I did the cycle to prove a point, that nothing is impossible. Somethings are improbable but there is a big difference between improbable and impossible. I never thought I would be able to do something like ride a bike from one end of the country to the other, very improbable. So I broke it down, figured out what I needed to do, I came up with a plan and I did it. I took the improbable, removed as much of the risk and uncertainties as possible and boiled it down to a bunch of smaller things I could achieve:

• Ride a bike? check.
• Ride a bike up a hill (without vomiting)? check.
• Ride a bike for a whole day? check.
• Ride a bike for a day then be able to get up the next day and do it again? check.

That was it. I found a replicable formula and then kept doing it until I got to the end. It is often too easy to put up barriers in front of goals, some fickle and no more substantial than a sheet of rice paper, and for you to use these as excuses as to why you can not achieve your goals. Along the way I lost 20kg, met a heap of interesting people, and had plenty of time to just think, something we all deprive ourselves of in our busy lives. The trip was a journey of discovery for myself, and I learnt a lot. Okay, I will get off of my horse now.

So, now that adventure is complete, I have this bubbling enthusiasm running through my veins and I now found myself at the next start line ready for the next adventure, which is pretty exciting. No I am not looking to roller-skate around the Antarctic, or pogo Route 66. As a part of preparing myself for the ride, I cleared all of my commitments from my plate, and now I have one of those rare and exhilarating opportunities in front of me. The opportunity to load my plate up as high as I like with new and exciting things.

So if you have any ideas, or you think I might be able to help you out with something let me know. There are some brief details on my background here. If you know me you will know I also posses boundless enthusiasm and optimism, something I am not afraid of offering about myself. I can’t offer my time free, I have bills to pay. But get in touch I would love to hear from you, before my plate fills up again.

When planning my ride up the country I wondered if I should just leave all the gadgets behind me for two months and go cold turkey, but who was I kidding, not anyone who knew me that’s for sure. And so as I ride the length of New Zealand I will be blogging, tweeting and posting videos to YouTube. I may even chip away at the new start-up project that has been keeping me busy for a bit. The thing is, you can.

When I came back from overseas 9 years ago, freshly inspired by seeing the world and travelling, I set up my first business, which specialised in tele-computing and mobile computing, and at the time you could finally put together all the building blocks to achieve true mobile computing. The technology at the time sucked comparatively to what we have got now, and even what we have now sucks a wee bit and is slowly getting better, but it still let people operate and stay connected on the move. At the time everyone went on about the remote workforce, tele-commuting and the mobile office but people weren’t interested in implementing it. Companies didn’t want people to work from home, not because it was too hard, but because they didn’t trust them and it was too hard to keep an eye on them. This is all another story, which I may well come back to in the near future, but for now my point is that today it is really easy to get away from the shackles of your desk and do business on the road.

At work, we operate the Voom Studio office totally in the cloud. We use Google Apps for email and documents. We use WorkflowMax for job management and time tracking. All our billing and accounts are handled through Xero. The new software product we are developing is SaaS based. Our code repository is totally up in the cloud also so there is no physical reason to physically be in there. The only gear that sits in the office is a printer and an Apple Time Capsule used for storing any large files we are working with, but mainly for storing software, video and any other heavy files (games usually). For collaboration however you cant beat having a chat at someone’s desk or just calling out across the office. That and the fact that customers like to know you “exist” are probably the only reasons we have a Voom office at all.

Here is my mobile office.

My mobile office

This setup lets me do everything I would normally do from my desk, with the added bonus of taking video and photos, neither of which would be very interesting taken from my desk.

There is only one thing that bothers me about my mobile office setup and that is that everything on the left should actually be just one device. If I could have an iPhone that took HD video and let me access the net on my laptop via mobile data then I would be in heaven. In fact I would put money on Apple including fairly decent video camera in the next hardware version of the iPhone, then it would be the single pocket powerhouse computer you would need. Apple, please buy Flip. Samsung and LG are both on the market with a HD video phone, but they are not iPhones are they. The good news is all these devices charge via USB, so I can leave all their associated power cables behind.

