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When I joined Sanderson Howe, one of the first things I did was set up a strategy workshop. This was more than just an excuse to do some day drinking and be creative with two brilliant and hilarious friends - we also came away with a plan for what we wanted to achieve with Sanderson Howe.

We started out the conversation with our personal goals, then talked about our vision for the business, then filled out a Business Model Canvas, to get more precise about our vision.

You have had a great idea for a business on the boil for a while now, so you think to yourself, “I really have to do something about this!” Followed closely by, “but where do I start? I don’t know the first thing about how technology really works and this idea will need a website, app or any number of other things a modern business needs these days that has to do with those fandangled devices, computers.” But you know there are people out there who dedicate their lives to understanding the inner workings of these devices, so how do you find them? And when you do, what should you look for?

BetterSaver is a personalised KiwiSaver fund recommendation website that draws from over 180 funds. It offers unbiased, expert advice and takes your ethical stance on investments into consideration - finding you the perfect fund that balances cheapest fees, best returns and making sure you know where your money has been invested.

How it works

When you sign up, you will be asked a series of questions about your goals, investing personality and ethical preferences. This information is then run through their recommendation engine to find the closest match to your personal preferences. You are free to switch when you like or continue to do more research - but once you’re ready, BetterSaver will then organise your fund to be transferred to your new provider at the tap of a button.

At Sanderson HoweR we like to keep an eye on the future. And as part of that future, we see WebAssembly as part of that landscape. As it starts to come into the mainstream, this is a series of our experiments into it.

What is WebAssembly

If you haven’t heard, here’s the TL;DR: WebAssembly is designed to execute efficiently on a variety of operating systems and instruction set architectures. Therefore, can be written using your favourite server side language and WebAssembly will run it directly in the browser alongside JavaScript.

SKYCITY is New Zealand’s largest tourism, leisure and entertainment company, running multiple casinos, restaurants, bars and conference facilities in New Zealand and Australia. In 2017, they were aware that technology was disrupting their services and that they were falling behind, so they created an innovation department called ‘the CoLab’ to help address this and keep them relevant into the future.

I joined the CoLab not long after the department was founded as an Solution Architect / Technical Director / “basically all things digital guy” - and together we discovered a treasure trove of opportunities and innovations we could bring to the company to make a serious impact.