There were protests, but not on the scale expected. In the social media space, the Bernie Sanders meme did the rounds and people had fun with their renditions of Donald Trump's letter to the incoming president. The online counterterrorism team deployed by our own Department of Internal Affairs ahead of the inauguration to monitor online activity had seemingly little to do.

Maybe that had to do with the removal of Trump from Twitter and Facebook, denying him direct access to his millions of followers. Maybe the discussion has taken on darker tones away from public view, in private groups on Signal and Parler.

Whatever the case, a sense of calm relief seemed to engulf the US this week as Biden began signing the stack of executive orders on his desk, undoing in a few pen strokes, many of Trump's signature policies.

What will Biden do in the coming months and years about Big Tech? It isn't entirely clear on where he stands on issues such as anti-trust action, social media responsibility, net neutrality and online privacy.

The anti-trust momentum will grow as lawsuits from federal and state agencies against Google and Facebook progress but the extent to which Biden, who has plenty of Silicon Valley supporters, throws his weight behind efforts to break up the tech giants, is yet to be seen. More likely, he will focus on reform of the "Section 230" legislation that gives Facebook and other platforms protection from liability for the content they distribute.

"It is propagating falsehoods they know to be false, and we should be setting standards not unlike the Europeans are doing relative to privacy," Biden said last year. Whatever the case, with the Capitol riot and the online activity that helped incite it still fresh in the minds of the politicians who lived through it, Democrat-led action on many of these matters is likely to kick off in earnest soon.

Bernie is everywhere following the inauguration - source Twitter

Vodafone retires TBox

Vodafone will, in a few months, ditch the TBox cable TV service for its 6,500 customers in Wellington and Christchurch, replacing it with Vodafone TV. In a way, it's the end of an era.

When Kiwi Cable began laying hybrid fibre cables on the Kapiti Coast in the late 1990s, it was the start of an audacious plan to replicate the cable TV services on offer in the US.

The small company laid hybrid fibre-coaxial cables around Kapiti and later in parts of Wellington with a view to offering a pay-TV alternative to Sky TV before running out of funding. The venture morphed into Saturn, then TelstraSaturn under the leadership of gung-ho CEO Jack Matthews. 

Telecom still dominated the home broadband market with dial-up and early digital subscriber line (DSL) connections with Clear Communications and a handful of tiny players nibbling at the edges. So the prospect of a rival offering pay-TV and internet services over the same connection was a compelling one.

TelstraSaturn pushed on with the same grand plan, winning the right to run overhead cables in certain suburbs where it was too expensive to go underground and as the company became TelstraClear, it expanded the cable network to Christchurch.

But the dream of building out a state-of-the-art cable network to rival the copper line network controlled by Telecom wasn't to be realised. In 2002, I broke the story on the front page of the New Zealand Herald about TelstraClear ditching its plans to go into the satellite TV market. That would have given it national coverage and the ability to offer a bundled service in opposition to Telecom and Sky TV. 

It was the start of the winding back of ambitions for a second national "triple play" challenger in the market offering broadband, phone and pay-TV services on an alternative network. It would be nearly a decade before the unbundling of the local loop and the emergence of the plan to build the ultrafast broadband network, which required billions of taxpayer dollars in investment. Those moves led to the highly competitive telco market we have today.

With its acquisition of TelstraClear, Vodafone retained the cable network and the T-Box service, which still retains technical elements dating back around 20 years. Moving customers to Vodafone TV makes sense. It's a great service - I recently ditched my Sky decoder in favour of the small Vodafone TV box because the user interface and remote control are better and I can remove a big box from my TV cabinet and the Sky dish from my roof.

Vodafone says most customers will be able to install the free Vodafone TV box themselves, which I think is a realistic claim, having done so recently. It will send around a technician for those who run into trouble. 

Pay per stream

2021 started with news that musicians from Bob Dylan to the members of Fleetwood Mac had sold their song publishing rights, in Dylan's case, for an estimated US$300 million.

Why would these legendary artists cut off the ability to keep earning royalties from their music for years to come? Yes, many of them are now in their seventies and in need of a retirement windfall. With Covid seeing concerts cancelled everywhere, a lucrative income source has also dried up, at least temporarily.

But a key reason cited is that digital streaming, now the main way in which people consume music, isn't particularly lucrative for artists. While companies buying up the publishing rights clearly see opportunities to profit from them, that's more likely to involve licensing music for advertising and film and TV as well as vinyl box set sales.

Recording artists are asking for a more equitable share of streaming music revenue in submissions to the British parliament's Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) committee which is undertaking an inquiry into the economics of music streaming.

The submissions reveal the root of the problem - the vastly complex nature of music publishing and rights and the lack of transparency into the economic workings of digital streaming platforms like Youtube, Spotify and Apple Music.

Watching from the sidelines, eighties electronic music pioneer Gary Numan revealed his own streaming finances - for one of his popular songs which was streamed one million times, he received the princely sum of 37 pounds.

The Broken Record campaign, which is representing artists during the hearings, claims that artists receive around 16 per cent of the total income from streams. Recording companies get around 41 per cent and streaming services around 29 per cent. They want a bigger share for artists.

Streaming platforms and record labels, for their part, say they are investing heavily in promoting digital music, which led to an eight per cent rise in the number of albums, or album equivalents, streamed or sold last year in the UK alone.

That doesn't mean much to artists who are only racking up hundreds of thousands of streams - they'll never make a living form streaming revenue. The answer may be to borrow the more generous models from the use of music by radio stations. But that will face fierce resistance from the digital platform. 

Streaming has become my go-to way of accessing music - I even threw out all of my CDs years ago. It is fantastic getting access to tens of millions of tracks for 15 bucks a month. But clearly, there are structural issues in the music industry that need addressing. 

The written submissions to the UK Parliament reveal the complexity of the issue. Britain's parliamentarians now have the chance to propose more equitable and sustainable ways to keep the music alive.

President Trump's de-platforming from Twitter and Facebook earlier this month, in the wake of the January 6 Capitol riots, prematurely snatched away the bullhorn that helped spread that toxicity.

Now politicians around the world are grappling with how to facilitate more sustainable solutions to the spread of disinformation, hate speech and violence on social media platforms.

Across the Tasman, over 50 MPs from across the political spectrum have formed the Parliamentary Friends of Making Social Media Safe, which is a non-partisan group that will look at ways social media platforms can be held more responsible for the content that they publish and disseminate.

Parliamentary friendship groups are nothing new in Australian politics - they have existed for everything from basketball to gun control. But they serve to focus politicians on discussing issues that may lead to policy outcomes. As such, the forum is a step ahead of anything New Zealand politicians have done to consider the many issues recent events on the largest social media platforms have thrown up. 

The permanent suspension of Trump was a trigger point for the group's formation, but so too was an event closer to home - a tweet sent out by China's foreign ministry spokesman that showed a doctored image of an Australian SAS soldier slitting the throat of an Afghan child draped in an Australian flag.

A lack of consistency, transparency

The parliamentary friendship group is led by Labor MP Sharon Clayton and Nationals MP Anne Webster. One of the MP's joining the group is Australia's science minister Karen Andrews, who has spoken out against the use of social media platforms to spread pseudoscience about the Covid-19 pandemic.

"There have been many instances of comments that have been taken down from various platforms, but yet in some instances, these platforms are very quick to act when it seems as if the subject content is something that they don't personally agree with," she said last week. 

"That is unfair, it is inconsistent, and it lacks the transparency that we are looking for."

Webster for her part has been on the sharp end of a targeted online campaign. She won a defamation case against a conspiracy theorist who accused her of being "a member of a secretive paedophile network".

Former Opposition Leader Bill Shorten said the internet had become a magnet for "idiots and conspiracists" allowing lies and disinformation to spread.

Others in the group are noted advocates of free speech, so getting agreement on policy measures that serve to make social media a safer environment while preserving existing rights will be easier said than done. 

But moves are already afoot in Australia to change the regulatory landscape governing social media. Just before Christmas, Australia's communications minister, cyber safety and the arts, Paul Fletcher, released a draft online safety bill proposing to give the e-safety commissioner powers to order the take-down of harmful content.

Blocks and fines

It would require Australian internet service providers, social media companies and other online platforms to remove severely harmful, abusive or bullying content within 24 hours or risk being blocked and fined A$555,000. The Australian Government is taking submissions on that draft bill through to February 14.

Defining what exactly is severely harmful, abusive or bullying content and how exactly the eSafety Commissioner would step in to force the likes of Twitter and Facebook to remove content or block accounts is still to be worked through.

But one thing is for sure, Australia goes into 2021 with a far more proactive approach to cleaning up the social media space than New Zealand does. 

That is because the majority of us connect to our home broadband connection via a Wi-fi router, enjoying the convenience of having our devices untethered from the wall but constantly connected to the internet.

The vast range of hardware configurations, quirks of home design and size of our dwellings means Wi-fi network performance varies widely between broadband customers. It's for that reason that Vodafone this week introduced SuperWifi, a free offer to equip new and existing residential broadband customers on its Unlimited Broadband and Wireless Broadband 600GB plans with two mesh wifi devices to improve network connectivity in the home. 

Vodafone is so confident that the two DecoX20 devices set-up from networking hardware maker TP-Link will provide "wall-to-wall in-home Wi-fi coverage" that it is offering a $100 credit if it doesn't live up to that claim. The pair of devices would cost around $450 to buy from an electronics retailer.

Poor Wi-fi isn't just frustrating for broadband customers. It is a thorn in the side of internet providers who often face criticism for perceived poor service, when the real reason is beyond their control. As such, Vodafone's investment in SuperWifi is an effort to cut down on helpdesk queries and is in line with the company's recent push to improve its patchy track record on customer service.

The two Wi-Fi 6 compatible mesh devices resemble the Google Nest Wi-fi device that internet provider Orcon has been offering new customers of fibre plans. That package includes one mesh unit, while additional units can be rented for $5 per month.

The DecoX20 supplying my lounge with Wi-fi

Mesh is the way

Vodafone's provision of two mesh devices is attractive in comparison and set-up takes about 15 minutes, a similar amount of time to Google Nest Wi-fi installation. The two units replaced a Google Wi-fi network in my Wellington apartment offering comparable network performance. 

If the TP-Link devices have an edge, it is in the antivirus, parental controls and quality of service features built into the network and accessible from the Deco app that you use to set up the network.

Vodafone's chief consumer officer, Carolyn Luey, said that increased demand for reliable Wi-fi in the home as a result of increased remote working and stay at home orders of 2020, was behind the SuperWifi offer.

"Thick walls, building materials such as concrete and ceramic tiling, other electronic and wireless devices, mirrors and even the neighbours' networks can cause problems with Wi-Fi in the home," she said.

That's certainly true of my 86 sqm apartment, where a concrete-lined lift shaft created Wi-fi dead zones in my apartment when I relied solely on my top of the line Netgear router. The set of three Google Wifi mesh devices solved that problem. They work by creating a dedicated network within the apartment, sending traffic between each other to improve the signal coverage. 

Wall to wall guarantee

The TP-Link set-up appears to do the same job with a pair of devices. Vodafone suggests two DecoX20 devices are suitable for a "standard 1-3 bedroom home" but will send out a third device if a Vodafone technician deems it necessary.

With many Kiwis living in larger and more complex homes with sleep-outs, loft offices and garage workshops, it is yet to be seen how Vodafone's wall to wall coverage guarantee stacks up. Vodafone is undertaking to work with a customer for up to 30 days offering remote support, an additional mesh device and even a visit from a technician if required. If all else fails, the $100 credit will apply.