The Flip Mino is my latest toy, and I had to ship one in from the US at the last minute when I discovered Flip had removed the off shore sales limitation on their products. It is pocket HD juiciness. I have already in one afternoon put together my first video as an experiment. 30 minutes of footage from a ride, condensed into 2 minutes with voice over and music, thanks to the brilliance of the Mino, and the magic of iMovie. The Mino HD can record on device an hour of video at HD resolution. The brilliance of the Flip cameras are their easy of use and convenience. Smaller than your average cellphone, and lighter, with a single big red button that makes it really easy to point, click and you are recording your next YouTube masterpiece. No fiddly focus rings, or zoom buttons. No back light controls and no on camera effects or editing. Just record. When you plug it into your computer, you can suck off all the video and fiddle with it in your video edit suite of choice. In my case I have a mac so it is iMovie, which does the job just nicely. Today our home computers have plenty of grunt to process video and audio and all we want from a camera is the data.

On my ride, for the mobile data side of things I am using a vodem, and I will pop my SIM card out of my iPhone and use that so as to not have to maintain two data accounts. Hopefully this works. I have tried it out and I could connect from my MacBook, but knowing Vodafone and their screwy data connection settings, my usage may not be billed against my iPhone data allowance.

Finally my iPhone will be my phone, GPS and map, and email and twitter on the go.

All this fits into a surprisingly small bundle. I have water proof bags so no need to stress about being caught in the rain. So I can be anywhere and do everything I would normally need to do on any given day. Customer meetings will be a bit of a pain, but otherwise it will be just like I am still at work, but with 7 hours cycling each day. Now if I could figure out how to type as I ride then life would be just grand.

“Design can change not just your product, it can change your workflow, it can change your company. We just need inspiration, vision, and determination to operate at the highest level. To be good is not enough.” – Jacek Utko

It is no secret that newspapers are facing extinction in the print form. People are looking online for their source of news and current affairs and they don’t want to read yesterdays news any more. The monopoly on news is no longer tightly controlled by the media agencies. Each day they lose a little bit more control to independent blogs, websites, twitter and Facebook, although slowly, one by one the media agencies are buying these up in an attempt to maintain the control. No surprise there but they do this so they can continue to replicate a formula that has worked pretty well for them so far, which is.

1. Write some words about something topical which could be news, or opinion
2. Take a photo to make it more interesting (so it isn’t all just words)
3. Add lots of ads
4. Print it

Now, in an age where your teenage kids are producing videos, 3d animations, flash movies, and mashups in their bedrooms, why god why are the online “newspapers” not doing the same thing? Why must they cling so dearly to their archaic model for presenting the news? White paper, serif font, colour photo. Sure they have made the paper digital, but it is the same ole same ole when it comes to content. In fact, the print editions are more interesting and interactive, with their big awkward pages, and the occasional multi-page feature which has some nice colourful graphics.

For the online edition however, I would much rather look at something that is designed, and crafted, to stimulate and engage me. Just as Apple made a portable music thing-a-majiggy an object of desire through design, newspapers should try to do the same with their news. Seriously, lets take Jacek’s ideas another step further.

What if along side the “news”, newspapers made an actual attempt to add form to their current (and in many cases lacking) function. The first thing they could do is actually “design” their sites. Make them visually rich, easy to view, less cluttered and have some semblance of style. Things may not fit into tidy boxes and columns all the time, but they will just have to deal with that. But not only change the form of the news online into something more attractive in general, what if they, say, ran interactive features along side the day to day news, that gave you in-depth analysis on topical events. That’s the cool thing about the web, you don’t have to have just words and a photo. There are all sorts of cool things like Flash, JavaScript and Video. Plus each article is it’s own island, and is not connected to the rest of the news other than by a single link.

