A new national group of New Zealand’s leading tech experts was formed in Auckland today, because the country is facing unprecedented growth and change in tech – which is now the nation’s fastest growing sector.
Tech Leaders has been set up with the support of NZTech and is a group of passionate New Zealand tech, digital and ICT focused-executives from leading organisations that will work together, with the support of NZTech, to use their experience to help address tech related issues of national importance.
NZTech chief executive Graeme Muller says New Zealanders are seeing dramatic tech changes the likes of which have never been seen before.
“Electric car charging stations are popping up all over New Zealand and we are seeing the introduction of driverless cars and buses. A string of artificial intelligence and IoT devices are continually being introduced into our daily lives.
“With the ultimate goal of improving the prosperity of New Zealand underpinned by technology Tech Leaders will define, communicate and promote initiatives around the use of technology from their experience and perspective.
“These tech executive, from organisations such as Auckland Transport, Downer, Fonterra, Fletcher Building and Westpac, are at the coalface, driving the tech change in large New Zealand companies and organisations.“What they can see is new tech out there which will make New Zealand more efficient and businesses will benefit,” Muller says.
David Kennedy, Global Chief Information Officer of Transaction Services Group, is the first chair of Tech Leaders and he says it is up to the leaders to create a platform for the success of New Zealand today and for the future.
“To ensure international and domestic success of Kiwi businesses, it is vital we act now to consider what’s being covered in our education system. Learnings should be designed to develop global leading talent who can cope with all the opportunities and challenges of tomorrow’s world.
“Our education system needs to be producing these type of employees today. We do not have a shortage of skilled people – however, we need to be sure the education being provided is equipping people to succeed in today’s business, as well as tomorrow’s world.
“Tech Leaders is committed to delivering change to the very fabric of New Zealand. Never before has a group of the most senior tech executives got together in this way for the sole purpose of ensuring the prosperity of New Zealand.
“Tech Leaders will work together to answer the toughest questions around the impacts and opportunities of new technologies. Large firms are piloting artificial intelligence tools and fleets of vehicles will soon become driverless, potentially costing thousands of jobs.
“This is just one of the questions we should be asking… What should the government and New Zealand’s largest firms be doing to protect the livelihood of Kiwi families that rely on driving jobs for the food on their table when, not if, autonomous vehicles are widespread on New Zealand roads,” Kennedy says.
| A MakeLemonade release || September 28, 2017 |||
Statement by Reserve Bank Acting Governor Grant Spencer: The Reserve Bank today left the Official Cash Rate (OCR) unchanged at 1.75 percent. Global economic growth has continued to improve in recent quarters. However, inflation and wage outcomes remain subdued across the advanced economies and challenges remain with on-going surplus capacity. Bond yields are low, credit spreads have narrowed and equity prices are near record levels. Monetary policy is expected to remain stimulatory in the advanced economies, but less so going forward. The trade-weighted exchange rate has eased slightly since the August Statement. A lower New Zealand dollar would help to increase tradables inflation and deliver more balanced growth. GDP in the June quarter grew in line with expectations, following relative weakness in the previous two quarters. While exports recovered, construction was weaker than expected. Growth is projected to maintain its current pace going forward, supported by accommodative monetary policy, population growth, elevated terms of trade, and fiscal stimulus. House price inflation continues to moderate due to loan-to-value ratio restrictions, affordability constraints, and a tightening in credit conditions. This moderation is expected to continue, although there remains a risk of resurgence in prices given population growth and resource constraints in the construction sector. Annual CPI inflation eased in the June quarter, but remains within the target range. Headline inflation is likely to decline in coming quarters, reflecting volatility in tradables inflation. Non-tradables inflation remains moderate but is expected to increase gradually as capacity pressure increases, bringing headline inflation to the midpoint of the target range over the medium term. Longer-term inflation expectations remain well anchored at around two percent. Monetary policy will remain accommodative for a considerable period. Numerous uncertainties remain and policy may need to adjust accordingly. Note: Following the departure of Graeme Wheeler, the Reserve Bank’s policy making Governing Committee now comprises: Acting Governor Grant Spencer, Deputy Governor Geoff Bascand, and Assistant Governor John McDermott.
