Euroasia: Language, Culture and Travel

Christchurch girl Hayley Westenra was the lead performer at the opening of the World Games in Kaohsiung, Taiwan on Thursday last week. After a couple of her famous songs, Hayley sang the Chinese classic Yue Liang Dai Biao Wo De Xin (月亮代表我的心) to an ecstatic crowd of 40,000 at the Kaohsiung Main Stadium.

The well-loved Teresa Teng song is literally translated “The Moon represents my heart”.  This song is etched in my memory because my dad used to have this running in the cassette deck of his car all the time when I was a kid.

What was most amazing is that she made the effort to get the intonation right. Most Mandarin learners would attest this is the hardest bit. It is usually very difficult for native English speakers to to sing in Chinese because of the need to get the tones right. She would have no doubt put in countless hours to practice this one song.  And for her persistence, her album sales will go through the roof in Taiwan/China and other parts of Asia in the coming months.

Her one performance in Taiwan would have been worth millions of promotion for New Zealand tourism.  I did a quick search of Google Trends to see whether the searches of “Hayley Westenra” has in fact increased after this performance. Voila! And where do these searches come from? You guessed it. Taiwan…

google searches for hayley westenra in last 30 days

Hayley finished off with a beautiful rendition of Pokarekare Ana, telling everyone she is from New Zealand. I nominate Hayley Westenra to be on the honours list at next year’s Queen’s Birthday! It’s hard to find Kiwis who can make such an impact beyond the rugby field. And I have yet to see a single article in local newspapers celebrating this.

I was surprised to read this in the Herald week that Kiwis are ranked third fattest in the OECD. The article goes on to say:

The obesity rate among adults in New Zealand in 2007 was 26.5 per cent. This compared with figures reported the previous year by the United States at 34.3 per cent and Mexico at 30 per cent.

“Given the time lag between the onset of obesity and related health problems (such as diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and asthma), the growing prevalence of obesity in most OECD countries, including New Zealand, may well lead to higher healthcare costs in the future,” the report said.

The Green Party’s health spokeswoman, Sue Kedgley, said the OECD report “highlights the stupidity of the Government’s move to slash funding for public health initiatives aimed at preventing obesity”.

The article goes on to list a number of initiatives that the government has cut in this year’s budget.

I decided to look further into this as I just couldn’t believe that we given how healthy and fit ordinary Kiwis are, that the obesity rate would be so high. The majority of Kiwis I know are active and outdoorsy.

Anyway, I stumbled upon this Ministry of Social Development report which breaks down obesity levels by age and ethnicity.

I think this chart paints the picture well:

The 2008 Social Report concludes:

There are large differences in the prevalence of obesity by ethnicity. Among the population aged 15 years and over in 2006/2007, Pacific peoples (65 percent) and Māori (43 percent) had significantly higher age-standardised obesity rates than the total population in this age group, while Asians (12 percent) had a significantly lower rate.

This is shocking. Two-thirds of Pacific Islanders obese! Islanders are 3 times more likely than the average Kiwi and more than 5 times more likely than an Asian to be obese. Almost half of Maori are obese.

The obesity rate of European/Other was (23 percent). For Māori, there was no significant change from 1997 to 2006/2007 in the prevalence of obesity, adjusted for age, either for men or for women. Between 2002/2003 and 2006/2007, only Asians had a statistically significant increase in obesity.

And why the heck are Asians getting fatter? Although “only” 12% of Asians are obese (half the national average), this has doubled in the last decade. I wonder why the Herald didn’t cover this angle. I’m sure like me, most Kiwis won’t believe that as a nation, New Zealand is so high up the “fatty rankings”. Could it be that it’s not very PC to say that a small number of people skew the rankings dramatically?

That reminds me, I haven’t gone to the gym for a week…

This is an awesome video…viral ad from a Russian language school. Hit me baby one more time!

I wrote an entry on Xero vs MYOB 3 months ago explaining why our business changed over to Xero, which brought heaps of traffic to the Euroasia blog. Perhaps it had something to do with Computerworld linking to us…

In this entry, I will discuss our experience with Xero over the last few months, and some of the improvements that could be made to the system to make it work better for SMEs. I googled Xero reviews prior to implementing the system, and found that the reviews out there are invariably written by computer geeks, who by and large were mesmerised with the interface/design as well as how solid the systems architecture is.  As for me, I’m only interested in using the system to keep track of key business measures and how much time our organisation saves on accounting tasks.