There is so much the format of the web allows you to do. For example, imagine if you can, a digital version of the traditional two-four page spread analysis piece. This digital version could be well designed visually to stand on its own as sort of a feature portal. It could be interactive, media rich and highly informative. Imagine still (are you still imagining?), as an actual example, a dedicated feature on the global financial crisis. This is a complicated story to report on because there are so many different levels of complexity to it, and it means different things to different people in how it effects them. Business readers will want to know different things to say, an at home dad, but both are desperate to understand the topic. Now you could give them a series of individual and non-connected articles on a daily basis that use text and a photo to communicate, or you could:

• Provide interactive graphs, and timelines demonstrating the scale of the crisis detailing critical events and the impacts on world markets over time. A nice interactive draggable graphic timeline would do this nicely. Here is a nice example at the NYT (its a nice start).
• Embedded YouTube style video of analysis. Here is a good one.
  
  The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.
• Add other interactive elements that provide visual analysis on the crisis. Like graphs. Lots and lots of graphs and data depicting the scale of bailouts and blowouts. I like pictorials and graphics.
• Use maps as a visualisation tool, here is an okay example, but you could do much more exciting things
• Provide links off to key news articles elsewhere within the site about the same topic. Link them coherently, like “To read more on the effect on the New Zealand economy…” . Visually group the articles together under subject headings so you can see related articles at a glance.
• Provide feeds from Twitter, so you can see what other people are thinking about the topic
• Have some fun, include a flash game or two.
• Wrap the whole feature up in a great fully themed design that stimulates you visually, and entices you to explore, and be informed. Make the whole thing an experience.

Or you could do this:

What is wrong with the above (the idea, not Kermit)? Well for one, newspapers are geared up to write text articles. They employ journalists and photographers. They syndicate text and photos through existing channels, that are used to text and photos. To start producing video, Flash, and other media formats they, the news agencies, would have to evolve considerably. How would the editorial process work? What are the costs involved? Could they outsource the creation of such things to people who are good at doing media rich content? Possibly. There is a whole web full of content out there that the online newspapers could be using, but by including information from various sources, feeds and other websites they are potentially losing control of your viewer-ship. They fear that you may wander off to the sources directly (the Internet lends itself well for this you know) and that means you may look at and click less ads in their website. Or worse, you might discover another site that is more informative and interesting than the newspapers.

For a newspaper to change from the crap format they have right now, and their sole reliance on advertising to something better and more engaging online, it will cost them. But, is this a new opportunity for them? Would you actually pay to be better informed and to get your news presented well?

What if they offered a free “news and ads” version of the site (this is pretty much what you get now). Then, what if for a month by month subscription you can get access to media rich, and more comprehensive detailed analysis on the news and current affairs. I want to be informed and to learn. I want the information in forms other than text and photos, and I understand that this costs money to produce. I am immune to online advertising anyway so they need a better model to earn revenue. I want to be entertained, and enjoy the news. If they priced it right I would pay.

Lets say they charged $4 a month (or a dollar a week), and perhaps 5% take up this new news+ option. If your online readership is 600,000 unique browsers a week/month/year, lets say that adds up to $100,000 a month in news+ subscriptions. That is $1.2M extra for an online news site like nzherald.co.nz, and for that money you can generate a lot of nice content. For you at home, for the price of a cup of coffee a week you can get your news looking better, more coherent and interactive. I would pay it.

Will it happen. I think it has to. News content on the Internet could be really interactive, engaging, and informative, but at the end of the day it might be hard work and they might need to adapt to new ideas. It will take some balls to change. Anyway, I made my New Years resolution to not read online newspapers. It might take a few more people to do the same before they change their ways.

Here is why. Are you paying attention now? Oh good.

