four web businesses amongst top Kiwi start-ups

To see what is hot in the e-business space right now, check out four of New Zealand’s top start-up companies for 2008 — four web businesses praised for their strong ideas and great execution.

Here’s an article explaining them, and below are links to their websites:

Bookhabit – an online book store with an innovative business model for self-publishers
Endemic world – an online design store for N ew Zealand products
Unimarket – an online (SaaS) multi-tenant eProcurement solution
Celsias – a website that helps people and organisations do practical things to combat climate change.

want to get into digital publishing?

Digital publishing – what is it about and how to get into it? Seminars in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch next month will explain all.

The Digital Publishing Forum will provide insight into what is happening internationally and in New Zealand, and guest speakers from the industry will explain what they do and how they do it.

The seminar is spookily well-timed! The newly launched e-book reader Kindle 2 (from Amazon) is getting heaps of positive press and looks set to be a huge seller, even more so than the Kindle 1. It could do for e-book sales what the iPod did for sales of online music.

E-books currently make up less than 1 percent of the total book market, so there’s tons of opportunity to get on board early in this sector and develop an innovative business model.

One company that has done this is New Zealand’s BookHabit, an online book store where writers can upload their own books to sell, and readers can download the first chapter for free.