I can attest to the satisfaction of not having to worry about Wi-fi dead zones - having to stay in certain rooms to get a decent signal or seeing streaming video services buffering when the Wi-fi signal drops out. SuperWifi has the potential to improve the customer experience for broadband users on those Vodafone plans - and reinforces the virtues of investing in mesh Wi-fi devices for those on lower-tier plans and signed up with rival ISPs.

SuperWifi is available on a 12-month term. Fees apply if you cancel or transfer your plan or billing account within 24 months.

Find out more information about Vodafone's SuperWifi.

We don't generally comment much on these sorts of things for 2 reasons. Firstly, ITP is a broad church and it's outside the areas that we - as an organisation - generally take a position on. Secondly, TechBlog's editor Paul Brislen usually covers this pretty well!

But there's a hugely important principle at stake and I think our community, as the largest tech community in New Zealand, should be thinking about all of this very carefully.

Let's start by thinking about three fundamental questions:

1. What is the Internet?
2. Who owns it?
3. Who is responsible for regulating it?

At this point our Network Admins might start talking about networks and routers and root DNS servers etc etc etc, and that's certainly true from a technical or structural perspective. But the reality is, the Internet is more than this; in fact, no person, company, or government owns the Internet; As one website puts it, it's owned by humanity itself.

But increasingly, what geeks like us think of as "the Internet" differs from what the public - especially the younger public who never saw that side - think of it as. 

Some of us see ones and zeroes, some see infrastructure, and some see immense possibility - both commercially and socially. But for many (most?) people, the Internet means Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter and Google. And maybe Netflix and a few others as well.

In short, the mindset has shifted as Internet access has become commoditised - just like we think of Electricity as the stuff that makes our devices and lights work (rather than the vast network of electricity generation and distribution), the Internet - for most people - has become what we do with it. And a huge part of that is on social media networks.

Now, if we accept that at least some regulation of "the Internet" is necessary to prevent the worst of humanity creating victims online, just as we expect Society's behaviour to be regulated to prevent people becoming victims offline, whose job is it to do so?

Putting aside some very significant jurisdictional challenges*, the answer has to be exactly the same as the offline world: the Government, via legally-formed laws and regulations.

Which raises a fairly crucial and fundamental conundrum.

Once a particular "service" such as Facebook has reached the point where it's basically part of the fabric of the Internet - and by extension, Society itself - as many of the services above have done, who is responsible for regulation of content?

To put it another way, we don't expect the power company to regulate what we do with electricity. We also don't expect "products and services" that use electricity to regulate our use - it would be daft to expect either the power company or heat-lamp providers, for example, to detect or prevent an individual setting up an illegal growing operation in their basement - or to cut off electricity because of it.

And it would certainly be daft for power companies or lines companies to start making up their own rules about what you can do with their power - over and above what's illegal or unsafe - and take action if you breach those rules. Quite rightly, there'd be a huge outcry.

Yet this is exactly what's happening more and more with "the Internet".

Let's take illegality out of the equation and accept that - arguably - mainstream social media and other companies have some sort of obligation to at least attempt to block illegal content.

It's not unreasonable to conclude that it's for the Government to regulate to the extent that content or behaviour is illegal regardless of whether it's online or offline. Unless you're an anarchist, that's a reasonable position to take and it's not too big a jump to then expect providers to have a role in preventing the publishing of content that is clearly illegal.

Some will argue with that, but let's put that aside for a moment and think about immoral, outrageous, offensive or unpopular - but not illegal - content.

Increasingly - and especially over the last few weeks since the brief occupation of the US Capitol building - social media companies like Twitter and Facebook have appointed themselves judge, jury and executioner on what content is acceptable on their platforms - both in "public" and "private" groups - and taken action against hundreds of thousands of people who have expressed views that differ from what they see as acceptable.

And there's that conundrum.

On one hand, it's their network so their rules. On the other, these companies have grown to the point that they're now a core part of the Internet itself - and their actions have a significant impact on everyone. They're now in a position to - and arguably do - shape public opinion by either shadow- or outright- banning views they don't approve of. 

Given the scale of these services, this means it's now up to a very small group of extremely rich and powerful unelected men (mostly) to decide what is acceptable speech and content for Society as a whole, above and beyond that deemed in law.

Surely we all have to agree that that's a problem.

And we're not just talking about speech. For example, these services have the proven ability to massively influence election outcomes and much more. At the other end of the spectrum, their algorithms can actively push content to you that research [pdf] suggests doesn't just shape opinion, but that can fully radicalise large groups of people. 

So what's the answer?

It surely has to be recognising that once a "service" reaches a large enough scale, their obligation has to at least partially expand from just their shareholders to society as a whole. And looked at in this context, you could certainly argue that this might include obligations around not censoring content and users except where content is explicitly illegal - as doing so infringes their right to free speech (remember, we're thinking societal obligations here).

Secondly, as with every other facet of life, surely it should be solely up to Governments to deem what is illegal when it comes to speech and content.

Facebook especially has been calling for Governments to step up and devise rules around harmful content, a different model for platforms' legal liability and a "new type of regulator" to oversee enforcement. But so far, many Governments have shirked this responsibility in a way they never would in the offline world.

New Zealand, on the other hand, has been fairly proactive in this area and already has specific laws regarding harmful content online - primarily The Harmful Digital Communications Act 2015 - complete with 10 communications principles and an Approved Agency (Netsafe) who have a role resolving matters before they get to Court. This law strikes a careful balance and focuses on an intent to cause harm and even includes a process for services to resolve complaints to the Agency about content - albeit many seem to ignore it.

Again jurisdiction* aside, surely this - the law of the land - is what large social media networks should be following when it comes to policing content rather than their own views? 

Should that not be an obligation, especially once a certain scale is reached and their editorial decisions are impacting a significant portion of society?

This problem isn't going to go away, especially as more and more of "The Internet" falls into private hands. It's up to all of us to push for a solution that protects victims while ensuring fundamental rights are maintained.

What do you think? Keen to read your views in the comments below.

* And yes, appreciate jurisdiction is one of the biggest issues in this debate and I've conveniently skirted over it above. Personally, I think this is resolvable technically but either way, the article was already too long :). I'll address that in a future piece if there's interest.

We have a massive year planned for 2021, from new tools to help you seriously advance your career through to courses, events, full-day conference events around New Zealand, and work to improve the digital skills system in New Zealand once and for all.

And just a heads-up - we're taking ITx on the road next year, with Innovation Day and related events happening across all 8 of our home cities, plus potentially one or two other places as well. Check it out!

ITP in 2021: Heaps happening

Well, 2021 is going to be another massive year for ITP. As always, we have a huge work programme building on the work of the last year or two with some key new initiatives and refreshing of other activities.

Here are some of the things we have planned for 2021:

Build your own Skills Portfolio

What skills do you have and what skills do you need to get ahead?

You can't figure out where you're going until you know where you're at. We're really excited to be releasing a FREE skills matrix assessment tool to help you quantify and define your digital tech skills using the popular SFIA framework.

Our confidential tool will help you map your existing tech-related skills and determine what you need to focus on to make it to your dream role - and the steps in between. And best of all, this will be FREE to most ITP members.

We're serious about helping our members get ahead in their careers. We're aiming to release this excellent tool to members in March this year.

Expansion of Mentoring Programme

As you may know, we updated, expanded and streamlined the ITP Mentoring Programme last year and it's now a free service to most ITP members.

Mentoring is a core part of professional development, both for a mentor and a mentee. The programme provides a 12-month mentoring partnership and is designed to help figure out where you want to go in your career, and put in place the steps needed to get there.

Most people find Mentoring to be massively rewarding. Give it a try - see below.

Webinars, Events, Short Courses and More

ITP's Thursday Live Webinars were hugely popular last year so we've extended them to 2021, starting in a couple of weeks then running fortnightly. We loved bringing them to you and, if the feedback was anything to go by, you loved the opportunity to engage live.

We'll also be running heaps of in-person events across New Zealand (subject to any Covid restrictions), including monthly events, the ITx Innovation Day events around the country and much more.

And we also have a full programme of workshops and short courses on offer, heavily discounted for members, including the hugely popular Become and Effective CIO 13-week course in August. More info on this shortly.

ITx 2021 on the road

We're really excited that ITx 2021 will be going on the road, with full-day and half-day events right across New Zealand. You don't have to come to ITx this year - ITx is coming to you!

These ITx Innovation Day events will be truly excellent, with great speakers, great networking, great catering and a truly excellent experience. One thing we guarantee - your head will be full and you'll learn a lot by coming along.

More on this later (see some details below).

NZ's Digital Challenge in Schools - bigger and better

Tahi Rua Toru Tech, New Zealand's digital challenge in schools, is back again this year - bigger and better than ever!

The programme focuses on introducing as many kids as possible to digital tech - not just what it is, but helping them pull up sleeves and get right into it over a term-long digital tech project.

We're excited to have reached over 10,000 students with 123Tech to date.

Transforming NZ's digital skills system

ITP is also leading the Skills component of the Digital Tech Industry Transformation Plan, helping make a real difference to the future of skills in our industry.

The Transformation Plan is a core Government/Industry initiative to truly transform our industry - removing key barriers to growth and in our case, removing the bottlenecks and blockages in the skills pipeline.

It's great to be taking a far broader perspective on digital skills and we're really looking forward to engaging more with our community as this work progresses.

Significant promotional activity

One of the key focuses for 2021 is lifting ITP's profile both within the industry and the public at large, to increase the value of your membership. We have two specific promotional activities planned for 2021 - one around membership and awareness, the other around CITPNZ and CTech certification.

You'll be hearing more about these later in the year.

New President and Deputy

And lastly in case you missed it, we're pleased to welcome Anthony Dowling as the new ITP national President, and Robyn Kamira as the new Deputy President. They lead a very high calibre National Board from across New Zealand.

A massive thanks to outgoing President Mike Dennehy as well, following the conclusion of a 4-year term. I thoroughly enjoyed working with Mike and he'll be missed - albeit he's remaining on the Board for a transition period.

So a big year planned! Can't wait to work with our community to make all this, and so much more, happen this year.

Harmful content vs Free speech online: Who should decide?

To what extent should Facebook, Twitter and others be censoring content and people, and how do you balance harmful content and free speech? 

We don't generally comment on these sorts of things much for 2 reasons. Firstly, ITP is a broad church and it's outside the areas that we - as an organisation - generally take a position on. Secondly, TechBlog's editor Paul Brislen usually covers this pretty well!

But there's a hugely important principle at stake and I think our community, as the largest tech community in New Zealand, should be thinking about all of this very carefully.

Read more on TechBlog

Heads-up: ITx 2021 is going on the road 

As you may know, sadly and as a result of the pandemic, ITx 2020 was moved back 6 months to May 2021. The plan at that stage was to continue to hold ITx as a full 3-day conference in TSB Arena in Wellington.

ITx is special this/next year, as it's also a celebration of 60 years of tech innovation in New Zealand (including the 60^th anniversary of ITP itself).

We've been talking closely with our members and while our membership clearly wants to see ITx continue through the pandemic (subject to levels etc), there is some concern about larger gatherings and travel. We've listened, and we've decided to make some changes.

While we'll still be holding ITx 2021 in Wellington, we've made the decision to change the format considerably and take it on the road! In fact you'll be seeing ITx 2021 Innovation Day events all across NZ in mid-2021, with full-day events in the larger centres and smaller half-day or similar events across all of the rest of our main cities.

In fact, if you're in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Hamilton, Tauranga, Dunedin, Palmerston North or Nelson, and possibly one or two other centres, you'll be able to attend an ITx 2021 Innovation Day event in your city!