Towards the end of ’08 I listened to a lot of people feeling a bit down and out about things. The world economy was making everyone think about how bad things were going to get for them, and no one seemed to have any positive ideas. I didn’t have any really ground shaking positive ideas either, but I saw the road ahead as a bit of a challenge, and even started throwing one or two ideas around. I was also looking at myself and seeing someone who needed to change what they were doing in order to move forward. I literally just wanted to get off my arse and do something. So I decided quietly, after a few glasses of wine on New Years Eve, that I would do just that. I would remove my arse from the desk chair it usually inhabits and put it on a bike. Why? Because. Because it is doing something.

I don’t seriously think riding a bike the length of the country is a really good way to turn things around for the country but it would at least change me. And who knows what might happen.

Since then I have been called mad, been labelled “mid-life crisisee”, and been flagged for failure by a few. Then John Key announced his idea for the NZ long cycleway, and the knockers quietened down a little. Now I am three weeks away from my first day of full on pedalling and making my own cycleway.

So why am I doing it. For inspiration, for me and others. For fun and to get away from my computer. To meet interesting people and to change things for me. I will probably have a bit of time to think about things too, and we have a few great ideas we are tinkering away at in the Voom Studio office so I will get a lot of quality time to think about them. We are developing a great SaaS product that we will be launching by years end and we are currently taking a whole day a week out of client work to build something new and exciting because it is an investment in the future and now is the best time to do just that.

You see, we can either give up and go hide under a rock, or we can get off our arses and do something new.

So that is why. And chances are I might be passing through a town or city near you during April and May. If you are keen for a catch up and chew the fat a little, I might have some free time on my hands, so drop me a line via email, visit http://nzuphill.8degrees.co.nz or Twitter @rowsell. And hey, if you have a bike I would enjoy some company for a kilometre or ten.

For the low down check out http://nzuphill.8degrees.co.nz/2009/01/27/the-art-of-speed-planning/

For the full transcript of the ad see the post over on getfrank.co.nz.

Hooonk!

To show that the recession is less of an uphill battle than people think, I’m doing my bit by riding NZ uphill on a bike. A push bike that is. And on the way I am going to do many detours to meet some interesting people and places, and I will be sharing the whole experience through yet another blog called nzuphill.8degrees.co.nz, where you will get good lengthy posts about my prep and journeys, plus I will be updating the world via Twitter, and any other damn social media channel I can find. Also by starting at the bottom it is more of a challenge (cause it is uphill you know ).

Really it is to get myself in better condition, and to do something interesting with my life. Here is my first post on why the hell I am doing it, over on nzuphill.8degrees.co.nz. Have a read or visit http://nzuphill.8degrees.co.nz anytime for updates. If you can share any tips or advice, then do get in touch via email or @rowsell on Twitter.

Tourism is our biggest export earner right? We love people coming to our little bump on the edge of the planet, and as Kiwis we love hosting people and telling them how great our part of the world is.

Here is a really smart and free idea (if any are in fact free) I was toying with while CTO at Vianet. This is for Tourism NZ, or any one who wants to make NZ shine on the world tourism stage. A “My NZ” social media site. Here is how it could work.

• The site, say www.mynz.com is a place for New Zealanders and visitors to New Zealand to have conversations about how fantastic NZ is.
• Let everyone have a say in their own space/page, in their own words and in their own way, about why they love NZ.
• Let them upload their NZ in pictures, audio and video. Identify the places they love in maps, favourite samples of life in NZ, music, culture, poetry, film.
• Link off to other social channels like Twitter and Facebook, YouTube channels, Blogger and WordPress. Every time someone contributes with why they love NZ, channel it with tweets and posts out through their other networks, to their friends and associates. Make it easy for people to have conversations about NZ with the rest of the world.
• Connect with great kiwi companies promoting NZ through technology, like ProjectX Technology/Zoomin, Vianet.travel, EventFinder, Bookabach etc. Connect it through www.madefromnewzealand.com, Tourism NZ
• Get people blogging on mynz.com. Invite prominent kiwis to write.
• Get Tourism NZ tweeting and twitpic-ing on twitter.
• Give New Zealanders ownership, and make them a part of bringing people to NZ. Offer bookings of trips, accommodation, activities through mynz.com. If you bring someone in through your profile and network, and they book travel through the site, earn points, commission, tax credits, jelly beans or a ranking based on how many people you connect with and brought to NZ.
• Make every kiwi a sales agent for New Zealand. Start tourism activism, actourvism!
• Make it fun. Make it infectious. Spread NZ like a virus!