It doesn’t matter how sophisticated or cool the system is, as long as it generates superior ROI, it’s all that matters. I won’t go into the details as to why Xero is better than MYOB, as that has been covered already.

I’m biased. I prefer to operate in the clouds, and if possible do all my work within the browser. This is a key reason why Xero appealed to me. Upon deciding to go with Xero, I hired Penny Smith from Penny’s Worth to help with the implementation.  The implementation was straightforward, and Penny gave me some key instructions on getting the opening entries  right so that the balance sheet is aligned. In fact, you can set up an adviser to access your system remotely, without having to pay for them to come to your office. Another key advantage of using Xero.  Penny can get it all set up for you remotely.  I met her at a Xero function a year ago, when Hamish Carter talked about the virtues of Xero. It’s a smart move for Xero to have Hamish Carter on-board, as he’s funny, and not a beanie or a geek. I recall the businesspeople in the room seemed to like his style, a welcome departure from the overly technical approach of the usual accountants or programmers.

So far, Xero has worked really well. In terms of measurements of key metrics, I think the dashboard is pretty good. It gives you a bird’s eye view of your financial standing, updated every day by automatic feeds that comes through from our bank. My advice is that you should get the bank feed set up first, as it takes about 2 weeks to get this approved. Once the bank feeds start coming through, reconciliation is easy.

The reports are excellent. You can customise what you want, and basically come up with professional-looking management accounts that in the past you would have to pay an accountant hundreds of dollars a month to produce. You can also access your reports anytime, whereas if you’re reliant on someone else producing reports, you won’t be looking at data in a timely manner. This is especially critical in recessionary times, when managers are spending more time looking at key metrics on a regular basis.

Businesses spend a lot of time monitoring debtors, which is why I’m glad to see that the debtors interface is really good. You can even specify expected payment date (which is often after the invoice due date) and make notes on when customers are expected to pay. You can also keep a log of calls made to keep better track of debtors. Specifying an expected payment date is a good business discipline, because it forces you to think about cashflow as opposed to just billings. The more time businesspeople spend on ensuring the debtors are up to date, the more accurate the cashflow projections and more importantly, this translates into real cashflow.

I also like the fact that Xero is pretty responsive. Don’t forget that the monthly fee of $49 + GST includes customer support, and from my experience they have been pretty good with responding to my few support requests. They have also recently introduced multi-currency, which is a great feature.

2 weeks ago, Xero went down for about an hour. Of course, it is a business nightmare to have the accounting system go down. One of the reasons I said I liked Xero is because it’s reliable. NBR said that “One of the drawbacks of cloud computing was dramatically illustrated…” by this outage. Did I change my mind because of this problem? No. For the simple reason that the same thing could also happen to MYOB. If our server failed, we would also lose MYOB, and would have to spend time manually restoring an old version, and pray and hope that we remembered to back up before the server died. All up, I’m sure it would take more than an hour to get everything up and running. I’m confident that on balance, we’re much better off having our data hosted by Xero than on one of our desktops.

However, our Xero implementation wasn’t without hitches. We had some dramas at the end of the 1-month trial period.  I forgot to confirm payment details prior to the end of the trial period, and as I was away when the trial period ended, I received some frantic messages from a colleague who couldn’t access the system to raise an important invoice that had to go out ASAP.  If you intend to stick with Xero after the trial, do get your credit card payments set up beforehand. I thought Xero could have sent reminder emails in the days leading up to trial expiry so that users can get it all set up should they wish to continue with Xero and not just cut off access abruptly.

On that note, I will talk about the things than Xero can improve on.

A major problem for companies that employ staff with different functions is that you need to be able to specify user permissions so that staff members with different roles can access different parts of Xero.  In our case, we need to give access to a customer-facing employee so that he can raise  invoices, approve them and send them out to clients. However, this person doesn’t need to have access to bank reconciliations or details of all financial reports. At the moment, there are basically 2 key access levels. “Employee” can only raise drafts of invoices, which have to be approved by a higher-level “Standard” user. “Standard” can do pretty much everything including bank recs, editing settings, accessing financial reports, except to publish reports, which can only be done by the “Financial Adviser”. I asked Xero today when they plan to allow customisation of permissions. They replied promptly: “We are certainly looking to provide more options in terms of user permissions, particularly the employee role.  We are yet to schedule this development.” This is not a feature that one-man bands require, but certainly if Xero wants to target companies with staff in different functions, then it’s pretty critical. Otherwise managers will have to waste time approving invoices, letting staff know through an email and the staff member will have to login again to send the invoice out. Very inefficient way of doing things. At least MYOB allows you to customise every conceivable permutation of user permissions.

