For the geeks we ran through the Building Chrome OS guide (http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/building-chromium-os using Ubuntu to do the work. If you follow the steps outlined it pretty much works as written. We then copied that onto a USB stick and ran it on a little Eee-PC. Some issues around networking were sorted out with a cable – couldn’t get the apps page to work either and logout seemed to be missing.

Otherwise a pretty slick experience. Next step is to change all the images to Xero logos and build our own OS

That pretty much sums up a fun week presenting Now’s the Time to accountants all around New Zealand. This event was a great chance to explain more fully the benefits of being online and that if you want to be ahead of the game, there is no time to waste. We also enjoyed meeting many of you in the Xero community and letting you know that we’re here to help with converting your clients onto Xero.

Our new fast cash coding feature was a hit with the crowds. Xero co-founder and chartered accountant Hamish Edwards did an excellent job keeping the audience on their toes and a highlight at the Auckland presentations was having Telecom’s General Manager Business, Vic Crone speak.

Thanks to Telecom for sponsoring this event. And congratulations to Michelle Wylde of Cooke Associates Accountants who won a Telecom Wireless Mobile Broadband USB Stick with a 1GB prepaid 6-month data usage plan.

We love celebrating the wins of people in the Xero community and Gold Partner Leon Wijohn certainly deserves some praise. Leon has won the Outstanding New Member category in the New Zealand Institute of Chartered Accountants 2009 Leadership Awards. Quite an achievement really when you consider just four years ago he started his chartered accounting business Wijohn Consulting Group. Today the firm has 300 clients.

Leon is a small business specialist and one of his strengths has been in helping the Maori business community. He works with Maori Trusts and Maori owned entities. Leon is also acitvely involved in encouraging young Maori into the accounting profession.

Judges noted that Leon’s leadership style is one of coaching – something he’s been doing since he was 14 on the rugby field. Another attribute was client support. Leon feels strongly about clients having up-to-date financial information, supported by good governance processes.

You can read more about the announcement here but some points that were interesting to me were:

• The browser IS the operating system: there are no installed apps, in fact no installations whatsoever. It’s just a browser – basically the same Chrome browser 40 million people are already using as their primary way to surf the web (according to Google). So obviously that means no MS Office, though it was funny to see them demo opening an Excel file into Windows Live – am pretty sure Microsoft aren’t building an online version of Office for Google’s benefit but it was a pretty nifty demo!
• It’s designed to be fast, simple & secure – just like Chrome.
• It’s designed & built for NetBooks only – Chrome OS doesn’t have drivers per se, will not run on any old laptop & it only works with solid-state hard drives. There is a certain level of device support – I think this is the area where there is still a lot of details left to tease out.
• Applications live on the web (as I said above – there are no installed apps, not even apps for Google Android will run on Chrome). But any application already on the web can be used immediately so Xero is exactly the type of application Chrome OS has been built for.
• Basic plugin support for ubiquitous formats like PDF & Flash are already supported (this was a big question mark for me & was answered in the first few minutes of their demo). I was kinda hoping that Chrome OS would be completely HTML5 only & therefore not require any plugins – however I guess YouTube is one of their biggest sites so without rebuilding YouTube to be plugin free they didn’t have much of a choice.

The other big announcement that caught my eye was actually right at the start of the event – Chrome for Mac will be ready by the end of the year & is great news for those of us that live in complex web applications like Xero on a daily basis.

So Chrome OS has had it’s first unveiling & I’m sure every detail will be hotly debated (probably for the next year!). In the meantime I think I’ll go download the source code, build it & run it in a VM to see what it can do.

Time-tracking is one of those applications that everyone likes to be tailored to them. Some people track in six minute blocks, some people in days. Some like to enter their time weekly, others use timers and some like to use installed applications that monitor their work and when they’re away from their computer.

Over the past year, more and more great web-based applications have started integrating with Xero and a lot of these include time-tracking. For example Acclipse is a practice management system for accountants; WorkFlowMax and ProWorkFlow are powerful job and project management systems with built-in time-tracking; FreshBooks is a well known online invoicing system that provides time-tracking.

For a good number of users that don’t need the power of these systems, there’s now a very nice solution that just does time-tracking and does it well. MinuteDock is time-tracking for Xero. It pulls contacts from Xero, allows you to track time using a nifty Twitter style input, then pushes invoices back into Xero when you’re ready.

Watch this video to see how it works.

Today Rod was named as a recipient of New Zealand’s 2009 Tait Radio Communications’ Flying Kiwi Awards. We know Rod is honoured to join fellow serial entrepreneur and award recipient Selwyn Pellet in entering the Tait NZ Hi-Tech Hall of Fame. They join other legends including Sir Angus Tait, Sir Woolf Fisher & Maurice Paykel, Ian Taylor and Sir Gil Simpson.

The news comes just a day after Rod joined the board of the New Zealand Stock Exchange.