It's going to be an exciting year. More details about the ITx Innovation Days road-trip will be released early next year. Look forward to seeing you all around NZ in 2021!

ITP Video Library now with closed captions

Those with hearing impairment - as well as those who just prefer to read as well as listen - will be pleased to know that we're now investing in closed captions for all new videos in the ITP Video Library.

This came from a suggested by a member and is a great way we can ensure that ITP is as open and welcoming to the whole community - including those with disabilities. We're investing in human-created (rather than automatic) captioning to improve accuracy, and while adding captions to all videos in the existing library is cost prohibitive, we'll be adding them to all new talks, webinars and presentations.

Generally speaking, the closed captions will appear 1-2 days after the video is uploaded. We're working on speeding this up, however don't want to delay the release of videos while waiting for the captions to be created.

As always, your feedback on these captions is very welcome!

Get an ITP Industry Mentor

As you may know, ITP re-launched our Mentoring Programme last year as a more stream-lined and free service to members. We have lots of mentors ready to go and if you're keen to be advance your career, we can match you promptly and kick off your mentoring partnership.

What is the ITP Mentoring Programme?

The programme continues to be built around professional development or career-focused mentoring - helping IT professionals set clear career goals and objectives, understand that they have the ability to achieve these, and putting in place a plan to do it.

If you haven't been involved in mentoring before don't be shy - this programme is purpose built for you. The programme has been designed to scale and we see it as a core part of professional growth.

The programme is also completely free for non-student ITP members, as part of our overall goal to help further those in our community. We'll be providing other career guidance for students but mentoring is for those currently practicing.

Once matched, mentees and mentors can expect to meet once a month (for approximately an hour) over the 12-month period. This can be in-person of via a videocall. We provide guidance, resources, career planning templates and more, and you also have access to a mentoring facilitator to help work through any issues you might have along the way.

Now's the right time

2020 was a tough year for everyone, but now is the absolute right time to focus on career development and the future. It's also a great time of year to get moving on these types of initiatives.

It's easy to get started - just join the mentoring programme online. We ask you a few questions to help match you to the perfect mentor and the whole process only takes around 10-15 minutes.

Find out more or sign up here

Exclusive ITP member offers

We're really excited to have a bunch of new deals and offers available for ITP members, thanks to some of our awesome Corporate Partners. Check them out on the ITP Member Offers page.

This includes huge offers on tech-related courses from Yoobee, NZSE and ITP, plus excellent offers from GoWirelessNZ, EscrowNZ, The IT Psychiatrist, insurance offerings, events and conferences and more.

Check out all of the ITP Member Offers

Offer of the week:

The IT Psychiatrist is an "on demand" tech executive that can help your organisation, or boost your capability, across cost, tools, information and skills.

ITP members and partners exclusively receive 10% Discount on all engagements.

If you're an ITP member or corporate partner, check them out here

Previous webinars - all available free to members

All past webinars are available on the ITP Video Library for members:

• UFB and the Future of Fibre
• Down-to-Earth Leadership Skills for Tech Geniuses
• How technology enabled the health response
• How Covid is impacting the Gaming Industry
• Creating a plan for Digital Skills
• Cybersecurity and the recent attacks
• Tech legal update - what you need to know
• An afternoon with Nanogirl
• Taking kiwi tech to the post-Covid world
• Tech startups in a post-Covid world
• The IRD Transformation
• Digital Government and Covid-19
• Tech and the Covid-19 recovery
• Privacy in the days of Covid-19
• Leading Wellness in uncertain times
• Meet the ITP Workshop Presenters
• The data behind Covid19
• Innovation in tough times: Don't Hunker in the Bunker
• Covid19: Tech and the Law
• Cybersecurity from home
• Clarke Ching on disaster innovation
• CITPNZ and CTech: The What, How and Why
• Working Remotely - How to get through

Check out the webinar section here

The water is calm and warm, stingrays bask in the shallows and the beach resembles Bondi on a scorching Sydney day. There's hardly a spare patch of golden sand to throw your towel down on.

Kiwis have been making the most of their holidays, to the envy of northern hemisphere friends forced to endure the newsfeed photos of crowded bars and beaches, as they live with the surging virus. In Ireland where much of my extended family lives, the country's Covid Tracker app tells me that there were 3,955 cases of Covid-19 on January 14th and 28 deaths. That could be us.

The sense of nervousness that we have grown far too complacent about Covid-19 is growing.

"Stunned that not a single person going to the supermarket tonight was scanning the NZ COVID Tracer QR code. Not one," tweeted the Wellington-based Infometrics economist Brad Olsen yesterday. 

"I looked wildly out of place stopping to take 2 seconds to scan. Complacency has well and truly set in. Dangerous if there is an outbreak."

The plummeting use of the NZ COVID Tracer app for scanning into shops, restaurants and businesses will render digital contact tracing efforts ineffective, particularly if some of the new highly infectious variants of Covid-19 begin to circulate here.

"If any variants of the virus got out, never mind these more infectious ones, they would spread like wildfire," microbiologist Dr Siouxsie Wiles warned this week.

As BusinessDesk pointed out this week, it's not just laziness - there are digital divide issues limiting compliance, which is hard to quantify.

What's the answer? A relentless and effective public health campaign is underway, but in the absence of community transmission, we have become jaded. We have all of the digital tools other countries are using - a functional QR code-based app and the Apple/Google Bluetooth contact tracing feature. Dr Michelle 'Nanogirl' Dickinson even coached iPhone users on how to boot into the NZ COVID Tracer app with the mere tap of a finger on the pack of the phone, giving the 2-second access Olsen speaks of.

There's only one other digital trick we could and should try - Bluetooth beacons. Placed in retail outlets, they would automatically detect smartphones that come into contact with them and have Bluetooth enabled. It would basically take the effort out of signing in as it would be done automatically by proximity to a Bluetooth beacon.

The technology is being trialled in New Zealand on a small scale. Paperkite, the company behind the Rippl contact tracing app, is experimenting with beacons. But the infrastructure requirements are daunting - each business would need beacons strategically located around their premises to get the required coverage with Bluetooth only accurate up to 10 metres or so at best.

The search is on for a more accurate and easy to deploy technology. At its Tokyo headquarters, TDK is trialling VENUE a contact tracing system based on the geomagnetic sensor found in smartphones and used for location-based services. The sensor gives a location accurate to within a couple of metres and would communicate this info anonymously to an app on the phone. It would remove the need for adding wireless infrastructure to premises. The drawback is that for it to work properly, it would need an indoor layout map to be surveyed for each premise.

When an infected person is identified, everyone who was close to them in a shop or restaurant could be traced.

There's a risk that automating even further the process of digital contact tracing will just entrench the complacency. But we need to be prepared for the virus to be part of life for a long time to come and deploy every possible tool in the arsenal, including Covid Card type devices where people don't have smartphones, to ensure contact tracing efforts are sustainable. 

Cup drama runneth over

In a week where Team New Zealand escaped damage and injury in a capsize of its 75-foot monohull boat on the Auckland harbour, another drama emerged off the water centred on software.

Dunedin company Animation Research, headed by former ITP president (2014 - 2016) Sir Ian Taylor, who was knighted in the New Year's Honours, is in a copyright dispute with America's Cup sailing legend Sir Russell Coutts over the graphics used to deliver official TV coverage of the racing.

The Coutts-led companies Oracle Racing and F50 League LLC, trading as SailGP, claim they own the rights to aspects of the clever augmented reality system Animation Research is using. Sir Ian argues that Animation Research developed the technology for the America's Cup as far back as 1992 and was blindsided by the copyright claim which arrived on the 23rd of December.

It's not a dispute about the technology underlying the system, but a few specific details around how the information is displayed on screen, with SailGP laying claim to the format of defining the course perimeter, displaying sponsors logos and indicating the distance between boats.

Sir Ian is one of our most respected technology leaders and Animation Research one of our most innovative companies, so it is disappointing to see this flare-up now. Sir Russell may have a valid claim to intellectual property, but also a vested interest - he's not involved in this America's Cup, but a rival yachting format where the LiveLine augmented reality system SailGP has developed will no doubt be deployed.

That two of our most prominent and respected Kiwis can't sort this out with a conversation says so much about the fractious and competitive nature of the America's Cup. Sir Ian's team worked hard this week to reformat the graphics, which will debut for racing this afternoon. Here's hoping that puts the issue to bed and allows us to focus on the action on the water rather than bitter recriminations on the sidelines.

Jack was right, sort of

There has been much debate about the de-platforming of President Trump from Twitter and Facebook in the wake of the riot at the US Capitol building, allegedly incited by a speech Trump gave which was backed up with tweets to his 88 million followers.

As I wrote on BusinessDesk this week, I think Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey did the right thing in permanently banning Trump from the platform. Faced with a difficult decision, he opted for an excess of caution, hoping to minimise the risk of further riots, violence and deaths.

But did he and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg make those calls to block Trump for the right reasons? A new Democratic president will be in the White House in less than a week. It's easy to be cynical and suggest the two billionaire tech executives are playing to the new master, looking to endear themselves President-elect Biden and Democratic lawmakers and soften any regulatory changes that are coming.

That may be the case, but ultimately, I accept the explanation for the move Dorsey tweeted this week. 

"We faced an extraordinary and untenable circumstance, forcing us to focus all of our actions on public safety," he wrote 

"Offline harm as a result of online speech is demonstrably real, and what drives our policy and enforcement above all."

But he and his fellow executives running social media networks can't continue to be responsible for making such editorial calls. The US needs a digital regulator where the "super-spreaders", those with massive social media followings and influence, are scrutinised by an independent regulator, who decides if and when they are deplatformed. It needs to be open and transparent and subject to appeal. But it needs to happen soon in the US and be mirrored around the world.

Dorsey's answer to the problem, funnily enough, doesn't involve regulation.

"We are trying to do our part by funding an initiative around an open decentralized standard for social media. Our goal is to be a client of that standard for the public conversation layer of the internet. We call it @bluesky"

How will that combat the influential spreading hate speech and inciting violence? It's not clear. It's a typically utopian and unrealistic concept from a Silicon Valley magnate. Other types of media are regulated and standards policed - why not social media?

The likes of Facebook and Twitter need to do more to police their platforms and do so transparently. But the time has come for independent regulatory oversight of them. Regulation won't be perfect, but it will be better than what we have now. The Democrats, if they are serious about changing the toxic nature of online discourse and its corrosive impact on democracy, need to take action.

Peter Griffin is filling in for Tech Blog editor Paul Brislen, who will return from a distant beach before the end of the month...hopefully

Normally this week would involve hundreds of thousands of tech industry workers and journalists descending on Las Vegas for the world's biggest annual trade show - CES.

But the party in Vegas was cancelled this year as CES went virtual to avoid becoming a Covid-19 suer-spreader event. The Consumer Electronics Show, which I've been to half a dozen times, is always a logistical nightmare. Spread across a sprawling series of convention centres and hotels, the show is crowded and features a bewildering agenda of events.

Airpop's smart mask

So it has been nice this year to lean back in my chair and take in the virtual sessions from the comfort of my office. While the usual flurry of product announcements have emerged spanning everything from flat-screen TVs to PCs, smartphones to streaming services, the pandemic has spawned its own significant product category touchless tech.

Hence, we have Ettie, the touchless doorbell from Plott that can take the temperature of a visitor at the door before they are permitted entry to the premises. Alarm.com's video doorbell allows a person to virtually knock, simply presenting their face to the resident without having to press any doorbell button and potentially passing on the virus. 

