Feb 19, 2018  -  Spark Digital chief executive Jolie Hodson, who is speaking to the international Digital Nations summit in Auckland starting today, has painted a picture of dramatic tech changes in New Zealand over the next 12 years.

Feb 19, 2018  -  Brake, the road safety charity has announced the details of its fourth annual Australasian Fleet Safety Awards. The charity is inviting awards entries from fleet operators and suppliers working to reduce the number of road crashes involving at-work drivers. The deadline for entering is Friday 15 June 2018 and the winners will be announced on Thursday 11 October at a reception in Auckland.

Feb 19, 2018   -The need for countries to embrace and successfully transition to fully digital economies is undeniable and pressing.  Callaghan Innovation executives will be driving the conversation at the Digital Nations 2030 conference, where local and international leaders will challenge current thinking about what our digital future looks like and how we get there.

Feb 19, 2018  -  As the nation considers how New Zealand will look as a digital society in 2030, Kiwis need to take a moment to look back the equivalent period of the last 13 years, a prominent tech expert says.

In 2005 there was no Uber, Tesla, Airbnb, WeChat, WhatsApp, Viber, Tinder or even a first iteration of the iPhone, many transformational technologies that now enhance our lives that we take for granted, says Leigh Flounders, a New Zealand chief executive award winner last year. In 2005 for financial services, we Kiwis paid exorbitant fees for foreign exchange, were required to go into a branch to open an account, provide two types of ID to take out an overdraft, used cards rather than mobiles to pay for stuff, and had to speak to someone if there was a bank error. In 2018… well in the New Zealand financial sector not much has changed, NZTech board member Leigh Flounders says. He is speaking at the international Digital Nations Summit in Auckland which opened today. The event has attracted 500 tech and business leaders, including 200 from overseas, and has been organised by NZTech and Conferenz.

“Technology has transformed many industries but much of the basic infrastructure we use as a society has changed little. Think how clunky RealMe is, the New Zealand government’s single sign-in (forgot your password again?) “In fact, for financial services change is glacial, the first online cheque account was created in 1995 by Wells Fargo, the first mobile payment was made by Text massage to a Coca Cola vending machine in 1997 and Google Wallet was actually first released in 2011. “But from an aspirational perspective change is coming, and its coming faster than ever, with New Zealand ready to make giant leaps in the coming years in AI, AR, food science, autonomous vehicles and green technology. “New Zealand, along with tech superstar Dubai, has being named in the top 10 countries in the world poised to move to driverless cars, according to KPMG’s Autonomous Vehicles Readiness Index.

“The Dubai autonomous transport strategy aims for a quarter of the cars on roads to become driverless by 2030, so one can only assume that the New Zealand Transport Agency has concrete plans to match this audacious and futuristic goal.

“One area of excitement for me is the stratospheric goals of some Kiwi businesses in green technology processing power, think GPU server farms using renewable energy and providing load balancing benefits to the New Zealand electricity industry whilst supplying processing power to international AI projects. “Or how about vertical farming for our cities following the global trend. Money, from the likes of Japan’s top tier SoftBank Vision Fund, is pouring into this market. “Growing hydroponic vegetables in 10 storey buildings on the edge of the city with no insecticides, or logistical issues associated with traditional farms. In the US it can take up to a week to get that lettuce to the supermarket alone. “Then couple that with meat-free look and taste alike products such as New Zealand based SunFed meats bringing disruption to the New Zealand farming industry and globally to the $US90 billion meat market. One thing that looks extremely likely is that New Zealand has a genuine opportunity to be at least partially meat-free by 2030 whilst consuming a wide array of vegetables “farmed” by innovative, ecologically friendly technology businesses.”

Flounders says the future is bright for many industries as technology transforms the landscape of New Zealand society. For financial services he looks forward to ubiquitous mobile payments hopefully around the corner and at the very least not having to call up an 0800 number when the bank makes a mistake.

|| A makeLemonade release  ||   February 19, 2018   |||

Feb 16, 2018  - 49 outstanding individuals have been awarded 2018 MITO scholarships to help further their careers.  Contributing funding towards apprenticeships, training programmes and business skills qualifications, the MITO scholarship programme assists aspiring and successful graduate learners to progress their skills and knowledge.