| A RBNZ release || September 28, 2017 |||
This morning, New Zealand-based cryptocurrency brokerage BitPrime has released a new service that now allows Kiwis to buy and sell Litecoin (LTC) and Ethereum Classic (ETC) using New Zealand Dollars. BitPrime is a full-service brokerage offering phone and email support, in addition to facilitating cryptocurrency trades. BitPrime has launched these new coins alongside the Ripple, Ethereum and Bitcoin they already stock on their site. The innovative business can also source almost any cryptocurrency from this snowballing asset-class to customers via custom orders.
Litecoin and Ethereum Classic are considered Bitcoin alternatives and they have been quickly gaining traction with investors in the cryptocurrency market. “The popularity of cryptocurrencies in NZ has been increasing rapidly, with trade volumes having grown more than eight-fold since we launched in March,” says Ross Carter-Brown, Senior Partner at BitPrime. As a testament to this, the total cryptocurrency market capitalisation is currently NZD$188 billion at the time of writing, which is an increase of 830% since August 2016.
To date, these “Bitcoin alternatives” like Litecoin, have increased 1520% over the past year with an approximate market capitalization of NZD$3.7 billion. Ethereum Classic has also grown in popularity with NZD$47 million turn-over per day. But what exactly is Litecoin and Ethereum Classic? Essentially Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Ethereum Classic are all cryptocurrencies, with some technical differences between the three.
Litecoin (LTC) was developed by the ex-Google engineer, Charles Lee. Some have said that if Bitcoin is the “gold” of crypto-currencies, Litecoin could be considered the “silver.” Litecoin boasts faster confirmation of transactions than Bitcoin, as well as a higher coin limit of 84 Million (compared to Bitcoin’s 21 Million). It has also been theorised that since Litecoin has a faster block time, this reduces the risk of “double spending” attacks (the same coin being spent twice) and therefore more secure.
On the other hand, Ethereum classic (ETC) is the original Ethereum blockchain with Ethereum (ETH) being the new fork, after the Ethereum blockchain split in 2016. Ethereum Classic (ETC) uses “Smart Contracts” which is revolutionising the business world including many industries such as insurance and real estate.
A Bitcoin success story that went viral on social media is Kristoffer Koch from Norway. Koch invested around $27 in Bitcoin in 2009 and then forgot about it for four years. He remembered about his Bitcoin wallet in 2013, which had then grown in value to $886,000.
BitPrime’s new launch has opened the markets up for Kiwi investors to buy and sell Litecoin and Ethereum, as alternatives to Bitcoin. As the demand for cryptocurrencies increases, Carter-Brown says, “we aim to make cryptocurrencies easily available to everyday New Zealanders, and expanding our offering is part of achieving that goal.”
You can contact BitPrime at www.bitprime.co.nz or 0800 4333 55 for more information about their Litecoin and Ethereum Classic launch.
| A BitPrime release || September 28, 2017 |||
Hawaiki, the new subsea cable system that will link Australia, New Zealand, and islands of the south Pacific with Hawaii and the mainland United States, reached another construction milestone. The 14,000 km of undersea fiber-optic cable is in the final stages of being loaded aboard TE SubCom’s cable-laying vessels, the CS Global Sentinel and the CS Responder. Installation of the system will commence in early October 2017.
The fiber cable was manufactured at SubCom’s Newington, New Hampshire facility, along with more than 170 completed repeaters. TE SubCom also noted that horizontal directional drilling (HDD) for the cable landing in Pacific City, Oregon and Sydney, Australia has been completed. In Sydney, the construction of the land duct route is complete, the installation of the terminal equipment has started and the pulling of the land cable is scheduled to begin shortly. In New Zealand, the construction of the land duct route is complete and the construction of a new cable station is underway.
