There was much excitement over MyTours email in the past few days, when Glen announced that we are a finalist for the onyas (which for those NOT in NZ, is basically our tech version of the Oscars… Sort of)

The funny thing about making products, is that you spend most of your time just trying to make things look/work better, and as a result, you sort of focus on all the bad stuff and the to-do list, rather than how awesome the product is. And despite a very disparate team who are all very much part time, it’s quite nice to look back and see what we’ve made… Which is pretty darn cool, if I do say so myself!

The judges say:

“Worked well. Like the integration of service website, clear targeting, and a nice-looking app.”

Check out the available apps here or signup to make your own

And thanks gang! There is nothing better than working with awesome people, on an awesome idea and seeing it come together.

Apparently the gang at Allaboutthestory.com celebrated our one year anniversary a month or so back.

And what a year it’s been!

From the start, we were all aware that this was not the sort of site that will go from no to woah in a year. Anything to do with listings requires a delicate balance of building of the buyer and the audiences. But on the discovery of this satisfied user, it struck me that it could well be a good time for the ‘State of the Startup’ overview.

Our big focus

One of the big mottos of the year, and a question thrown about with abandon is ‘what will this new functionality/tweak/button etc etc TEACH US?’. Learning about how people use the site was priority number 1, 2 ,3 4 and 5. This can prove amusing in the early days when the user base is so small that 50% of your audience doesn’t equate to a huge number of real people.

But we’ve learned a lot. Most importantly, that the mainstream media industry is indeed changing and people are gearing up for it. I think this was proven very early on, when our founder/cheif editor and super talented Julie Starr signed up some fairly substantial publications and journalists before we’d really even proven ourselves.

Some big highlights

• The first sales made to people we didn’t know
• Discovering Cartoons! Allaboutthestory.com has some of the funniest and most clever cartoonists around, regularly selling their relevant and timely takes on the world.
• Watching traffic rise – as I say, it’s early days, but it’s growing. This is especially cool when it’s the result of some new thing that Julie has done (anything from a good blog post, to email newsletters, to Twitter and Facebook)
• Seeing the quality of the content continually rise. As the site grows, so, it seems, does the percentage of really well written articles. We’ve had some sell within hours of listing, which is pretty exciting and does mean that publications are on the lookout constantly.
• The process we’ve developed of regular monthly/6 weekly get togethers with intense updates. These are prioritised around time and focused on making the biggest improvement within that site – which can be the subject of much debate and hard questions. Some months, I believe Julie forces herself to not pull her hair out at the lack of progress, other months, we make a leap forward.

Don’t get me wrong, there are many hiccups, barriers and whole sections of the website we still cringe at. But that’s life and a million times better than my experiences of intense startup environments, full of infighting and freakouts.

Check out the website

It’s been a while since I wrote a post here…it’s good to be back! Since I last wrote I found myself a sweet job as a Sustainable Transport Planner at Greater Wellington and am able now to do lots of good stuff, instead of just asking other people to do it.

One part of my job is promoting the Let’s Carpool website that was launched  last May in the Wellington Region. Over the last few weeks I’ve been getting my head around exactly what the programme does and what makes it different from other carpooling programmes. Luckily for me, I think it is pretty impressive with some very grunty software behind it that does a number of cool things. Not to mention that it’s New Zealand’s most popular commuter carpool programme.

Not only do you get a map of your commuting route with all the potential carpoolers located on it, it gives you the ability to really personalise what you want. You can state if you don’t want smokers, if you just want to travel with people of the same gender, only fellow employees, or with people that are within 1km of your home intersection. It’s a powerful programme and it works. People who are making trips like Karori to Lower Hutt or Island Bay to Porirua who realistically don’t have many options other than the car, can now share their costs with others going that way. 

Currently we have 1400 people using the website and a recent evaluation gave us positive results but also some good ideas for where to now. The most important thing is getting more people using it…obviously that’s the key ingredient for making sure everyone has a possible match. We seem to have passed a kind of tipping point in about March so that now its pretty rare for a person with normal commuting hours to not find at least someone going that way. But the more the better!

If you’ve got any great ideas for us about Let’s Carpool please let us know…either here or you can email me at claire.pascoe@gw.govt.nz. I’m keen to hear marketing suggestions, technological suggestions (given a very modest budget), and any other type of suggestion you might have.