Feb 16, 2018  - Five months after it was requested under the Official Information Act, Callaghan Innovation has now released its 2016/17 entertainment expenses.  The bill increased from the previous year, going from $304,675 to $308,969.

Feb 16, 2018  -  Revenue Minister Stuart Nash has confirmed the bright-line test on residential property sales will be extended from two years to five years in legislation currently making its way through Parliament.

Feb 15, 2018  - The Government’s decision to rule-out funding for embattled company Fletcher Building is a refreshing change from years of corporate welfare and a bad habit of taxpayers’ money being used to bailout private businesses, says the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union. Taxpayers’ Union Executive Director, Jordan Williams, says “The previous Government used our money to bail out Solid Energy, Rio Tinto, and even Mediaworks. It’s great news for taxpayers that the new Government is starting their term by refusing to continue that policy.” “Company bailouts are socialism for the rich. Shareholders don’t have to face any risk for their investment and the average taxpayer ends up footing the bill.” “Sometimes taxpayer groups are accused of always being negative. Here we want to applaud David Parker and his Government for making the principled, moral, and right decision.” | A taxpayers Union release  ||  February 15, 2018   |||

Feb 15, 2018  -  Distinguished Professor Mike Steel has been elected as a distinguished Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB). Dist Prof Steel’s main research focus is phylogenetics, which uses mathematics to come up with better ways of reconstructing evolutionary relationships between species based on genetic data. His research interests are applications of discrete mathematics (combinatorics, graph theory) and probability theory to contemporary problems in biology. Dist Prof Steel’s citation is for “outstanding contributions to mathematical and computational phylogenetics, and for service to the academic evolutionary biology research community." The ISCB is a large international body that runs leading bioinformatics conferences and is active in mainstream journals such as Bioinformatics. Fellowships are awarded for “outstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics”. Since 2010, only around eight people have been elected each year, based on nominations by ISCB members and peer review. With nearly all ISCB Fellows based in North America, Europe or Asia, Dist Prof Steel appears to be the first New Zealander to receive this award and possibly the first Fellow elected from the Southern Hemisphere. He will be part of the ISCB fellow class that increases now to 67 members. Dist Prof Steel, who won the 2014 UC Research Medal for leading work in phylogenetics and in autocatalytic networks, is director of the Biomathematics Research Centre hosted within UC’s Department of Mathematics and Statistics and is a Fellow of the Royal Society Te Apārangi.

He will be recognised for his contributions to computational biology and bioinformatics at the ISCB’s annual international conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) in Chicago, Illinois, 6-8 July, 2018.

| A University of Canterbury release  ||  February 15, 2018   |||

Feb 14, 2018  -  The construction union, E tū says it is working to clarify the effect of Fletcher Building and Interiors’ huge loss on its members at Fletchers.

“We’re still coming to terms with the fact that the country’s biggest building company is no longer bidding for new commercial projects, which is just extraordinary,” says Ron Angel, E tū’s Industry Coordinator for Engineering and Infrastructure.

“We’re trying to find out what happens next, but we will have members affected by this – though it’s currently unclear how many,” he says.

Ron says union organisers had visited Fletcher sites in Christchurch this morning, where members had been told to expect closure once work is finished on company projects including the city’s Justice and Emergency Services Precinct.

“Our immediate focus is to protect our members’ interests. We hope if there are redundancies our members can be redeployed in other Fletcher divisions. Some will be entitled to redundancy pay, but others won’t,” says Ron.

Ron says E tū has also spoken with members about the factors behind the near-billion dollar losses.

“In part, this is a result of too many people in head office doing the paperwork and pushing up overheads, and too few people on the ground doing the work,” says Ron.

He says a lack of experience in project management also meant a lot of mistakes, especially on the Justice precinct project.

“Our members have told us that 50 percent of that project was built twice.

“The workers say they’d put stuff up and a week later they’d be pulling it down again because the design changed or there were design faults, cracked tiles and the like. And there was too little supervision, with no one taking responsibility for the quality of the work.”

Poor cost control had also been flagged by the division’s Chair, Sir Ralph Norris, who has resigned.

Ron says Fletchers’ losses are “a salutary indictment of the sub-contracting model which is killing the construction industry in New Zealand.

“It means Fletchers has been unable to control costs and quality on these big projects and the result is just gobsmacking.”

| An E tū release  ||  February 14, 2018   |||