There's the Coro Bot from Hills Engineering, an autonomous hygiene and cleaning robot that motors around any blasts surfaces with ultraviolet light to clean them of bacteria and kill the virus. It also sucks in the air, purifying it of virus particles. Legions of them could be put to work sterilizing areas where the virus spreads, such as overburdened US and European hospitals full of Covid-19 victims. 

Companion robots, all the rave in Japan, have always been a major theme of CES, but the pandemic has given them a further boost as robot makers come up with new uses for people trying to stave off the isolation and boredom of lockdown. 

Then there's Moxie, the homeschooling companion robot perfect for assisting kids trying to continue their education from lockdown. The robot, from US startup Embodied, helps kids build their social, emotional and cognitive skills and was one of Time's best innovations of 2020.

The BioButton from BioIntelliSense, a wearable sensor that is designed to give early warning that you may have Covid-19. The coin-sized disposable sensor has battery life for up to 90 days and continuously measures temperature, respiratory rate and heart rate. Connecting to your smartphone, it will indicate if your vital signs change to indicate potential infection. I could see that coming in very handy for managed isolation facility and border staff.

MaskFone will appeal to workers who need to talk on the phone regularly but are required to keep their mask on at all times in the workplace. It does what it suggests, building a microphone into a mask that allows for filters to be replaced. There's also earbuds built-in and you can just tap the front of the mask to adjust the volume or skip music tracks on your phone.

With the Airpop Active+ mask you can track your breathing, the air quality around you and remind you when its time to change your mask's filter. 

This sort of touchless tech can't beat effective vaccines in keeping people safe. But as the pandemic has advanced, the public health messages have crystalised around the importance of mask-wearing and maintaining good hygiene standards. This year's CES goes down as a unique moment in the history of the tech show where tech to keep us alive rather than entertained, gets top billing.

But as many have pointed out, our own Privacy Commissioner and Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel among them, blocking Trump from tweeting to his 88 million followers and millions more on Facebook, which also disabled his account, may be populist, but is also deeply problematic.

The move is only likely to accelerate efforts to regulate social media platforms, taking control over sensitive editorial decisions out of the hands of the corporations and into some sort of regulatory agency or at least an independently appointed arbitrator - the equivalent of our Broadcasting Standards Authority.

A year ago, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter's Jack Dorsey would have bristled at the prospect of losing some control of the content that features on their platforms. But faced with increasingly vexing editorial calls, Zuckerberg, in particular, told Congressional hearings last year that he welcomed stricter regulation, to combat the perception that the platform is inherently biased in its editorial decision making.

Arbitrary and cynical

Privacy Commissioner John Edwards, in a tweet, described Twitter's move to permanently block Trump as "arbitrary and cynical".

"We should not be abdicating responsibility for the tough policy decisions required, and delegating responsibility for our community standards to conflicted corporates," he wrote.

The infiltration of the Capitol building in Washington D.C. by Trump-supporting activists last week, preceded by Trump's inflammatory speech, which was carried on social media channels, put the Big Tech platforms in unchartered territory.

While Google, Facebook and Twitter had all previously flagged or blocked his tweets for containing disinformation, this was deemed a much more serious incident - allegedly glorifying violence and potentially inciting the Capitol riots that resulted in the deaths of five people.

Twitter and Facebook shares have both dipped significantly this week as the market anticipates swift regulatory action to bring social media platforms into line. Reducing those platforms autonomy to make editorial decision making could impact on the popularity of them and increase the compliance costs of policing new rules that may be imposed by the Biden administration and Democrat-controlled Congress.

Everyone acknowledges we need a new playbook of rules to deal with the increasingly polarised world of social media. The debate now begins in earnest over what regulatory structure will preserve the best of social media platforms while more effectively curtailing the dark elements. 

Who gets to decide?

As New York Times writer Shira Ovide puts it, "there has been lots of screaming about what these companies did, but I want us all to recognize that there are few easy choices here," she wrote. 

"Because at the root of these disputes are big and thorny questions: Is more speech better? And who gets to decide?"

Freedom of speech-loving Americans and their elected representatives will need to consider those questions carefully. The rest of the world will look in in fascination because the decisions that are made to regulate a tiny handful of powerful Big Tech platforms will have implications for all of us.

This year has been the year of goat herding and we're not quite done yet. A quick perusal of the Before Times reveals a certain naivety that is quite touching to behold.

January

You bright and gorgeous beast of a month, with sunlight streaming onto us uninhibited by ozone of any kind. How bright and shining you looked, and how young and eager we all were (sort of) for the year ahead. Our biggest concern in January - Jeff Bezos being hacked by the Saudis, the need to figure out patch protection for Microsoft and gosh, aren't we doing well in terms of investing in our own home grown tech companies.

Little did we know what awaited us.

February

Short month, not much to say except we all have that nagging feeling we should be on holiday still and sadly we're not.

And that was it for the year. Really. The first sign of a story about COVID-19 (with 2000 dead and 75,000 affected worldwide) showed no inkling of the scale of what 2020 was going to bring for us. Some mutterings from yours truly about supply lines being affected, the just-in-time model, impact on universities without students coming to our shores and a pithy line about the official response: "The authorities have all responded far more eagerly to this outbreak than you'd expect from years of zombie movies, and I'm really pleased about that. But we might need to address a few of the ramifications that have reared their ugly heads before something larger and nastier hits."

It's OK, February Paul. There's plenty of time for ugliness to come.

Lockdown arrived with a hiss and a roar and lots of meetings. If there's a word of the year it'll have to be Zoom because the "little video conferencing app that could" became the video conferencing mega story of the year. Sure, there wasn't as much security as claimed and sure, there are plenty of other well-established options out there, but for some reason Zoom caught the public attention and while lockdown taught us to sneeze into our elbows, wash our hands for 30 seconds and how to squash the curve, Zoom gave us the new meeting etiquette, the "you're on mute" sign and some seriously new insights into our colleagues' home lives. From pets to Kylie Minogue posters, from rampant children to towel-clad husbands (all true stories), never before had we been so close yet so far away from our fellow workers.

We also learned all about contact tracing, about how it's done overseas, about what we need to do in New Zealand and QR codes versus Bluetooth versus The COVID card versus just writing it all down on a scrappy bit of paper.

And we learned about online shopping. Boy, did we ever - everything from food to digital content, from fruit and meat packs, to logging on at 0900 exactly to get the next supermarket pick-up slot. Those that were quick to adapt (like the grocery company that stopped sending fruit to empty corporate offices and instead set up a home delivery service) prospered and those that didn't… well, didn't.

Cloud services took off for corporates all around the world and if you didn't have a digital transformation programme of work underway in February, you did by June. Staff were not coming into the office any time soon so everyone needed access in ways we never had before.

Contact centre staff were probably the winners from all this. After wanting to work from home for years but constantly being rebuffed (it's an expensive, time consuming, distracting project to get everyone set up to work remotely) in the matter of days or maybe weeks every one of them was sitting in bed taking calls in their PJs with their headsets on and quite happy thank you.

There were other stories, of course. The US president remained a source of much entertainment and stress and of course fake news (some of it about us). There were a couple of elections. The social media giants continued to treat the concepts of defamation, privacy, objectionable material and the destruction of democracy itself as a PR exercise. We got to point and laugh at the Aussies as they tried to work from home using the digital equivalent of a plate load of damp spaghetti instead of fibre optic cable, and the anti-5G brigade finally got something to complain about as telcos began to roll out 5G kit in their networks, thus ensuring that sellers of conspiracy theories (and aluminium foil) remained flush all year long.

What will 2021 bring? Predictions are a mug's game but I'm pretty sure it won't be half as exciting and simultaneously as boring as 2020. Beyond that, who can tell.

Stay safe out there and we'll see each (one way or another) in The Future.

Texas attorney general Ken Paxton is leading the lawsuit on behalf of his state and Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Mississippi, South Dakota, North Dakota, Utah and Idaho, all states with Republican prosecutors.

The states are seeking financial compensation, penalties, injunctions against Google's operations and, once again, "structural relief", suggesting a separation of parts of Google's business is seen as necessary.

The lawsuit follows a similar theme to the Department of Justice action launched in October, in that it paints a picture of Google as a competition-crushing behemoth. But whereas the DoJ case lasered in on Google's practice of paying billions of dollars to smartphone and web browser makers to ensure its apps and search engine get prominent position on their devices, the coalition of states goes right for Google's jugular.

Don't be evil? Yeah right, say attorneys general

"Google uses its powerful position on every side of the online display markets to unlawfully exclude competition. It also boldly claims that 'we'll never sell your personal information to anyone,' but its entire business model is targeted advertising-the purchase and sale of advertisements targeted to individual users based on their personal information," the lawsuit reads.

"From its earliest days, Google's carefully curated public reputation of 'don't be evil' has enabled it to act with wide latitude. That latitude is enhanced by the extreme opacity and complexity of digital advertising markets, which are at least as complex as the most sophisticated financial markets in the world.

The trouble really began, the suit alleges, in 2008 when Google acquired ad display platform DoubleClick and integrated it into its own advertising business. That gave Google the scale, reach and technology to dig its teeth into the digital ad market. But the suit alleges that Google then went further, rigging ad exchange bidding processes in its favour.

The suit also alleges a cosy and unlawful duopoly arrangement emerged between Google and Facebook, where the two conspired to manipulate online auctions and Google agreed not to go head to head with Facebook if it stayed out of areas of business it prioritised.

Google has reacted defiantly to the lawsuit:

"We've invested in state-of-the-art ad tech services that help businesses and benefit consumers. Digital ad prices have fallen over the last decade. Ad tech fees are falling too. Google's ad tech fees are lower than the industry average," a company spokesperson said.

What does it all mean?

The stakes are high for Google, which generates 80 per cent of its revenue from advertising. 

But Google is gearing up to fight this lawsuit and the DoJ's one too. Facebook is also readying its own legal defence against a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit filed last week that alleges its acquisitions of Instagram and Whatsapp gave it an unassailable lead in social media.

The legal teams of the two Big Tech companies will also be busy on the other side of the Atlantic, with the European Union proposing new legal bills this week which would give regulators new powers to police illegal content and anticompetitive behaviour on online platforms.

The proposals include multi-billion dollar fines for lack of compliance and while individual tech companies are not named, it is clear that the proposed laws are aimed squarely at the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple.

The UK, mired in efforts to complete its exit from the European Union and struggling to contain Covid-19, has said it will separately pursue similar new rules.

It all means that 2021 will be a record year for activity in competition law with the outcome of these legal actions having consequences for anyone who uses the internet anywhere in the world.

Every day has turned into a turgid mess of Teams meetings, FaceTime calls, Skypes, Zooms, and all the rest (even Amazon Chime which should absolutely be avoided at all costs).

Then there's the kids at home, the running around, their Teams/Zooms/Skype calls and "multi-tasking" (if you can call pretending to do your homework while playing games online with one set of friends and simultaneously making TikToks with another a series of tasks). All told, my New Year's resolution will be for a quiet and peaceful life.

So when Jabra offered to let me test drive its new earbuds - the Elite 85t (RRP: $379) - I jumped at the chance.

I've had a love-hate relationship with noise cancelling headphones for quite some time. I had a pair of early edition Blackbox noise cancelling headphones that were tremendous, but the over-the-head band made my head hurt on long flights and the cushioning part on the ears got hot and sweaty.

Then I had a full over-the-ear pair from Bose which were great but the cushions also wore out eventually.

The rise of the ear buds gave me cause for rejoicing and Apple's AirPod Professionals have long been my standard bit of ear candy. They weigh practically nothing, the sound quality is tremendous and the mic has an uncanny ability to pick up sounds in a way that's so good I've had radio engineers ask me what kind of lapel mic I'm using.