St Andrews

Price: $4.19
Want to learn more about St Andrews, the Home of Golf and one of Europe’s finest small towns? This app will help you enjoy the key sights in this historic and beautiful place.

Buy it from the Apple Store

Invisible Paris

Price: $2.59
Paris is the most visited city in the world, but how many people ever get to the real heart of the place?

These tours won’t take you to the traditional tourist areas but will show you a different side of the city, an invisible side where ordinary people live and work, but which nevertheless is filled with fascinating places and incredible stories.

The walks feature full descriptions of points of interest as well as a map and a selection of original photos. Each walk is based around a particular theme, and generally in a limited geographical area.

Buy it fromt he Apple Store

This is actually not my idea and I know I will be KILLED for claiming this as something I found, but I do think (outside of the creations I’m involved in of course…) that this is the best iPhone app ever.

Why?

Because First Aid is something that we should all know and pretty much all don’t.

Emergency situations are something we should all be prepared for, but let’s be honest, when you are actually in one, who is to say your mind wont go 100% blank or that you will be unable to do anything for fear of doing something wrong?

What an absolutely brilliant thing to have on you – a quick reference guide you can have on hand IF ONLY to give you the confidence of someone with a reference guide on hand.

It’s actually not as uncommon as you might think to be thrust into a life or death situation and even if you do the fullblown 2 day course (without being so bored that your mind closes for the majority of it), staying up to date on the latest best practises and even remembering the basics can be a struggle for those of us with brains like sieves.

So get it now

Just so no one accuses me of being boom and bust, it’s official, I have lost 7.2 kilos since starting my health kick… Despite a few wobbly moments/weeks.

So it’s update time. And this one is about exercise.

I am FULL of exercise mental blocks:

• As SOON as I step foot on a treadmill, I’m convinced I’m too tired to go on
• I then mistake boredom for tiredness, which leads me to watching the clock like a hawk – I’m talking 30 second updates here (’39.5 minutes to go… puff puff… 39 minutes to go… puff puff…’ etc etc) and assuming that at some stage I will be too tired to go on, and that stage is probably NOW.
• I believe that I am a slow runner and I will NEVER get any faster
• I believe that EVERY ONE in the world is faster than me, which then makes me feel like a loser

Exercise is an emotional NIGHTMARE for me. I feel like I’m REALLY bad at it. And even if I manage to run for 40 minutes, I generally finish the run feeling like a loser, because I am too slow, too tired, too bored… And don’t even get me started on the panic attacks I experience when the necessity to run alongside someone else is introduced into the equation… Or (as Im sure alcoholics feel a far worse version of) when I think that I have to do this EVERY DAY for the REST OF MY LIFE. The whole thing breaks me out into a sweat before I even tug on my leggings.

BUT.

This time, I stuck with it. I ran through the pain. I walked a bit when I felt tired. I tried desperately to stop judging myself and to start feeling proud of myself for simply getting my butt to the gym.

And eventually… And for me, it took MONTHS, I started to get exercise highs, and I IMPROVED.

Case in point. One hungover, rainy Sunday, it was decided that a small group of us would go to the gym for a run then spa.

I stepped on the treadmill with trepidation. Then I started running

5 minutes in, I was feeling uber energetic, and not AT ALL puffed. I felt like I could run forever. I upped the treadmill speed more and more over the 40 minutes, until I had knocked over 30 seconds off the time it normally takes me to run a kilometer….

And when the clock ticked over 40 minutes (another mental block)… I kept running.

And for the third time in my life, I ran 10kms. The whole way, I was on fire, I was loving it… and I did it in just over 58 minutes… which is about 4-5 minutes faster than the other times.

Now, about 20% of the time, I still hate running
60% of the time, I work on gradually improving my time
and 20% of the time, I am like a spring chicken.

That is some drastically improved statistics from the days I limped along feeling like my lungs were about to burst, and my legs fall off… 100% of the time.

So in conclusion, I now believe that a good exercise routine is nothing to do with your fitness, it’s all to do with your head and overcoming mental barriers and not being afraid to be TERRIBLE. I can honestly say that after you get your brain into gear, your body (eventually) follows. And it IS worth it.