The system is on schedule for completion by mid-2018.
The carrier-neutral Hawaiki cable system was co-developed by New Zealand-based entrepreneurs Sir Eion Edgar, Malcolm Dick and Remi Galasso.
| A Converge release || September 26, 2017 |||
Rocket Lab today announced it will fly payloads for Planet and Spire aboard its upcoming second test flight, ‘Still Testing’, from Launch Complex 1 on the Māhia Peninsula, New Zealand. Rocket Lab’s Electron orbital launch vehicle will carry two Earth-imaging Dove satellites for Planet and two Lemur-2 satellites from Spire for weather mapping and ship traffic tracking.
The flight is the second of three in Rocket Lab’s Electron test program and follows the successful inaugural Electron test flight carried out on May 25, 2017.
Peter Beck, Founder and CEO of Rocket Lab, says carrying a test payload marks a significant milestone for the Electron program, enabling Rocket Lab to gather crucial data and test systems for the deployment stage of a mission.
“We’re thrilled with Electron’s performance in the first test flight and now we’re eager to test the next crucial step – payload deployment. No major changes to the launch vehicle hardware have been required, the third-party error that meant we didn’t make orbit has been corrected and we’re focusing on the six Electron vehicles in production right now,” said Beck.
“While we’re still very much operating in a test phase and can likely expect a few scrubs during the second test flight attempt, we’re incredibly excited about carrying Planet and Spire payloads on Electron. The data these companies gather has an increasingly significant role to play in how we understand our planet and better manage it,” said Beck.
Mike Safyan, Senior Director of Launch at Planet, said: “Our companies have long shared an ethos of dreaming big and executing on that vision, so it’s only fitting that Planet is among the first payloads to fly on a Rocket Lab Electron. The Electron will be a game changer in a traditionally difficult launch market. We are excited to quite literally be riding the leading edge with Rocket Lab.”
Planet’s largest-ever network of 190 satellites collects more imagery daily than any other commercial provider, creating a completely new information feed about our world. With this comprehensive and empirical dataset, Planet uses machine learning-driven analytics to create unique insights that deliver crucial market intelligence for businesses, governments, and NGOs.
"The ability to iterate quickly and execute on an incredibly high level is core to the success of both Rocket Lab and Spire. ‘Still Testing’ is a culmination of that work into a single event,” said Peter Platzer, CEO of Spire, “and we're proud to be onboard for this inaugural deployment attempt.”
Spire, the world's first commercial weather satellite constellation, adds two satellites to an existing constellation of Lemur-2 satellites that covers every location on earth over 100 times per day. The multi-sensor satellites gather global atmospheric measurements for advanced weather warnings and predictions and track global ship traffic for multiple commercial and government applications.
The Electron vehicle for the ‘Still Testing’ flight is expected to be trucked to Rocket Lab’s Launch Complex 1 on the Māhia Peninsula, New Zealand, in October 2017, with a launch window to open in the weeks following once vehicle checks are complete.
| A RocketLab release || September 27, 2017 |||
When Autodesk announced that it would be moving some of its major software products to the cloud in 2015, a reactionary backlash began from some of the more vocal content creators who use their software on a regular basis. The transition from perpetual licenses to subscriptions was justified by the company in order to make recurring payments more predictable, to increase the rate of new users signing up and to decrease piracy by using cloud subscription verification processes.
Fastforward to today, and every CAD vendor now has plans for the cloud. We’ve seen the rise of Onshape, a CAD program that runs completely within your browser, making it an extremely powerful mobile CAD platform. Autodesk has consistently developed Fusion 360, though it is only partially cloud based, requiring a relatively sophisticated GPU and part of your workstation’s hard drive.