But it's the noise cancellation that was so extraordinary. Tiny microphones inside the pods listen to the surrounding sounds hundreds of times per second and adjust the audio accordingly. They really do make the surrounding world go away.

I have to say these new Jabra devices give Apple a run for its money.

The Elites have an oval shaped earpiece that doesn't sit in your ear as far as the AirPods do, but feels somehow more secure, more comfortable. Time spent on the treadmill or cross-trainer couldn't dislodge them, yet at no time did they feel like they'd been in for too long, as sometimes can happen with the AirPods.

Battery life is on par with them as well - both will get you through a day of audio use, although constant on-time without stopping to take a breath will drain both sets faster than you'd like.

As for audio quality, well that starts as soon as you synch them with the Jabra app and it's rather odd. You're asked your age and your gender and well, colour me old fashioned but I tend to use my ears for listening, not other parts of my anatomy. So what gives?

Jabra says it has worked with GN Hearing to develop a two-stage hearing test. The first part includes an algorithm which analyses "a significant pool of individuals' hearing profiles to be able to predict a user's audiogram just by inputting age and gender". This is then refined further by taking the user through a short hearing test to reach a more accurate personal profile for the individual.

The test (tap the button when you hear the tone) soon makes it clear I should have insisted on those ear defenders as a student working with heavy equipment because there are times when I'm just unable to hear the higher-pitched tones, but pretty soon the test is done and I have to say the sound quality is tremendous. The app fills in where my hearing is limited so I have a full range of sounds delivered to my pummelled eardrums for maximum effect.

Whether I'm listening to podcasts or music, the quality is stunning to behold, and when you turn on the noise cancellation capability you find yourself alone in a crowded world. There are various degrees of cancellation available - I chose the whole hog setting and never regret it.

The Jabra Elite 85t even allow you to connect to two Bluetooth devices at once, something I've yet to find a use for but which seems to excite the more connectable among us.

But I do have a problem with noise cancelling Bluetooth headphones and ear buds and it's nothing to do with them at all. They connect beautifully to both iOS and Android mobiles but when it comes to laptops it's exceedingly frustrating.

The Apple AirPods will connect with my MacBook Air but it can't see the Jabra at all, and my HP notebook can't see either of them. When I do use Teams on an Apple iOS device the Jabra will connect but there's no noise cancellation capability, so I'm stuck listening to the craziness around me.

This is a problem because it means I still need a pair of wired headphones for my Team calls, or I just rely on the built-in speakers and the inevitable feedback whine. Or of course, I just avoid the meetings altogether. Maybe that's the answer.

Sort that out, laptop makers, and you'll have a friend for life.

Stuff reports that Datagrid plans to build a large data centre in North Makarewa in Southland and connect the region to the US and Australia with two new undersea cables at a total cost of around $700 million.

The project is backed by the founders of the Hawaiki Cable, including Remi Galasso and Malcolm Dick, a New Zealand telecoms pioneer who also founded CallPlus. Datagrid has secured access to 100 megawatts of electricity capacity from Meridian Energy's Manapouri hydro scheme. That's regardless of whether the Tiwai aluminium smelter stays in business in the next few years.

A hyperscale data centre is one that can scale up quickly to offer massive capacity and is typically operated by the major data centre providers, including Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Alibaba Cloud.

Those big players would be the target customers for the facilities. Microsoft announced in May that it would spend $100 million to build its own Azure data centre region, which will see facilities based in Auckland.

But why would Microsoft or its competitors decide to base their data centres in an isolated spot well away from the bulk of their customers? It comes down to cost. The largest expense with data centres is powering the massive banks of computer processors - and keeping the equipment cool enough to function properly. The electricity cost - and carbon footprint generated if the power is coming from fossil fuel sources, is a major concern for data centre operators.

Cool and green

That's why Iceland has become a hub on the northern hemisphere for data centres. As far back as 2016, data centres accounted for around one per cent of Iceland's gross domestic product (GDP) and the industry has boomed since then on the back of the Bitcoin mining boom. A handful of local players are busy building new data centres to meet demand from a range of clients, attracted by the low cooling costs and access to hydro and geothermal energy.

The average annual temperature in Iceland's capital Reykjavík is just 5 degrees centigrade. That allows for natural cooling through ventilating the data centres, rather than requiring energy-intensive airconditioning.

Southland's annual average temperature is 9.8 degrees. According to Datagrid's founders, that would allow data centres to cut their cooling costs in half to around 15 per cent of the total cost of operating them.

With millions of customers in the Asia Pacific region, that could prove highly attractive to the big public cloud providers - as long as they can get decent connectivity to Southland data centres. That's why the plan involves replicating the Hawaiki cable links at the bottom of the country, to provide direct links to central nodes on the east coast of Australia.

Southland's future

Iceland is also building more submarine cables to improve access to its growing fleet of data centres, which accounted for the country's power consumption more than doubling in 2018.

With the local council and central Government welcoming the news, the Datagrid developments are positive for the Southland region which faces the prospect of losing thousands of jobs if Tiwai Point winds down production.

Data centres aren't massive direct providers of employment, but they have been seen as big enablers of economic development as they enable the digital economy to advance quickly. While Datagrid may not be the only answer to Southland's economic sustainability, it could well be an important part of the mix.

We were excited to recognise the national winners during the event, from Arahoe School, Auroa School and Palmerston North Girls High School, while also celebrating regional success from across New Zealand. We were also pleased to recognise recently retired teacher Margot Phillipps for her massive contribution over many years.

And just a heads-up - we're taking ITx on the road next year, with Innovation Day and related events happening across all 8 of our home cities, plus potentially one or two other places as well. 2021 is going to be a great year!

ITP recognises award-winning school students across New Zealand

Wow, what an amazing finals celebration for 123Tech, NZ's digital challenge in schools, last Thursday.

For those who don't know, Tahi Rua Toru Tech (123Tech) is the nationwide in-school challenge, run by IT Professionals NZ and delivered in partnership with the Ministry of Education, Digital Tech Teachers Aotearoa, plus a bunch of awesome companies like Datacom and NZSE. 

Previously we've held an in-person finals event in Wellington, however this year we opted for an online-only format. So far this has been watched by over 6,000 people across the various platforms, plus lots of schools had classes and assemblies and watched it live as well. 

Suzy Cato was our MC and was wonderful as always, plus our larger than life 123Tech champion (or "mascot"? For lack of a better word!) Digital Dan was roaming around NZ and awarding some of our winners live.

The finals event had 19 different live or pre-recorded video segments over the hour-long event, including pre-recorded virtual tours of tech companies across NZ, finalist videos, live crossings to Digital Dan heading towards a school to build suspense, and winners announced and awarded live across the different categories.

My favourite thing was being able to have our team travel to Auroa School, a rural school up by Mt Taranaki, and announce they'd won live on air. They were able to fully participate as judging was virtual (previously the 2.5 - 3 hour trip each way to the closest regional finals/judging event would have excluded them).

In their words, nothing like that had ever happened at their little school - nobody outside the area had really even come to visit before, let alone to announce on a live broadcast that they'd won a national title. During the build-up live crosses, the teacher had said to the students "maybe they're coming here?" and the students responded with "yeah, right - nobody's coming to Auroa!"). Then we did :).

I guess in some respects this is one of the silver linings of the pandemic - more inclusiveness and equality for all students in all schools to participate in NZ's digital challenge, regardless of where they are in New Zealand. 

It's been a tough year for everyone, no one less than schools, and it's great to be able to finish on such a high note. 

The 2020 national winners were:

• Discovery level: Tech Potatoes from Arahoe School
• First level: Power Rangers from Auroa School
• Secondary level: Three Musketeers from Palmerston North Girls High School

Click the links above to see their live presentations (on Facebook).

You can watch the whole finals event on the 123Tech website or Facebook.

Digital Tech Teacher honoured

We were also really excited to be able to recognise recently retired teacher Margot Phillipps for a massive amount of work she has done over the years, with the 2020 Ali Chivers Teacher Influence Award. 

Margot, along with ITP Honorary Fellow Gordon Grimsey, were the authors of the authoritative report into the Technology Achievement Standards back in 2008/2009. This report found that none of the 18 generic Technology Achievement Standards were appropriate to assess either Computer Science or end-user computing at the secondary school level

It was a direct result of that ITP (then called NZCS) report, peer-reviewed by professors and industry leaders and following significant advocacy activity, that we ended up with Digital Technologies-specific Achievement Standards - plus now the whole subject area itself.

So her work literally led to what we now know as Digital Technologies and Hangarau Matihiko in all schools across New Zealand.

However this wasn't the only thing she was recognised for. Margot has helped countless schools and teachers get started with Digital Tech, plus spearheaded NZ's involvement in the International Olympiad in Informatics, was a co-founder of the PC4G (Programming Challenge for Girls) now running in many countries, and led NZ's involvement in the Bebras Challenge (another international programming contest) - plus so much more.

She's not someone who seeks the limelight but has been a true force to be reckoned with and an inspiration to many. It was great being able to recognise her efforts over many years.

Here's Margot being surprised with her award :).

Heads-up: ITx 2021 is going on the road 

As you may know, sadly and as a result of the pandemic, ITx 2020 was moved back 6 months to May 2021. The plan at that stage was to continue to hold ITx as a full 3-day conference in TSB Arena in Wellington.

ITx is special this/next year, as it's also a celebration of 60 years of tech innovation in New Zealand (including the 60^th anniversary of ITP itself).

We've been talking closely with our members and while our membership clearly wants to see ITx continue through the pandemic (subject to levels etc), there is some concern about larger gatherings and travel. We've listened, and we've decided to make some changes.

While we'll still be holding ITx 2021 in Wellington, we've made the decision to change the format considerably and take it on the road! In fact you'll be seeing ITx 2021 Innovation Day events all across NZ in mid-2021, with full-day events in the larger centres and smaller half-day or similar events across all of the rest of our main cities.

In fact, if you're in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Hamilton, Tauranga, Dunedin, Palmerston North or Nelson, and possibly one or two other centres, you'll be able to attend an ITx 2021 Innovation Day event in your city!

It's going to be an exciting year. More details about the ITx Innovation Days road-trip will be released early next year. Look forward to seeing you all around NZ in 2021!

ITP Video Library now with closed captions

Those with hearing impairment - as well as those who just prefer to read as well as listen - will be pleased to know that we're now investing in closed captions for all new videos in the ITP Video Library.

This came from a suggested by a member and is a great way we can ensure that ITP is as open and welcoming to the whole community - including those with disabilities. We're investing in human-created (rather than automatic) captioning to improve accuracy, and while adding captions to all videos in the existing library is cost prohibitive, we'll be adding them to all new talks, webinars and presentations.

Generally speaking, the closed captions will appear 1-2 days after the video is uploaded. We're working on speeding this up, however don't want to delay the release of videos while waiting for the captions to be created.

As always, your feedback on these captions is very welcome!

WATCH NOW:
UFB and the Future of Fibre

Where would we be now without UFB?

Clearly the decisions made about connectivity and fibre a few years back unknowingly prepared New Zealand for the Covid-19 pandemic. With remote technology uptake at an all-time high now, what does the future hold?

Join Chorus' Network Strategy Manager Kurt Rodgers as he talks through the UFB rollout (the good, the bad and the ugly), the massive rise in data consumption, HyperFibre, and the future of connectivity in New Zealand. This is a hugely interesting talk.

ITP members can watch it free here

Get an ITP Industry Mentor

As you may know, ITP re-launched our Mentoring Programme this year as a more stream-lined and free service to members. We have lots of mentors ready to go and if you're keen to be advance your career, we can match you promptly and kick off your mentoring partnership.

