Heaps! Personal Finance Software

Lot’s of people need to be better at managing their money so they can live the life they want and get out of debt, and New Zealand needs a much more financially strong country of people. Enter online personal finance software Heaps!

Heaps! Intro Video to Personal Finance and Budgeting

Why Heaps!

Helping people save money and set a budget they stick to is hard work. Some people are ready, already budgeting and ready for a smarter way, and others need it to all just be a lot simpler, more fun and about the goals they want to get in life. So over the last few weeks we’ve been rolling out online personal finance software heaps! to the first round of Kiwibank customers, checkout the Heaps! Intro Video, if you’re interested sign-up here at heaps!

Who is behind Heaps!

Heaps! is brought to you by Kiwibank in partnership with Social Capital

Disclaimer – I (Tim Norton), am the owner of Social Capital so along side partner Kiwibank, am behind Heaps! so already think it’s pretty cool and love it to bits!

If you charge out your time, and are familiar with super simple social media tools like twitter, then you’ve just found the fastest and most easiest way to turn your time into money.

Here are 2 Big things Minutedock does to hit the bottom line and increase profitability and ability to scale for billable hour and services businesses.

Micro-bill lots of clients in Parallel

Because you can quickly log every piece of work you do in MinuteDock, it’s much easier to allocate and bill for small amounts of our time over many clients, enabling you to support more clients in parallel. And with no overhead, you can now knock out a dozen 15 or 30 minute jobs, and make them profitable! Key when you’re in the services game.

Customers know EXACTLY what they’re paying for

With Minute Dock, there’s no scurrying to pull together invoices for clients or having to tally up and detail whats been done at the end of a month. Instead you’ve got a simple clean audit trail so you and your clients can see exactly what chunks of value you’ve delivered – Chunks of value = cash. Also great if you’re managing a team and want everyone working on things that can be billed everyday.

The Crew Behind MinuteDock

MinuteDock has been designed, developed and is backed and supported by some pretty smart cats Nik Wakelin & Oliver Clarke from Code to Customer and James Nisbet from Bandit Design and a partner of mine in Challenge for Change.

Small Business and Personal Finance direct link

The rest of the world aside, as a country powered by small businesses, New Zealand alone has over 400,000 business owners, and depending on what numbers you get, around three quarters of these are sole traders – 1 man bands or couples. To many of these people, the family money and budget are based around the business, and all financial decisions in either business or personal completely effect each other.

Xero Sharpens it’s Sales Strategy

So along side the massive and increasing opportunities in personal finance, Xero is stepping into a very strategic position with small business owners and will be able to capture these people as customers through either their business or personal finances, then convert them into a customer on the other… a well oiled machine…

For a quick video teaser of Xero Personal

Ponoko on cover of Inc Magazine

The world’s easiest making system – Ponoko and CEO David Ten Have, have taken their business, Wellington and brand New Zealand to the front cover of Inc Magazine in this months global edition in an expose titled The Future of Manufacturing.

The headline says it all – and Dave, Derek and the crew at Ponoko are carrying brand New Zealand and a couple of our key attributes of green and innovative.

“The future of manufacturing is alive in a five-person shop in Wellington, New Zealand. Think cheap, quick, green, and global. And everything’s made to order.”

Inspirational leadership from Ponoko, they’ve opened doors for all of us

Major hit to the competition

MYOB was subject to a takeover by a private equity firm at the end of 2008, which sparked the move of previous founder and board member Craig Winkler, and no doubt a shift in culture for the business at a time when Xero is just warming up. The ability of private equity to manage a business which needs to rapidly innovate in a competitive environment remains to be seen, but it’s clear that the now private equity lead MYOB will continue to face challenges in finding and retaining key talent and innovation, and with the visionary founder now moving his money into Xero, the new era of online accounting lead by Xero is in full swing.

Existing investor top-up

The shares will be issued at 90 cents in a round open to all existing investors, so while Xero don’t need your additional money, if you bought in at launch, nows a good time to top up and bring your average buy price down slightly. With a strong growth curve, a freshly capitalised balance sheet, a foothold in New Zealand, the UK and Australia, and momentum building from a base of regular customers, Xero is well on it’s way as a powerful global business that’s changing the way small businesses roll in the new world economy.

Big congrats to the Xero crew, this is a big win for the industry and a great story for the NZX at a time when capital is generally tight.

