Sleeping out in Melbourne

Last night, I joined over 1,000 executives around Australia and participated in the 2012 Vinnies CEO Sleepout. We braved the elements and spent a night outside to get a taste of what life is like for the estimated 100,000+ homeless people around the country who do the same thing every night.

The aim of the event was to raise money for the St Vincent De Paul society (the Vinnies) through sponsorships and to raise awareness about an often-neglected group of men, women and children living on the streets every night. We raised a total of $4.7m – and a whole lot of awareness!

Sky News was also on the scene. You can watch the quick interview below to see my thoughts on the event and technology in general:

Like I said in the video, the event was satisfying in and of itself, but it was also a good opportunity to see how helpful technology can be for not-for-profits.

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Big planet, small data

I had the privilege of spending time at the Le Web conference in London this week and learned a few things. As its name might suggest, Le Web is Europe’s largest tech conference and has taken place in Paris every December since 2004 and is very highly regarded. Acknowledging the UK’s fast growing tech ecosystem, the organisers added an extra summer Le Web in London for 2012.

So, what did I pick up?

Firstly, while the world of tech still has its center of gravity in Silicon Valley, the dynamics of web distribution are definitely changing that. And that’s mostly because with a few notable exceptions like Microsoft, pre-web era software just didn’t travel very well.

That’s in part due to the fact that regional business communities from which PC-era software businesses emerged were parochial and inwardly facing, and because selling software overseas used to require old world operational scale.

Today it’s different.

Marc Andreessen, renowned Silicon Valley venture capitalist and former co-founder of Netscape, perfectly captured the essence of how things are changing in Why Software Is Eating The World.
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Cow-orking in the UK

It’s now three months since our UK business went legit so to speak and moved into a physical office in Milton Keynes, about 30 minutes north of London. Among other things, I’m pleased to report that I wasted zero time in executing against our strategic growth strategy, starting with branding up our own version of the famous Milton Keynes Concrete Cow.

I digress.

Apart from a short-lived rental agreement on a cupboard in London that Xero co-founder Hamish Edwards used in 2008, our UK business ran virtually for the best part of three and a half years.

Today, twelve weeks in to our new home, I have to say that I hardly recognise our UK business. Not least in the sense that our staff numbers have doubled from eight to sixteen since we moved in. So, as a seasoned veteran of remote web working but with the benefit of a little objective distance since we opened our office, how do I feel about virtual working and what have I learned?

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Even more beautiful accounting software

The new iPads went on sale today and since our new UK office is barely 400 yards away from an Apple Store, it was too easy to pick one up after the crowds had died down this lunchtime. And as you can see from this comparison, Xero looks even more stunning on the new iPad’s Retina display. The left image is a close-up of Xero running on a first generation iPad, the right on today’s brand new Retina display iPad. Click for big.

Fanatical Support

We’ve just finished three days of some pretty intensive planning workshops in Wellington with the visiting senior account team from Rackspace, our US based production hosting provider.

We’ve covered the whole hosting infrastructure stack, from the network perimeter down to the core application database server layer, looking at all the different architecture and technology options available as we continue to scale out Xero’s underlying hosting infrastructure. This is so we can accommodate continued growth while optimising key elements such as application performance, service availability and customer data protection.

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