Quick catch up on last few weeks...(cont'd)

Sheena and I were heading to the Auckland Xero office on Beaumont Street. Pamela had already visited the Wellington Xero office, but we thought it would be good to take a look at the Auckland office and meet Hamish Carter, the Relationship Manager there. Wow, that's the same title as me? Maybe he will be able to give me some hints on how to manage relationships!

We climbed the stairs of the lovely brick office and met Hamish at his desk. We moved to the large meeting room, if you can call it that, it was empty apart from a large table, chairs and a projector. Oh and a bar and kitchen to the side.

We talked about this year's yMedia Challenge, Xero and how we could work together more. Hamish offered for us to use the Xero Auckland office for some of the workshops we will be holding. He might also come along and speak at them. The speakers are being organised by Adele from Hong Kong, so we'll have to get her in touch with Hamish at some point.

If you don't know about Xero, it's accounting software that's all web-based. So you never have to install anything on your computer, just log in to the website and do your accounts from there. Pretty cool that it's a New Zealand product and they are expecting to take it to the world!

Quick catch up on last few weeks...

I've been working on this year's yMedia Challenge for a couple of weeks now, I'll do a quick recap of everything so far. I pulled Sheena in with me on the first day, Sheena is studying with me at Unitec and we did the Industry Internship course together. It was coming up to Uni holidays and Pamela had asked me to recruit anyone I knew to help out.

The yMedia office is totally cool. Terabyte gave us an area in their York St, Parnell office as an in-kind contribution to the yMedia Challenge. We have a big space with wooden polished floors and open-planned desks. All that we had on the desks so far were felttip pens and A3 paper, must be in brainstorm mode.

/skip forward a week/

Pamela and I are here meeting Brendan Jarvis from Chrometoaster. We're at the Strawberry Alarmclock in Parnell. I hadn't had my morning coffee yet, but Pamela had already taken 3. Brendan didn't know what had hit him, Pamela spoke at 100 miles an hour, Brendan asked a few questions and I interjected every now and then. It was a pretty successful meeting, certainly economic on time.

Brendan is quite a big deal, a General Manager at the Chrometoaster Auckland office. One of his major clients is NZ Trade and Enterprise. He also blogs on BusinessDay about digital media and design. Check his blog at http://www.businessday.co.nz/blog/playingtowin. Since our meeting, he's volunteered to judge the yMedia Challenge projects and is offering an internship opportunity to students coming through the Challenge. Awesome!