What is the ITP Mentoring Programme?

The programme continues to be built around professional development or career-focused mentoring - helping IT professionals set clear career goals and objectives, understand that they have the ability to achieve these, and putting in place a plan to do it.

If you haven't been involved in mentoring before don't be shy - this programme is purpose built for you. The programme has been designed to scale and we see it as a core part of professional growth.

The programme is also completely free for non-student ITP members, as part of our overall goal to help further those in our community. We'll be providing other career guidance for students but mentoring is for those currently practicing.

Once matched, mentees and mentors can expect to meet once a month (for approximately an hour) over the 12-month period. This can be in-person of via a videocall. We provide guidance, resources, career planning templates and more, and you also have access to a mentoring facilitator to help work through any issues you might have along the way.

Now's the right time

It's been a tough year for everyone, but now is the absolute right time to focus on career development and the future. It's also a great time of year - we can get you set up now, meet your mentor before Christmas, then kick things off properly in the new year.

It's easy to get started - just join the mentoring programme online. We ask you a few questions to help match you to the perfect mentor and the whole process only takes around 10-15 minutes.

Find out more or sign up here

Exclusive ITP member offers

We're really excited to have a bunch of new deals and offers available for ITP members, thanks to some of our awesome Corporate Partners. Check them out on the ITP Member Offers page.

This includes huge offers on tech-related courses from Yoobee, NZSE and ITP, plus excellent offers from GoWirelessNZ, EscrowNZ, The IT Psychiatrist, insurance offerings, events and conferences and more.

Check out all of the ITP Member Offers

Offer of the week:

The IT Psychiatrist is an "on demand" tech executive that can help your organisation, or boost your capability, across cost, tools, information and skills.

ITP members and partners exclusively receive 10% Discount on all engagements.

If you're an ITP member or corporate partner, check them out here

Previous webinars - all available free to members

All past webinars are available on the ITP Video Library for members:

• UFB and the Future of Fibre
• Down-to-Earth Leadership Skills for Tech Geniuses
• How technology enabled the health response
• How Covid is impacting the Gaming Industry
• Creating a plan for Digital Skills
• Cybersecurity and the recent attacks
• Tech legal update - what you need to know
• An afternoon with Nanogirl
• Taking kiwi tech to the post-Covid world
• Tech startups in a post-Covid world
• The IRD Transformation
• Digital Government and Covid-19
• Tech and the Covid-19 recovery
• Privacy in the days of Covid-19
• Leading Wellness in uncertain times
• Meet the ITP Workshop Presenters
• The data behind Covid19
• Innovation in tough times: Don't Hunker in the Bunker
• Covid19: Tech and the Law
• Cybersecurity from home
• Clarke Ching on disaster innovation
• CITPNZ and CTech: The What, How and Why
• Working Remotely - How to get through

Check out the webinar section here

The 123Tech National Finals were broadcast LIVE at 2pm on Thursday 10 December 2020.

Watch as we check in with lots of student teams from around the country, take virtual tours of TradeMe, Datacom, NZSE and more, and announce the 2020 winners live!

Hosted by Suzy Cato, Digital Dan and the 123Tech team.

Good grief.

It's almost as if the US government doesn't really understand what Facebook does, how it does it or what the real issues are, but it knows people are mad as hell so it'll have a crack at regulating it the old fashioned way.

Facebook bought WhatsApp and Instagram (and it did so with regulatory approval) and has grown from strength to strength since then. Now the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is going to argue that Facebook is to be split up.

The last time the FCC did that on this scale it took the companies that had spawned from Bell (a company set up by the inventor of the telephone himself who actually got to capitalise on his own invention - something that rarely happens throughout history) and forced AT&T to sell them off. That was in 1982 and took a couple of years to complete. Fast forward to the 21^st century and those regional telephony companies have amalgamated back together again in the form of Verizon and AT&T.

Doing something similar to Facebook would result in three very strong operators each in their own niches continuing to dominate those niches because social media platforms are natural monopolies. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Instagram, Pintrest and even the newcomers like TikTok all have a different take on a social media user's needs and they don't compete with each other very much at all. How many of us have multiple accounts on multiple platforms to keep up with different groups or issues in different ways? Breaking up Facebook won't change that at all.

Instead, the regulators need to look deeper into Facebook's operating model, at its claims around how many clicks each ad gets, how much it charges advertisers, how it manages user-driven complaints about abuse, how it encourages users towards ever more extreme content, how it ignores privacy, defamation, copyright and other regionally variable pieces of legislation and then we might have something worth talking about.

Of course, that's not likely to happen when you look at the calibre of the congressional hearings or the types of questions being put to the founders and CEOs of the world's largest social media companies. Until the politicians understand what these companies do, what danger they represent and why they need to act, I fear we're going to be spending a lot of time on lawyers and the outcome will be meaningless at best.

It's a shame, because social media has a huge potential to be so much more than an advertising platform. It's an idea that is pretty idealistic and pure but at its heart, social media is about enabling creativity and encouraging connections and community building. It's about bringing people together in a way that wasn't possible previously.

I've seen it work tremendously well from the individual connections you can make or rekindle through to charitable support (if you'd like to donate to The Aunties let me know and I'll hook you up), lost toys returned to desperate owners and so much more. You can find your tribe online - the vertical integration allows you to connect with anyone who shares your views, your hobbies, your values regardless of where you are in the world. You need never be isolated or alone again.

But unfortunately that's treated as a byproduct, not the core proposition, and between the influencers, the brand ambassadors, the liars and charlatans and the disinformation professionals, and the companies themselves with a greed for ever more revenue and a constant demand for growth, the poor old users are squashed into boxes and fed a steady diet of fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Now if we could regulate that, I'd be a happy camper.

The Federal Trade Commission, in conjunction with 47 state attorneys general, are suing Facebook alleging anti-competitive practices. It follows the Department of Justice's lawsuit filed against Google in October which alleged that the search giant was using its market dominance to lock competitors out.

The approach taken by the regulators is different but they ultimately seek the same result - structural separation of these Big Tech companies to break their allegedly monopolistic practices. 

In the case of Facebook, the lawsuits centre on its acquisition strategy, which involved the company paying US$1 billion for photo-sharing app Instagram in 2011 and the 2014 purchase of WhatsApp for US$19.3 billion.

Divestiture of assets

Those acquisitions, the FTC suit claims (which is well-written and worth a read), were designed to eliminate threats to Facebook's power. Whether that was the intention or not, the purchases have certainly helped Facebook retain its position as the world's dominant social network - at least in the English-speaking world anyway, with over 3 billion users.

The FTC is seeking an injunction against Facebook that would include the "divestiture of assets, divestiture or reconstruction of businesses (including, but not limited to, Instagram and/or WhatsApp), and such other relief sufficient to restore the competition that would exist absent the conduct alleged".

Another arm of the case takes aim at Facebook's policies around controlling which third parties have access to the network via APIs (application programming interfaces).  

Facebook disclosed over a year ago that it was being investigated by the FTC. It also had to fork out US$5 billion in fines to the FTC and tighten its privacy policies as a result of privacy breaches in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

But that pay-out barely caused a ripple in the markets given Facebook's strong balance sheet and, yep, its market dominance. Fines aren't being demanded in this case, but a more structural solution aimed at getting to the heart of the perceived problem - Facebook's ability to crush any emerging competitors - or buy them outright.

Facebook for its part is considering the lawsuits and its next moves.  

"Years after the FTC cleared our acquisitions, the government now wants a do-over with no regard for the impact that precedent would have on the broader business community or the people who choose our products every day," the company posted on Twitter.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his executives do have a point. Where was the considered scrutiny of the acquisitions by the FTC nearly a decade ago when Instagram was on the block and especially four years later when Facebook paid its eye-watering sum for Whatsapp?

What it means for us

As with the Google lawsuit, which also takes place in the context of US anti-trust law, the Sherman Act, Facebook's case will be complicated, costly and drawn out over years. In the meantime, Facebook and its other messaging apps will likely continue to be used as normal, however, any plans Facebook still had to further integrate its messaging platforms will now surely be on hold.

The suit has major implications for how Facebook uses data in future, how it interacts with other companies seeking to access its network with software interfaces, and ultimately its future shape as an advertising platform for New Zealand businesses.

Big is not necessarily bad in competition law. The issue is whether being big gives Google and Facebook the power to stop anyone else competing against them. That's the crux of the matter and the tech landscape could alter significantly based on the lawusit outcomes.

Who's next?

The question now is who is next? Will Apple and Amazon also find themselves fighting sweeping antitrust action? 

Apple's Tim Cook clearly sees his company as standing apart from the others.

"Some people see Silicon Valley as monolithic," he told The Outside Podcast this week.

"And so in particular, the larger companies they sort of put in one bucket, if you will. Some of the big issues that are surrounding tech today are the lack of responsibility taken on a platform about what happens. We clearly take responsibility. We make tough decisions."

US regulators may well beg to differ. One thing is for sure, President Biden's first term in office is likely to also see exhausting legal action rolling on in the background as Big Tech fights a long-anticipated rearguard action.

Version 3 of the app will be released tomorrow on both Apple and Google stores and the addition of Bluetooth is not intended to replace signing in to locations via the QR code diary, but rather enhance the capability should someone test positive in the community.

Bluetooth tracing - not tracking, which would imply an active monitoring of the user's location at all times - allows the user's device to record which other Bluetooth-enabled devices it has come into contact with. If one of those devices is carried by someone who tests positive, the system can alert all those devices to let them know to get tested and to isolate until they get the all clear.

The system doesn't store information in a central repository so users can be assured there is no state-level monitoring of their movements. In fact, anyone who does receive a notification of a positive result near them at some point won't know who that person was or where they were, just that they've been near someone with a positive result.

Not all residents in New Zealand have a mobile device that is capable of this kind of activity, so the Ministry of Health continues to urge everyone to record their own movements around the country. Usage of the app remains high - around 2.4 million Kiwis are using the app and the ministry estimates around 90% of those have a device that is capable of Bluetooth tracing - but not all scan in as often as they should. The hope is that by combining QR code self scan-ins with Bluetooth tracing, any outbreak can be swiftly identified and squashed.

The ministry continues to work on trials of the Bluetooth contact tracing card for those who don't have access to a smart phone and the recent trial in Ngongotaha, just outside Rotorua, saw more than 50% of locals sign up to be involved. The trial is looking at both the technology and its usability but also at user acceptance of, and willingness to use, a card that needs to be worn on a lanyard or carried in an external pocket.

The Exposure Notification Framework (ENF) developed jointly by Apple and Google is currently in use in 25 countries around the world and is only available to public health agencies.

Users who already have the app will be able to upgrade to the new version from Thursday.

Deloitte's Top 200 Index features the country's largest 200 companies by revenue, which collectively generated $173 billion in 2019. They span all sectors, from retail and agriculture to transport and construction.

But when it came time to choose some of the top performers of the year, Deloitte's team of judges leaned towards companies in tech-related industries.

The awards "recognised those businesses that have gone beyond simply responding and recovering, and are taking this opportunity to transform and rebuild for a stronger future," said Deloitte.

The criteria include the latest financial measures, as well as non-financial and other qualitative measures of organisational performance, such as corporate reputation, approach to environmental management and others.

Weighing up all of those factors Fisher & Paykel Healthcare named Company of the Year with chief executive Lewis Gradon winning Chief Executive Officer of the Year.

Rising to the Covid challenge

By any measure, it has been a massive year for the designer and manufacturer of high-quality health equipment. In the half-year to September 30, revenue was up 59 per cent to $910.2 million, while profit jumped 86 per cent to $225.5 million.

