The Trade Me Story

Spiral table

Last Friday Mike O'Donnell, Head of Operations at Trade Me ,spoke to my local chamber of commerce here in Lower Hutt. If you weren't there you missed out on some funny stories, great tips on growing an web based business and Mike's view on the future of the web. I wish I'd taken more notes but I was pretty much enthralled by what he was saying and so was the whole room. Along with entertaining us through breakfast, Mike was promoting his book, "Trade Me - The Inside Story" - a mixture of good business advice and funny anecdotes.
This month I have a signed copy of Mikes book as our prize draw.
If you sign up during November 2010, to receive our newsletter, you will go in the draw to win a copy of this book.

Cloud Computing for SME's

Last week I attended a packed presentation on cloud computing from our friends at LANtech. This well thought out presentation explained clearly what cloud computing is good for and when you wouldn't use it. The room was full of, mostly, business people with no interest in computers but a lot of interest in protecting and growing their business. There are two important messages relating to cloud computing.

1. Cloud computing takes the hardware out of the equation for you

2. You can use it anywhere you have an internet connection.

Consider cloud computing before you lock yourself into an expensive local server

If you have software running on a server in your office you will know how expensive and time consuming it can be to keep the server running  and the software up to date, virus free, add  all the microsoft updates and patches plus the new versions etc etc

With cloud computing it’s a no-worry scenario because you let your developers look after that for you - of course you need to establish a relatiuonship with someone you trust. But cloud computing also means you can move your apps from one developer to another or one server to another without it being your bother.

Do you wish you could be free of the office?

With cloud computing you can. Because its out there on the internet, you can access your files and work anywhere. This one is very dear to my heart and in my last newsletter I touched on some of the things we do and tools we use  at Spiral to enable the team to work from anywhere. 

All the software we develop goes out into the cloud. As well as the bespoke development we do to assist people manage their databases, we also have our own products used by so many of you i.e.

- Nautilus for updating your website

- Mailroom for managing your email communications and marketing campaigns