Everyone at Xero is really proud of Rod and of course happy to share the gifts of French champagne that keep arriving at the Xero reception in Wellington (thanks PWC).

Know a good accountant in the US? As the head of design for Xero you might say I’m doing some hands-on research in the US market. Like most of team Xero, I’m based in New Zealand, but I happen to be in the States for the next few weeks.

I need to file US taxes and I’m looking for a US accountant who is already using Xero or ready to start.

We have lots of people asking about US based accountants using Xero, so please take this opportunity to recommend some in the comments below, with contact details and links. Thanks!

I just don’t have time these days to do many of these meet ups and in 20 minutes we’re not going to cover a lot of ground. So for the last few years I’ve been wanting to do my own event and spend a day with a group of companies wanting to accelerate – and get them networking to help each other out.

I’ve found it’s all about going fast, thinking outside the box and executing. Rather than a normal conference format I prefer interactive workshops to allow us to cover the ground quickly and get to the things that you don’t read about in text books. So Accelerate is born and kicks off in February in the sunny Hawke’s Bay.

For the first year I’m stoked to have Andy Lark join us.

Check out Accelerate 2010 at http://0to60.com.

Next February in Wellington (home to the Xero HQ), some of the best and brightest digital writers and thinkers from all over the world will gather to celebrate good design, champion web standards and  have fun.

Webstock is a true kiwi success story. Organisers Ben and Natasha Lampard, Mike Brown and Debbie Sidelinger have created something from nothing. They haven’t ripped off an overseas format or tried to emulate something that’s been done before. They’ve created something new, with its own identity, which now attracts lots of people from offshore. A tremendous achievement for the Wellington-based digerati who got it started by giving a couple of their heroes a few cheeky phone calls.

But it’s not just a web conference. Past events have touched on print media and journalism, television, film, distribution, logistics, central and local government, hardware, retail, libraries and information management, politics and law, games and game theory, organisational psychology, economics, product design, visual design, management theory, occupational therapy, architecture and even horticulture.  Horticulture?  Yes. In this modern-day web of things, even a a pot plant can have a Twitter account.

How can something so scattershot be of value, you may ask? If Steve Jobs is right, and creativity is just connecting things, Webstock provides an environment where those connections can spontaneously happen, where people can meet and talk and share ideas from many different disciplines. Instead of a hundred bankers talking past each other about the latest innovations in banking, you have a couple of bankers talking with journalists interviewing public servants arguing with artists collaborating with architects brainstorming with hackers: the sort of stuff that drives real innovation.

The glue that brings these disparate disciplines together is the web and the wider internet, the potentiality of devices and communication protocols and networks that can be combined and recombined to create new businesses; and to decimate old ones. Last year Meg Pickard from The Guardian spoke about how her newspaper is bucking the trend and transforming into an online content community, while Adrian Holovaty of Everyblock described his vision of a world where every neighbourhood has a newsfeed generated from media, crime stats, local government and more. And he’s already done it for key cities across the US, open-sourced his source code and invited anyone to use his code to do the same for their own city.

Webstock doesn’t have a particular product to push. Unlike a lot of industry conferences, the tools are not the point. You’ll see people from Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, Google and Yahoo!, along with free software and open source advocates. They might argue and throw their tools at each other but they all have the same goal in mind: leveraging the power of the internet for the betterment of everyone; creating businesses that are smarter, more efficient and more fun than businesses that have gone before.

At next year’s Webstock I think we’ll see more about online communities, augmented reality applications, mobile, and the genesis of a thousand great ideas, the best of which will be turned into new businesses or campaigns or art which you’ll see and hear about in years to come.

Early-bird registrations finish on the 4th of December, and I wouldn’t miss it for the world. If you want to see where the next generation of entrepreneurs are going to take the world of business, you should be there too. Also beginning for the first time are the ONYAs, New Zealand’s independent web industry awards, sponsored by Shift. It should be a great night.

At Xero we really value the role of the not-for-profits and have always tried to support this sector. For a while now we’ve been looking for a way to formalise this commitment. Today we’re thrilled to announce a partnership with TechSoup New Zealand that meets this objective.

TechSoup NZ provides donated software from companies such as Microsoft to eligible New Zealand charities, voluntary and community groups with charitable status.

“When resources are limited keeping on top of your cashflow is paramount, says Xero CEO Rod Drury.  ”We think Xero will simplify, what up until now, has been a tedious process for the volunteers who run these organisations.”

Through our relationship with with TechSoup NZ we hope to open up the possibility of using Xero for a diverse range of not-for-profits and let them realise accounting can be easy and fun even. We’ll be offering a 25% discount on the first organisation an eligible subscriber signs up with Xero.

For the not-for-profit sector useful functions in Xero include being able to set up recurring subscriptions, produce professional reports, and track profits and losses for any part of an organisation.

If  you or you think someone you know might be interested, have a look at the TechSoup NZ website and follow the prompts for more detail about this offer and how to sign up.