The New Zealand Cycling Community is powered by Challenge for Change run by Thomas Stokell, Tim Norton, and James Nisbet

GiveaLittle is New Zealand’s online community with the aim of making giving normal. Headed up by friend and experienced social entrepreneur Nathalie Hofsteede and chaired by Dion Mortensen of New Zealand Angel/Venture fund group Movac who are also co-foundeders and backers, GiveaLittle is setting off to be a major New Zealand online community that makes a real difference on the ground

Look forward to sharing more about this later, Congratulations guys!

Here’s a chat I had with Corin Dann on the NZI Business show bright and early this morning on TVOne.

We see Made From New Zealand as a critical piece of infrastructure for the country in building a sustainable global business economy. Once we’ve got our global kiwi business community mapped out and and well promoted online, we will move forward faster and smarter than anyone.
Thanks TVNZ

There’s a lot to be said about a personal Jetpack and Glenn Martin’s 20 year story to get here, but really you just want to see this sucker fly, so join 55,000 others who’ve tuned in the last 5 days and see for yourself, Nice work Glenn Martin and team, and Thanks to Martin Aircraft backer Jenny Morel from No8 Ventures for the tipoff this morning.

Playing in the backyard

Glenn Martin talks the crowd through a controlled take-off at airshow

Swindon Workplace Cycle Challenge

Getting Real Results

The first customer who financed this first Challenge the Swindon Workplace Cycle Challenege was the UK’s Cycling Touring Club and the Swindon Council in the UK, and the first challenge is just wrapping up now and I’m very happy to say that in just 2 weeks we’ve got the following results: There are a total of 41 organisations signed up for the Challenge. Within these 181 departments have been registered. 888 staff members are registered and of these 136 hadn’t cycled in more than a year, but 126 have since cycled for the Challenge! 815 people have logged 3,708 trips, equating to more than 33,930 miles! Thats 1.3 times around the world, over 5000 litres of petrol saved, in one small community, in 2 weeks! (reduction in heart disease saved coming soon! Quietly quite happy with this!

Getting user generated content to drive the site

This entire community has been designed from the first scruffy wireframes scribbled out at Visat Cafe on a quiet Sunday afternoon on Oriental Parade to be all about user generated content an active and successful community will grow – the people, organisations, miles and cycling trips that together are an active cycling community. The mission for the business is clear: If you can get more people and organisations cycling more trips and more miles, then, we’re getting more people cycling, and the world is a better place. So the site is all about promoting people who get others cycling, organisatins who get more of their staff cycling, and peopel who just get on their bike and ride! So theuser generated content strategy sticks out to me like ray of sunshine. This is the same as online health community that gets people more active the naked trainer, more on this soon.

No buzz words please… just real communities

I’m going to write a lot more about this over the coming months, as I’m going to be frank and say that while there are a load of people using the words ‘user generated content’ this seems to have more to do with them reading blogs, repeating what they hear and sharing photos rather than actually understanding what a simple user generated content strategy is, as you can apply the principal to any organisation, industry, community, so lets see the live communities!

PlanHQ has started and grown so far with a closed community. The user generated content is extremely private, but now that we’ve got a base of paying customers, its soon time to launch our community strategy, and focus on the content our uses do or will generate in their process of achieving goals and drive a public community around this… more soon.

Using the online community to drive real action on the ground

I don’t really get off on technology or the web, I came into this space for one over arching reason – to make it easier to do more real things in the world. This Swindon Workplace Challenge and the growing cycling community we’re building uses the web to help get people actually getting on a bike and riding to work, something that we need more of. Here some media coverage of the event: Mid Challenge, Radio Review – 3 days to go, Radio Interview with Tom, the challenge completes, Read Toms post on how to get good publicity.

Making A difference – Doing something that actually helps…

I just couldn’t care less about 2nd lives, games or fun things online, the web is a powerful medium that we either choose to use to do something valuable with, and deal with the real issues (the environment, health, sustainable economics…) or leave it to get dominated and turned into an ‘entertainment’ and message delivery machine that neither inspires or drives any real action like TV and other media have largely become.

We make it happen on PlanHQ

We’ve been giving PlanHQ a massive working through building the first stage of this cycling community business. Some quick numbers from the PlanHQ account – 9 months, 18 Goals and 221 actions completed! Now thats making it happen!

More on all of the above soon.