So, here’s question for CAD companies: Are CAD users warming up to the idea of cloud-based subscription models? After all, the concern is understandable. When your business’ vital software is moved to the cloud, you have less control over it. What can users do about it really? CAD vendors like Autodesk and Dassault Systèmes are taking more aggressive actions to segment and partition more services away from the perpetual license model to the new cloud subscription models.
Continue to read full article on engineering.com || September 27, 2017 |||
Foreign Minister Gerry Brownlee is encouraging all New Zealanders in, and travelling to Bali to register with Safe Travel.
“Indonesia’s National Disaster Management Authority has raised the volcanic alert level for Mount Agung to level four, the highest level on their scale,” Mr Brownlee says.
“Bali is a popular holiday destination for New Zealanders, and I encourage Kiwis living or travelling to Bali to register with SafeTravel.
“Registered New Zealanders will receive updated advice and information from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade in the event the situation deteriorates.
“Residents and tourists have been warned to stay at least 12 kilometres from the volcano’s crater.
“There are evacuation orders in place for those within that area due to the potential for an eruption.
“In the event of volcanic ash clouds, New Zealanders travelling to or from Bali are advised to confirm their travel arrangements with their airline or travel agent directly, prior to travelling to the airport,” Mr Brownlee says.
SafeTravel launched in 2006 and is the official source of advice for New Zealanders living or travelling overseas.
There are currently 386 New Zealanders registered as being in Bali.
You can register with SafeTravel here and for further information, view SafeTravel’s Facebook page and Mount Agung advice.
| A Beehive release || September 27, 2017 |||
Australasia’s long-established Customised operator Out-Distances competition with long-range journeys onto the Roads less Travelled
Australasian tour operator Odyssey Traveller anticipated the narrow ultra-specialised consumer requirement so evident today.
Now of course the customised preference drift has become the dominant leisure industry direction echoed so distinctly in outward and inward packaged travel everywhere.
Tailored around the knowledge-seeking experience Odyssey’s expeditionary-style tours are sharply defined around just a few time-frame durations, notably of nine and 30 days.
Focussed on the 50 plus age sector Odyssey’s concentration on the exclusivity of small travelling groups means that the operator can mould its offerings to conform to traveller preference rather than the other way around.
The Sydney-based Odyssey is owned by the Australian and New Zealand universities.
In an academic-dimension lightbulb moment a generation ago these universities conjured forth Odyssey because saw the future in adding an adventure element to what had previously been academic field trips.
In recent years Odyssey CEO Mark-Banning Taylor (pictured) has tightened up still further on this sharp destination emphasis by sending tours into regions which people have long read about, but who have never encountered anyone who has actually ever been there.
These destinations include nations such as Togo and Benin, Madagascar, and Papua New Guinea.
He has similarly sharpened his profile on inward tours by emphasising subject areas over destinations, basing them for example on studies of Australasian ethnicity, arts, flora and fauna, photography, pioneering, and so on.
In fact he has let expire the organisation’s agency arrangements in order to concentrate on Odyssey’s own inward intellectual tours.
He has similarly enhanced the perspective on Odyssey’s outward tours.
For example, with the resurgent interest in battlefield travel, those of antiquity to those of modern times, Odyssey has expanded its range of tours encompassing the Pacific theatre, North Africa and Europe.Odyssey has also nudged still further to their geographic extremities its standard tours to the Russian/Asian landmass.
Iran is a particular thrust at the moment, with departures guaranteed years ahead for these small groups.
According to Mr Banning-Taylor the objective is to implant tour members directly into the environment and its culture with the minimum of distraction.
This applies across the swathe of the tours including such mainstays as the one that “Island Hops” through Scotland’s Western Isles.
Here members will find themselves lodged in remote crofts and listening to Gaelic as part of everyday life.
A particular strength of Odyssey is considered to be its carefully selected local guides who must be local residents and accredited to a tourism authority.
Similarly the company’s tour “leaders” as they are described are drawn from those who have had a vocational, often academic, association with the region being visited.
The tour planning starting point tends to be at the learning end rather than with the destination itself.