One thing people from large countries will never understand is the feeling of being a rank underdog, of being somewhat of a joke on the world stage… and then proving everyone wrong.

I’m no sports fan, I can’t even claim to have staunchly supported our All Whites until the day they made it to the world cup, but I am perfectly happy to watch re-run upon re-run of our last-minute goal against Slovakia, I’m even happy to watch reruns of the drunken fans screaming and hugging and crying is their overdramatic, middle of the night celebrations.

There’s nothing better than being part of a small country in moments like these. It makes up for all those times we watch other countries pile up gold medals in the Olympics and all those times we don’t even make it to these sporting events.

One thing you can say about New Zealand, is that we are GREAT underdogs.

DISCLAIMER: While I believe Lance might be a part of this company, and even though Lance and I are in several companies together, I am in no way associated with Groupy APART FROM, I am their new BIGGEST FAN!

I just feel like I have to say that to avoid being accused of underhanded self-promotion.

I LOVE the idea of getting bargains through amassing crowds, and I love the bargains they are giving out. I just referred all my friends and we are going bowling en masse.

I know it’s not unique in the world, but most times you hear about sites like this and are super excited, but NZ is ignored, so you have to sit there and wish you lived in America.

I hope they do well and despite the fact that I will be missing my $10 referral fee for everyone who signs up through this blog post, I hope everyone signs up and we get lots of cool stuff dirt cheap.

Another disclaimer: The only addiction I have discovered that I have is for cheap internet shopping sites… so there is a mild chance I get overly excited when I find them.

I was brought up in a military family, so ANZAC day has been a running feature in my life, however, for many people I know, the date goes unnoticed (unless, of course, it falls on a weekday, and we get a day off). I think this is largely due to our modern thoughts on war in New Zealand. Modern wars like Iraq have well and truly given some New Zealanders a reason to lump all wars in the same basket – an unnecessary and disgusting waste of life. ANZAC day seems to be the last bastion of glorifying war and the people who are stupid enough to get involved.

ANZAC day is a joint celebration with Australia, and technically is a day of remembrance for the anniversary of the first major military input from us in World War I in Gallipoli. In this place and time alone, New Zealand lost 2,721 men. That was a huge whack out of our young population, and they were the kind of people we would have done well to keep around. The loss of them has probably changed the course of our history more than anyone really realises.

Over time ANZAC has become a day to remember ALL our troops who have served anywhere. I think it is very hard for well educated, left leaning, intelligent people who lived through the last several years to not put a negative spin on the idea of spending an entire day focusing on war.

But there is no glory in ANZAC day.

Gallipoli itself has started to openly become recognised as a dismal, avoidable and badly managed loss of life. A grave lesson in our need to stop leaping to arms without just cause, planning and consideration of every life that could be lost. ANZAC day, for me, is not about the glory of the military and the big brass, it’s about the men on the ground. And we need to remember that these men did not have the luxury of living through what we did. The world was a different place, they were the ones who taught us the lessons we should take a lot more seriously than we do.

It is our job to stop one day a year and remember them as the heroes they are and the teachers they should be. Even those who survived, sacrificed their lives to the belief they were making the world safer for the rest of us.

In this age of climate change and our inability to alter our actions to affect future generations, the concept of literally giving your life for people you will never meet is hard to imagine.

That’s what these guys did. And that is why it is so important to not forget.

Despite early signs that I would become the crazy farm lady of the family, Sarah has pipped me at the post.

This weekend, her dreams of farming free range chickens have come to fruition. While I was out on my yearly Guide Dog collection (failing dismally at generating the kind of funding I have come to expect), Sarah was in the country, selecting hens.

Some facts:

She had an 80% egg laying rate on their first morning in their new home.

All the chickens look the same but one. There is one ugly white hen in amongst a flock of brown. They peck her shamelessly. This has caused comments from those who have experienced forms of racism that it is nice to see the white chicken suffering.

It appears that several family members were never explained The Birds and the Bees, and the poor hens keep getting referred to as ‘he’.

My mother was the hen house artist.

There are now 10 chickens. They live in Ngaio and have a very subtle impact on Sarah’s property. They live in a large fenced area and I believe they have had their wings clipped to stop them flying out.

Sarah eats about 6 eggs a fortnight. Within one day, she had her full quota, so I am open to bribes for connecting people with eggs.