F&P Healthcare's hospital-related business internationally nearly doubled its revenue as it ramped up production to serve public health workers treating patients infected with Covid-19. The company's Optiflow and Airvo systems saw particularly strong demand.  

"This reflected a worldwide change in clinical practice. Informed by emerging studies and anecdotal evidence, respiratory specialists began leading with nasal high flow therapy before resorting to ventilators," F&P Healthcare noted in its half-year results.

At the same time, the company retained its position as one of the country's largest investors in research and development, which accounted for seven per cent of operating revenue in the half-year, $64.4 million.

Xero, which won the Best Growth Strategy category, also had a big year on the back of helping small businesses navigate the impacts of Covid-19 with its cloud-based accounting services in strong demand.

In the half-year to September 30, Xero turned a net profit after tax of $34.5 million, up from $1.3 million in the previous half-year period.

Operating revenue was up 21 per cent to nearly $410 million.

Animation Research founder Ian Taylor

Road to recovery

Chorus won the Most Improved Performance award, reflecting a change in the company's fortunes that included a strong rally in its share price, which is up 21 per cent so far this year. That reflects the company being able to put regulatory uncertainty behind it and successfully rolling out the majority of the ultrafast broadband network. Though further regulatory pressures remain as the Commerce Commission looks to change how UFB wholesale prices are calculated.

Finally, the Visionary Leader award wen to Animation Research founder Ian Taylor, who had to re-organise his business to adapt to the new reality of the pandemic. Running graphics and animation services around the world for some of the top sports events, Taylor had to overcome travel restrictions to allow his team to operate remotely from Dunedin.

The year also saw him team up with Sam Morgan to push the deployment of a Covid card device to improve contact tracing efforts to fight the pandemic. That effort ended in frustration as the Government moved slowly on the programme, though Morgan and Taylor can take some comfort from the fact that trials of a similar Covid card are now underway.

There are 11 companies on the Deloitte Top 200 index that could be considered to be in the technology or telecommunications space, with Xero, Datacom, Spark among the biggest and multinationals IBM and Samsung also featuring.

As one era concludes another begins, with Anthony Dowling and Robyn Kamira appointed to the President and Deputy President roles respectively.

Also, check out last week's UFB and the Future of Fibre webinar on the ITP Video Library, now with closed captions, and look out for the final of the 123Tech in-school challenge this week, broadcast live at 2pm Thursday!

Passing of the President baton

Last week was the last ITP National Board meeting of the year, with a strong focus on planning (both strategic planning and annual planning for next year's work programme).

It also marked the end of an era, with ITP President Mike Dennehy reaching the end of his term. Mike has been President for 4 years and was a very active Deputy President prior to that.

Mike Dennehy, ITP President 2016-2020

Mike has been a huge influence in the organisation over this time, with a completely unwavering focus on professional practice and ensuring that ITP's attention remains on helping our members, and the profession as a whole, grow. His leadership has also helped ensure steady and stable governance and a focus on ensuring broad income streams to support ITP's activities.

At a personal level, I've thoroughly enjoyed working with him. As well as being wise counsel, he's both supported and challenged me, which is awesome. We've also had heaps of fun along the way, and I'll certainly miss his wicked sense of humour - although he's staying on on the Board and Executive for a few months to ease the transition, and I suspect we'll still catch up regularly after that!

New ITP President and Deputy President

New ITP President Anthony Dowling and Deputy President Robyn Kamira

Ex-Deputy President Anthony Dowling has stepped up to the national President role following four years on the Executive (and several years on the National Board prior to that). A huge congratulations to Ants and it's great to see the deep south continue the tradition of leadership of ITP through many Presidents off and on over the years :).

While he does have big boots to fill, Ants will make an excellent President and is also joined by new Deputy President Robyn Kamira. As well as serving on ITP's National Board, Robyn has been hugely involved in the industry and profession as a Māori Economic Development Advisory Board and Māori Spectrum Working Group member, Hi-Tech Awards lead judge, advisor to the TIN 100 Report, member of the Tech Story Advisory Board and so much more.

We're incredibly lucky to have such high-calibre people across our National Board, both past and present. Without exception, our Board members work hard because they care deeply about our profession and it's a privilege to be working with them all.

123Tech National Finals - this Thursday!

We're really excited about the Tahi Rua Toru Tech National Finals this Thursday, 2-3pm!

As most will know, Tahi Rua Toru Tech (123Tech) is NZ's in-school project-based digital tech challenge, with teams of students across New Zealand using digital tech to tackle a problem in their local school or community.

The challenge is co-funded by industry and Government, and many thousands of students have taken part over the last three years to help usher in the Digital Technologies curriculum.

Given Covid and its impact on travel and other activities, we've opted for a livestreamed broadcast event rather than the face-to-face finals event this year. While on one hand it'll be sad not to welcome all the finalists to Wellington, it gives us the opportunity to put together an amazing showcase of both school student work, and our industry.

As well as announcing and celebrating the national winners live, the event will feature virtual tours and interviews with some of the most innovative tech companies in New Zealand and quite a few surprises!

Check out the live stream on Thursday on the 123Tech website.

ITP Video Library now with closed captions

Those with hearing impairment - as well as those who just prefer to read as well as listen - will be pleased to know that we're now investing in closed captions for all new videos in the ITP Video Library.

This came from a suggested by a member and is a great way we can ensure that ITP is as open and welcoming to the whole community - including those with disabilities. We're investing in human-created (rather than automatic) captioning to improve accuracy, and while adding captions to all videos in the existing library is cost prohibitive, we'll be adding them to all new talks, webinars and presentations.

Generally speaking, the closed captions will appear 1-2 days after the video is uploaded. We're working on speeding this up, however don't want to delay the release of videos while waiting for the captions to be created.

As always, your feedback on these captions is very welcome!

WATCH NOW:
UFB and the Future of Fibre

Where would we be now without UFB?

Clearly the decisions made about connectivity and fibre a few years back unknowingly prepared New Zealand for the Covid-19 pandemic. With remote technology uptake at an all-time high now, what does the future hold?

Join Chorus' Network Strategy Manager Kurt Rodgers as he talks through the UFB rollout (the good, the bad and the ugly), the massive rise in data consumption, HyperFibre, and the future of connectivity in New Zealand. This is a hugely interesting talk.

ITP members can watch it free here

Get an ITP Industry Mentor

As you may know, ITP re-launched our Mentoring Programme this year as a more stream-lined and free service to members. We have lots of mentors ready to go and if you're keen to be advance your career, we can match you promptly and kick off your mentoring partnership.

What is the ITP Mentoring Programme?

The programme continues to be built around professional development or career-focused mentoring - helping IT professionals set clear career goals and objectives, understand that they have the ability to achieve these, and putting in place a plan to do it.

If you haven't been involved in mentoring before don't be shy - this programme is purpose built for you. The programme has been designed to scale and we see it as a core part of professional growth.

The programme is also completely free for non-student ITP members, as part of our overall goal to help further those in our community. We'll be providing other career guidance for students but mentoring is for those currently practicing.

Once matched, mentees and mentors can expect to meet once a month (for approximately an hour) over the 12-month period. This can be in-person of via a videocall. We provide guidance, resources, career planning templates and more, and you also have access to a mentoring facilitator to help work through any issues you might have along the way.

Now's the right time

It's been a tough year for everyone, but now is the absolute right time to focus on career development and the future. It's also a great time of year - we can get you set up now, meet your mentor before Christmas, then kick things off properly in the new year.

It's easy to get started - just join the mentoring programme online. We ask you a few questions to help match you to the perfect mentor and the whole process only takes around 10-15 minutes.

Find out more or sign up here

Exclusive ITP member offers

We're really excited to have a bunch of new deals and offers available for ITP members, thanks to some of our awesome Corporate Partners. Check them out on the ITP Member Offers page.

This includes huge offers on tech-related courses from Yoobee, NZSE and ITP, plus excellent offers from GoWirelessNZ, EscrowNZ, The IT Psychiatrist, insurance offerings, events and conferences and more.

Check out all of the ITP Member Offers

Offer of the week:

The IT Psychiatrist is an "on demand" tech executive that can help your organisation, or boost your capability, across cost, tools, information and skills.

ITP members and partners exclusively receive 10% Discount on all engagements.

If you're an ITP member or corporate partner, check them out here

Previous webinars - all available free to members

All past webinars are available on the ITP Video Library for members:

• UFB and the Future of Fibre
• Down-to-Earth Leadership Skills for Tech Geniuses
• How technology enabled the health response
• How Covid is impacting the Gaming Industry
• Creating a plan for Digital Skills
• Cybersecurity and the recent attacks
• Tech legal update - what you need to know
• An afternoon with Nanogirl
• Taking kiwi tech to the post-Covid world
• Tech startups in a post-Covid world
• The IRD Transformation
• Digital Government and Covid-19
• Tech and the Covid-19 recovery
• Privacy in the days of Covid-19
• Leading Wellness in uncertain times
• Meet the ITP Workshop Presenters
• The data behind Covid19
• Innovation in tough times: Don't Hunker in the Bunker
• Covid19: Tech and the Law
• Cybersecurity from home
• Clarke Ching on disaster innovation
• CITPNZ and CTech: The What, How and Why
• Working Remotely - How to get through

Check out the webinar section here

LibreOffice clearly has not had a facelift since the 1800s. Honestly, it was a giant leap back in time to the Netscape 3.1 era of design. The icons alone were quite quaint but what really got me was the bewildering array of tools on offer for managing a simple document and, more importantly, the things that were missing.

Office and Microsoft Word are sadly very similar in that regard. Sure, I can chose from a thousand fonts, I can format, I can paste with formatting, or without, or with some other form of formatting. I can publish as HTML, I can save as a PDF, I can justify to my heart's content. There are templates, there are designs and there are styles (these are different things) and I can merge with lists, with other documents or with previous versions of the same thing.

But all these tools are overblown. There are so many options and so many tools that can or might plug in that simply aren't necessary and a lack of the tools that are necessary.

What I wouldn't give for one set of accepted words across all my devices. Or those shortcuts we all develop (when I type in nez and add a space my processor fills it out to New Zealand. This has been the hardest sentence to write because of that) and which I have to reteach every version I come across.

I have set up one processor to automatically lose the formatting by default as it pastes copy into a document, but I can't find the setting to let me do that on the other one, yet both are linked to the same account and both have my name on them. Instead, we get extra tools and extra capability added on all the time that don't seem to actually be on the wishlist of users.

Which brings me, in a roundabout sort of way, to the Salesforce purchase of Slack.

Slack was really the flagship  product of the new era of productivity tools. Never mind bundling Word and Excel and PowerPoint together, Slack (and Trello and Jira and Teams and all the others) bring together cloud storage, collaborative working, messaging (including video chats), calendars and meetings project planning and so much more.

For the early days of the gig economy, Slack was the business. You could belong to Slack channels for different companies! You could share documents and manage workflows independently of each other yet have it all in one interface! Truly, these were the best of times.

But for all the make busy, organising and sharing that goes on, I often wonder just how much actual y'know work takes place on these channels. I'm often reminded of my eldest daughter who, when she was starting out in high school, would make folders for each class, colour coordinated with tabs and goodness knows what else. Then she would make flip cards with notes on them and hole punch them and add them in. It would take hours and looked great but I'm not sure it actually counted as studying. (Mind you, having said that, she got much better grades than I ever did so what do I know?)

Salesforce used to be a CRM system (customer resource management) but has ballooned in recent years, buying up associated products and their owners and bolting them all together. Radian 6, long the high-end social media management platform, was an early acquisition but there are plenty more since then, and today Salesforce lumbers along with all manner of beast and fowl flapping and slithering and grunting and squawking and it's not alone.