You could almost start it with a little bit of work for relatively low cost by using established social networks and free tools out there. You would just need to build the central cog, the glue, the brand.

It might sound wacky, but I think it would work! Think about it. Don’t you love telling the world how great our country is? What is the best form of promotion? Through word of mouth via people you identify with and trust.

I have a little superstition that the evens are bountiful and the odds are hard work. Now that’s not to be pessimistic and expect doom and gloom (gawd there are enough doom merchants around at the moment). No, I actually like the odd numbered years. They are nose down kind of years, and I always seem to get a lot done. Now of course this is all silly superstition.

So what did I plan in 08?

Read more, think more, be more
This is pretty hard to measure, but I have made a concerted effort to spend more quality time reading quality, having more quality thinking time and not feeling rushed. All in all I think I am more effective. So success.

Do more to enhance my way of living without relying on buying crap
We rented no DVD’s in 08. I gave myself a “discretionary spend” budget each week and stuck to it. I did buy a new TV, but my old one was had it, and I bought an iPhone. Neither of these things can be considered “crap”. Oh and I got a boat so I can get away from things that make you want to buy crap. So I think this is a success.

Grow a really impressive moustache
SUCCESS! I thoroughly enjoyed Movember 08 and having everyone ask me if I grew my mo in sub-30 days. Yeah right. I was asked if now I will shave it off. No, I think I will hold onto it for a while. It has become kinda attached.

Avoid marketing
This one was easy. I watched only the TVNZ Freeview channels with no ads, downloaded TV series I like (with no ads), and stopped reading newspapers. Once you pull away from the mainstream media that pretty much cuts it down to mailbox circulars and online ads. Neither of these actually register with me anyway.

Be a better person
Success. I was a notorious work-a-holic and often let my work get in the way of other nuisances like, healthy relationships and lifestyle. I am now a reformed work-a-holic. I still work hard but in measured doses. I left my full time operational role with Vianet, and started part time consultancy which has quickly become a regular thing. I spend more time with my family and love them even more. I have more time for friends, and the community. And most importantly I have more time for me.

Move more
I have lost 8kg in 08. I find it much easier to get off my arse now. It is great!

Love more
I spend more quality time with my family. My youngest daughter spent the first 2 years of her life with a never there dad. And when I was I was always thinking about work. I have discovered two beautiful girls living in my house and they become more delightful everyday.

Eat less
As part of my weight loss, I watch what I eat. I count everything. It is amazing how oblivious I was to the amount of crap going into my body. When you carefully measure the inputs you can get very predictable outputs, and this is the secret to success for most things. If you don’t measure the inputs, how can you possibly expect the right outputs. As Rowan once advised, measure everything!

Hate less
Lastly, as a result of all the above I find I am much happier, and thus don’t hate as much. There is still much that “grinds my gears” but I don’t hate it as much. I find that if I don’t like something, rather than hating it, I provide constructive criticism, and see if I can help them or it out so I don’t hate it some much.

Well what is ahead for 09? I think the above worked so I’m gonna stick with it. But there is one new thing to add. There is a project I have been toying around with as an idea for some time now. Occasionally I tinker away at it. But this year I am going to get it going. I will make a plan (using PlanHQ) of what I want to achieve and then give it quality time. This is a year of hard work you know.

Also I refuse to participate in the recession. I think it is all psycological anyway. Anyone who tries to get me to subscribe to the impending doom will get a quick dose of optimisim and sunshine.