In other words, what are party members going to acquire in a knowledge sense from their experience that they did not know before?
Observes Mr Banning-Taylor: “We ask ourselves, ‘what do people of curiosity really want to discover, see for themselves?’ “
This is a particular characteristic of the Odyssey inward tours which deliberately cater for these special fine-focus interest groups.
Aside from the obvious ones of terrain, settlement and ethnicity, we also find, for example an emphasis devolving onto governance, national character, and how these came about.
One example is a tour for those curious about Australian literature.
Here, the tour takes in visits to the homes in which the authors once lived and takes party members through the institutions and landscapes that determined their output.
This fine-slicing embraces broader gauge interests such as the tours of Australasian distinctive cuisine and wine regions that are sectored into regional specialities, terroirs and marques.
Odyssey according to Mr Banning-Taylor, seeks always to put plenty of distance between what it offers its travellers and the general Australasian tourist concept of looking at the familiar sights.
In its central Europe offering for example is one on the Hapsburgs with reference to their pioneering role in the entertainment industry as we know it today.
It turns out that this is a variant on the usual Danube type of experience insofar as it takes into account the little-understood fact that it was the Hapsburgs who liberated live entertainment and thus gave the world Mozart and Beethoven among other luminaries.Similarly a tour of Provence features this connectivity between past and present with an emphasis on the walled cities of Avignon and Carcassonne which turns out to be where the global heritage and conservation movement as we know it had its beginnings.
Odyssey’s intellectual point of embarkation features a notable sociological emphasis that some may interpret as downright serious.
For example a South American tour is one into Peru centred on the influence of women in regard to the matrilineal nature of the Inca society which was pretty much wiped out by the patriarchal Spanish colonisers.
The tour includes contemporary manifestations of the subsequent resurgence in the status of women especially in textile design and development, thus blindingly indicating the linkage between perceived economic value and civil rights.
Symbolically the expedition is capped by two nights in the middle of Lake Titicaca on Suasi Island owned by a prominent Peruvian womens activist.
In operational terms an enduring shared worry of both providers and their clients is that offered tours will in fact not take place because they are under-subscribed.
It is no consolation to would-be travellers that their deposits will be recovered should there be insufficient bookings to launch it. Time has been allocated, arrangements made.
To this end Odyssey from its long experience categorises certain tours as guaranteed.
Other tours such as the pioneering ones into the paths less travelled are cited as being dependent on a minimum number of takers, usually as low as three people.
A recent tour to see the world’s largest ever dinosaurs in Argentina is just one example “You could say that we are in a joint venture,” noted Mr Banning-Taylor
“A client seeks from us a memorable experience—it is up to us to be candid about the need to find a few others who wish to share in it.”
He summarises the Odyssey endeavour as being quite literally one of an applied taste test.
“Would your Odyssey travellers’ tales stand up at a dinner party; command some attention?
“We like to think that if you have been on an Odyssey tour, then, yes, they would.
“Our objective is taking travel quite some distance beyond sightseeing.”
Similarly Odyssey itself travels just a little bit further also in a community sense
It is known that Odyssey via its board allocates surpluses to university types via a series of cash scholarships for students across New Zealand & Australia of AUD$10,000 who demonstrate financial need and academic performance.
| From the MSCNewsWire REporters desk - travel || Monday 27 September 2017 |||
Palace of the Alhambra, Spain
By: Charles Nathaniel Worsley (1862-1923)
From the collection of Sir Heaton Rhodes
Oil on canvas - 118cm x 162cm
Valued $12,000 - $18,000
Offers invited over $9,000
Contact: Henry Newrick – (+64 ) 27 471 2242
Mount Egmont with Lake
By: John Philemon Backhouse (1845-1908)
Oil on Sea Shell - 13cm x 14cm
Valued $2,000-$3,000
Offers invited over $1,500
Contact: Henry Newrick – (+64 ) 27 471 2242