mobile phones for about 18 months and they have super cheap rates!

How cheap?? How about a pre-paid phone with local calls from 0.6c per minute !?!? and free night-time calling ! (Ok, this is a promotion with super-low prices but still !)

Having a look at one of the top providers rates (Airtel and Vodafone)

I’ve taken data from Airtel’s website and tried to extract info from vodafone. Broadband pricing is slowly coming into line. Its time to get Mobile prices inline with the rest of the world. The impact of lower mobile prices was a wider effect to the economy. More New Zealanders would benefit to lower mobile prices than wold benefit by broadband. It will help development and innovation in the mobile space, thus creating jobs and growth opportunities for NZ companies. The future of computing is mobile, its time we grew up and get with the rest of the world!

This came as a very pleasant surprise: In last night’s NZ Open Source Awards, ProjectX won the “Open Source Use in Business” category, and NZ Summer of Code took out the “Open Source Use in Education” award.

We’ll write some more soon about the advantages we’ve found to using open source, and some specific software that we can’t do without; but for the moment we’re all just rather stunned!

Hot off the heels of Ponoko being at the techcrunch 40 , PlanHQ have just been techcrunched.

Congrats to Dave, Tim and the teams at Ponoko and PlanHQ

Silicon Welly represent !

Here are the slides from our talks at Bar camp.

John & Paul on “Why your website is SLOW and how you can make it fast!” - John’s slides in PDF (2.2Mb) and Paul’s slides in PDF (87K )

Tom on “Space, Place and the meaning of Where” - (Powerpoint 7.5Mb and Openoffice 7Mb)

We had a great time talking to everyone and putting faces to some famous bloggers.

Kudos to both Mike’s, Nat and Fronde staff for putting on a fantastic event!

“Talk is cheap, because supply exceeds demand.” - Anonymous

Seth Godin, has just posted an answer to a question he ask was asked on “Why do you give away your ideas so freely ?”.

Here’s what he said….

I responded that ideas are easy, doing stuff is hard.

My feeling is that the more often you create and share ideas, the better you get at it. The process of manipulating and ultimately spreading ideas improves both the quality and the quantity of what you create, at least it does for me.

And the clincher for me …

History is littered with inventors who had “great” ideas but kept them quiet and then poorly executed them. And history is lit up with do-ers who took ideas that were floating around in the ether and actually made something happen. In fact, just about every successful venture is based on an unoriginal idea, beautifully executed.

There are a lot of really smart people with great ideas and a lot of talk. It takes a lot of balls to ante up and do the hard yards to make things happen. Trade Me is clear example of an unoriginal idea, superbly executed!

I’ve been invited to speak at the launch of Terralinks new data product - NZ Mastermap.

I’ll be speaking in Wellington (Tuesday morning) and Auckland (Wednesday morning). My talk is on “Online Maps - Past, Present and Future”. I’ll be providing a brief look at online mapping; what’s happened over the last 2 years and provide a hint of what to expect in the future.

If you’re coming to the breakfast presentation, either tomorrow or Wednesday, make sure you come and say Hi.