"UP Bloggers Predict"

Just arrived home from this UP event which was fantastic, good bloggers / presenters, a good crowd (around 75 I think) and the ever present 'crowd heckler' who got a little annoying.

The winner was Philip Fierlinger who works at Xero and runs the blog http://turntablemedia.com/blog/ who 'predicts' that "Robots will rise from the ground and rule the world" but on a more serious note was all for pushing bio fuel given he also 'predicts' the cost of oil will rise to $200 dollars a barrell this year.

One of the more interesting bloggers was Hamish MacEwan whom seemed to come a little under prepared and maybe it was just me but I simply didn't get his 'predictions'. One was simply called "green".

Probably a little unlucky was David Farrar who even though was rather witty and had some clever stuff to talk about probably didn't engage the crowd as well as others. One of his predictions is that Telstra will see TelstraClear to Vodafone NZ - interesting 'prediction' given TelstraClear's relationship with Vodafone in 2007!!

In short a great event and nice work by the Ninetwenty team as they were out in force.

News on Bearing Point New Zealand

I read earlier this week that there might be some upcoming changes at Bearing Point with New Zealand with two key figures, Suri Bartlett and Chris Day having created a new company Cadence New Zealand.



It looks like this will be a management buyout, similar to what the guys did at Cap Gemini, where some key figures bought the NZ operation off the parent company. Now that is a story in itself, where they then got snapped up by Hewlett Packard for a great price and now most of the key people from CG NZ have left HP New Zealand, leaving HP New Zealand with only a handful of the core CG staff!!



I wish Suri and Chris well and will watch with interest what occurs in next few weeks.