Techblog: Innovation Subscribe to RSS Feed
Retail as a Service
Technology disrupts every sector, and none more so than retail. So what innovation is around the corner for the shoppers, merchants, suppliers and distributors? A good place to look to is China. A recent PwC report points out that China has eclipsed the US as the largest retail market in the world.
Living on the curve
It was Gordon Moore who pointed out that technological change isn't linear, it's exponential. As computer power doubles, the price for it halves and this is having a profound effect on the way we live and think, so that we are now, as Amy Fletcher put it, "living on the curve".
That's just one of the take-homes in a day of ideas at ITx, the tech industry's biannual conference, hosted by IT Professionals.
Brislen on Tech
International borders and the World Wide Web: Many years ago I received a phone call from a local pharmacy here in New Zealand. They'd been cheerfully selling goods in accordance with New Zealand law as they are a New Zealand business and were quite happy with their lot.
But then along came the internet and the opportunity to sell to people who might not want to go into a store in south Auckland (from memory) and pick goods up off the shelf.
So they set up what was quaintly called an "e-commerce shopping site" and it meant people could buy goods from them online and have them delivered. You may be familiar with the concept.
They called me because they'd received a letter from the US Food and Drug Administration telling them to stop selling goods online at once or they'd be taken to court for various unspecified crimes.
Also: The Yeah-nah Burger, and Privacy Blues
Brislen on Tech
Oh government. You really shouldn't bite off more than you can chew.
Once, big government projects were the key to a good economic recovery. Bridges, dams, roads, office blocks, saw mills, you name…
Robots stealing jobs, maybe
The latest on the "robots stealing jobs" front is that 31% of current jobs in New Zealand are at high risk of being automated - replaced by robots and overtaken by algorithms.
But is all this talk …
Dirt mapping
Soil is the skin of the earth. That poetic sentence is uttered during a video on the Manaaki Whenua Landcare Research site acknowledging the digital milestone reached by the organisation's national S-…
CIO Conference, digital disruption, the Met and OMGTech
The CIO Conference wrapped up last week in Auckland. We sent in an undercover tech head to see how it went.
Five take-homes from Fieldays
With more than 130,000 people visiting over four days, the annual Fieldays at Mystery Creek in Hamilton is billed as the largest agribusiness event in the Southern Hemisphere.
It has four pillars …
Preschoolers (tamaiti) create Samoan language apps
They may be too young to enter Tahi Rua Toru Tech - the national competition to support the new Digital Technologies & Hangarau Matihiko curriculum in schools - but pre-schoolers (tamaiti) from Tino e…
Unbundling fibre
Telecommunications is an interesting sector - a company's competitor can also be its partner and its customer. That's how you get a situation where the second and third largest players in the fixed li…
Proposed Changes to NZ’s R&D Incentives
There's an open consultation about to end, on the changes MBIE would like to make to New Zealand's R&D incentives. In particular, they'll phase out the Callaghan Growth Grants and replace them wit…