The other problem we have is that we can’t specify the name of a contact person for a company. In the name field, all you can do is to enter the name of the company. But often invoices are addressed to specific people within the company. We should be able to specify the name of the invoice recipient.

You see a snapshot of activity over recent months when you click on a contact, which is useful. But what would be great is a “news feed” of notes and other activities for that client. eg. when you sent invoices to that client.

There are numerous other things that Xero can do, which would be useful for SMEs. But this post is long enough as it is…

On an overall basis, Xero is a great system, with the pros outweighing the cons, and I would definitely recommend this product over MYOB (or for that matter any system that locks you to a desktop) any day. And the best part is they keep improving the product, so it can only get better, which is why the value proposition can only get more compelling for users.

Last year, in response to my question “Is there any reason why we shouldn’t switch to Xero?”, my accounts assistant responded “well, you’re stuck if they decide to up prices”. On that note, I hope Xero sticks to current pricing and do not squeeze us clients simply because they know how inherently sticky these systems are.

[UPDATE 12 October 09: MYOB vs Xero 6 months post-implementation]

This Thursday, take an art (de)tour before Euroasia’s free language taster lessons at our Parnell centre.  Starting in July, on the second Thursday of each month Parnell galleries will be serving up a tempting smorgasbord of New Zealand art and live music.

For the first Late Night Art, on 9 July, Parnell has arranged for popular crooner Grant Chilcott singing outside International Art Gallery, Charles Dolbel playing with fire (literally!) outside Jonathan Grant & ARTIS Galleries, and The Margarita Club, featuring gorgeous vocals from Alannah Peterson, playing in the courtyard between Sanderson Contemporary Art and Aesthete galleries.

Galleries open until 7.30pm:
Aesthete Gallery, ARTIS Gallery, essenze, International Art Centre,
Jonathan Grant Galleries, Pankhurst Studio Gallery, Parnell Gallery, Sanderson Contemporary Art, Sarah Alexandra Tills Gallery (Bath St).

Also on Thursday August 13, September 10, October 8, November 12 and December 10

Free language lessons at Euroasia Parnell, for you to learn how to properly pronounce the names of those foreign artists, wines, cheese etc:

Tuesday 7 July: French, Japanese, German
Thursday 9 July: Spanish, Mandarin, Korean, Italian
Time: 7.40-8.40pm
Venue: Euroasia, 10 Titoki Street, Parnell (next to Birthcare) – plenty of free parking at Auckland Domain or along Titoki Street.

The French language is certainly one of the most popular languages that Kiwis learn. Here are some reasons why you should consider learning French:
• Together with English and Spanish, French is one of the most international of European languages, spoken in all the continents of the world.
• French was for centuries the international language of diplomacy and culture; it’s still important in those fields.
• The French-speaking world has contributed an enormous number of great artists, writers, philosophers and scientists.
• France has a large economy with a huge international presence.
• French cuisine is world-renowned, and French is still the international language of cooking, so at least a smattering of the French language is useful for chefs and food enthusiasts.
• Young Kiwis can go and work in France, Belgium or Canada for one year under a working holiday scheme.
• If France seems a long way off, New Caledonia and French Polynesia are more accessible holiday destinations. Even a limited knowledge of the French language can enrich and enliven your tropical holiday.
• Much like speakers of English, French speakers tend not to be very enthusiastic about speaking other languages. There is no guarantee you will find someone prepared to speak to you in English!

You can learn French and other languages at award-winning Euroasia Language Academy. Over 2500 Aucklanders have attended one of our courses. Come check out our free taster lessons next week.

I had a quick look at the itunes panel as I synced my phone to the laptop. Scrolling through the list of the Top 15 albums, songs, videos etc, everywhere I looked it was Michael Jackson.

MJ songs on itunes

In this screen shot of the top 15 music videos sold on itunes, all bar one were Michael Jackson songs.

In the early 1980s, he became a dominant figure in popular music and the first African American entertainer to amass a strong crossover following on MTV. The popularity of his music videos airing on MTV, such as “Beat It“, “Billie Jean” and “Thriller“ — widely credited with transforming the music video from a promotional tool into an art form — helped bring the relatively new channel to fame. (Source: Wikipedia)

One of the music icons of our time has now passed on. I remember vividly those MJ music videos. The controversy aside, Michael Jackson made HIStory.  He captivated an entire generation, across cultural and national boundaries.

He showed us that it don’t matter if you’re black or white.