Microsoft's productivity suite now centres around Teams which is a fancy front end to its own cloud-based storage-slash-CRM thing wherein you can set up a group of users (a Team) and give them access to certain files, a private chat facility complete with emoji, bolt on your Outlook calendar and Microsoft Planner should you want to plan things (or you can add Monday or Jira or a dozen or more besides) and you can make phone calls, have video conference calls, send tweets over Yammer (are they Yams?) and also allows you to open documents in the relevant online version of the app (even if you have the app installed) and auto-save it to the cloud (if you're connected) but again, this is a new iteration of the world processor, spreadsheet, slide deck so you don't have any of the tools you've personalised over on the other version.

I can see where they were going with all this. A word processor that is connected to other processors means multiple users can work on a document all at the same time (Google does this astonishingly well - if you want to see collaboration in action watch a classroom of primary kids working on a Google Doc) but the way all these tools work is to give everyone a second-class experience and call it progress.

But with two giants like Salesforce and Microsoft ready to duke it out for the new office revolution you can bet we're going to see innovation thrown at us in spades in the coming months and years. And, while I question just how productive this will make us, in a time when so many are working remotely and we might need to drop everything and get out of the office and work from a different device, all these new office tools give us the ability to carry on regardless, and that's worth a huge amount.

Welcome to the new Office Wars.

This week: Big acquisitions in NZ and abroad, with Australian online retailer Kogan purchasing NZ's Mighty Ape and Saleforce.com picking up Slack for $27 Billion.

Plus: Research finds disclosing security breaches is better financially for companies, US cybersecurity chief sacked for saying elections were fair, Callaghan wanting to attract top international talent, and are digital health passes the future of travel?

ITP Members can view previous Tech Media Panels and webinars, alongside 100s of other events, on the ITP Member Library.

In a letter to the minister, NZTech chief executive Graeme Muller wrote that with Clark also taking the consumer affairs, commerce and statistics portfolios, there was "considerable opportunity to advance financial technology, education technology, artificial intelligence, blockchain as well as digital identity".

But NZTech would still like to see a fully-fledged technology portfolio by the next election, a role that would also span hi-tech manufacturing and biotechnology.

"This respects the natural division between Research, Science and Innovation, a separate portfolio and what is essentially applied technology," wrote Muller.

NZTech recommended that a technology branch be established within the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment from 2022 "to take ownership of cross-cutting policy, skill development, funding/grants and the international promotion of New Zealand tech".

NZTech's proposed action to attract top tech talent

It urged the Government to forge ahead with its Industry Transformation Plan for Digital Technologies, but to use that as the basis for the first 'Digital New Zealand

Strategy', which it said should be in place by the start of 2023. 

The measures, as well as implementing a national strategy around artificial intelligence, would seem to reflect widespread concern in the tech sector that the Government lacks a cohesive strategy on how to leverage technology to boost the country's social, economic and environmental wellbeing. 

Clark has yet to make any substantive comments about where he plans to put his focus in his new portfolio areas. But the rest of the NZTech Briefing for Incoming Ministers should give him plenty of food for thought about what could be done in the next 100 days as well as in the course of Labour's full term.

The BIM spans areas well-canvassed ahead of the election, such as fast-tracking visas for high-tech workers and investors, boosting the ElevateNZ fund for tech start-ups and updating government procurement rules to give the domestic tech sector more of an opportunity to grow its capacity.

But NZTech also advocates for an overhaul of regulations to allow greater use of biotech tools such as gene editing, the formation of a plan to "end digital poverty" and the creation of an infrastructure forecasting and management system.

It would use AI to "aid and model decision support at both local and central government".

Think bigger

NZTech also suggests addressing what many see as a yawning gap in tech-related blue skies research funding. It wants to see a "standalone technology investigator-initiated research fund" separate to the Marsden Fund, which it says is "ill-suited to technology".

The NZTech BIM amounts to a wish list for a tech-sector craving strong leadership, better decision making and support to grow the digital economy quickly.

Some of the work, such as the Industry Transformation Plan, is already underway and will inform the priorities Clark has on his plate over the next few years.

But the subtext of the TechNZ BIM is that we need to think bigger and be more ambitious for tech. The challenge has been laid down - The question now is whether the Government will listen and act.

Read NZTech's Briefing Paper for Incoming Minister here.

The purchase is timely - COVID restrictions continue apace and globally IT-based workers are doing more work out of the office and away from the steely glare of middle managers. Having a tool that enables robust planning, team communication and cohesion and tracking capability is essential and for many users, Slack offers the best selection of tools on the market.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in a statement: "Together, Salesforce and Slack will shape the future of enterprise software and transform the way everyone works in the all-digital, work-from-anywhere world,"  while Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield is just as keen, saying "Personally, I believe this is the most strategic combination in the history of software, and I can't wait to get going."

Salesforce has expanded its portfolio of products beyond its original customer resource management (CRM) base over the past few years. Its warchest has paid for a number of acquisitions including a big chunk of data warehousing company Snowflake ($250 million), Demandware ($2.8 billion), MuleSoft ($6.5 billion), Vlocity ($1.3 billion) and Tableau, its largest purchase to date at $15.3 billion. It's also moved into social media management with the purchase of Radian6.

But Salesforce is up against a newly awoken Microsoft with its product set built on Teams and its suite of capability. Teams has been beefed up lately, with Microsoft taking on Zoom in the video calling space and bundling the capability in with its messaging app, planning tools and cloud-based storage capability to form the core hub of a new suite of office tools.

With Microsoft's embedded base in many corporations around the world, Salesforce will have its work cut out for it.

Krebs was fired by President Trump, via Twitter, on November 17 after the government body he led, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, issued a statement rejecting Trump's claims that election ballot machines had manipulated the vote in Biden's favour.

Over the weekend, Krebs gave this first interview on being fired, to 60 Minutes, reflecting on going up against an administration that spread misinformation and outright lies to undermine the election result.

Krebs had ultimate responsibility for US Government efforts to secure critical infrastructure, including nuclear power plants and the entire federal and state election system. A life-long Republican, Krebs was appointed to head CISA in 2017 with the unanimous support of the US Senate after working on cybersecurity in the Bush administration and serving a stint as Microsoft's director of cybersecurity policy.

He told 60 Minutes that from the very start of his time at CISA, the agency's priority was to prevent efforts to hack election vote-counting machines.

The agency ran "countless gaming scenarios" to prepare their defences. So when Krebs and his team gathered at their command centre on election day to monitor the voting, it was no surprise that the day progressed as expected - with the election officials and the hardware they used doing their intended jobs.

"It was quiet," says Krebs. 

Chris Krebs (left) terminated for doing his job

No indication of hacking

"There was no indication or evidence that there was any sort of hacking or compromise of election systems."

Then the vote turned against Trump and he and his legal team put the misinformation machine into action. In a tweet, flagged for containing misinformation, President Trump claimed that vote-counting machines run by the Dominion Voting Systems company had "deleted 2.7 million Trump votes".

In a press conference on November 5th, Trump told reporters that "this is a case where they are trying to steal an election. They are trying to rig an election."

Krebs was incredulous. 

"The proof is in the ballots," he told 60 Minutes. 

"The recounts are consistent with the initial count. If there was an algorithm that was flipping votes, it didn't work."

He points to states like Georgia, which completed a hand recount of five million ballots, which confirmed the results recorded by the voting machines. 

"That gives you the ability to prove there was no malicious algorithm or hacked software that adjusted the tally of the vote," he says.

"That pretty thoroughly, in my opinion, debunks some of the sensationalist claims out there that there is some hacking of these election vendors and their software and their systems across the country," he adds.

John Poulos, the founder of Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems wrote a piece on Sunday in the Wall Street Journal calling the Trump legal team's claims of voter machine tampering "bizarre".

"There is no secret 'vote flipping' algorithm. Third-party test labs, chosen by the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission and accredited by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, perform complete source-code reviews on every federally certified tabulation system. States replicate this process for their own certification," he wrote. 

"These attacks undermine the tens of thousands of state and local officials who run our elections." he added. 

CISA: Most secure election - ever

CISA responded to the claims in its statement claiming the election was the "most secure in American history". In doing so, Krebs sealed his own fate, at odds with a president desperate to stay in power and willing to undermine the integrity of the country's electoral system to do so.

Krebs did the right thing and helped secure an election which saw a record turnout of voters. But he was immediately removed from his position.

"It's not how I wanted to go out," he says.

"The thing that upsets me about that is that I didn't get a chance to say goodbye to my team. 

Last year I spoke to Krebs' predecessor, Greg Touhill, who served as President Obama's chief information security officer. Touhill abruptly left the CISO role in the US Government with the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House. Did he quit, unwilling to work for Trump?

"Cybersecurity is a non-political issue and so am I," Touhill told me.

"I have served every president of the United States since Jimmy Carter, but our officers take an oath to the constitution, not to a person. I left the campsite a lot better than I found it, but there's still a lot of work to be done."

Krebs' Republican leanings didn't do him any favours in the end as he chose to do his job rather than enable one of the most cynical efforts to manipulate an election, one that came not from foreign actors, but from the White House itself.

"I did it right, we did it right," says Krebs. 

"It was a secure election."

Following a spate of arson attacks on cell sites (the towers that provide mobile and internet connectivity) around Aotearoa during the level four lockdown in April/May 2020, Vodafone NZ contacted Ngahere Communities to help understand community concerns around 5G, particularly with South Auckland where the majority of the early attacks occurred.

Nicky Preston, senior communications lead, Vodafone NZ explains, "We are trying to address an information gap and help Kiwis better understand the potential of 5G. New Zealanders increasingly rely on digital infrastructure to keep us connected to the internet, but as an industry we tend to over-complicate how mobile network technologies such as 5G operate. The science can be technical and confusing, so we're trying to translate complex topics on how phone and internet networks work into easily digestible videos that will be shared on social media - explaining electromagnetic frequencies and the evolution mobile tech.

"We started working on this kaupapa after the first NZ lockdown, when COVID-19 changed the landscape so dramatically and we realised we needed to provide more accessible 5G education following the arson attacks on cell sites, to combat conspiracy theories online. Hopefully by busting some myths, and using humour to beat the rumours, New Zealanders will feel more comfortable that 5G isn't something they need to worry about."

Kirstin Te Wao, head of Māori development, adds, "Part of the challenge the tech sector has is a lack of cultural diversity within key decision making roles that can translate into messaging that doesn't resonate with many of the people within our communities. Partnering with an organisation like Ngahere Communities means that we bring community concerns, voices and solutions to the fore in a meaningful way that resonates with them.

"As part of our commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi, we're working hard to create meaningful, enduring and authentic relationships with Māori innovators and entrepreneurs like Manawa and her team."

Manawa Udy, CEO of Ngahere Communities, who led the campaign alongside her team including producer Jason Manumu'a, says, "We partnered with Vodafone on this project because we agreed with the kaupapa around more inclusive and accessible 5G education, and the concept of including our community in these bigger conversations.  Too often our communities are expected to just 'get on board' with new ideas and opportunities but we need to journey through these big changes together, it helps to reduce the amount of fake news and give facts, not fiction.

"It's no secret that South Auckland is dripping with creative talent, and we were stoked to have an opportunity to get our crew together, including creator and social media influencer Torrell Tafa, to work on this project. The result is three choice videos that we hope are both engaging and informative."

Nikora Ngaropo, Member of the Digital Council for Aotearoa New Zealand, adds, "I'm glad I've been able to bring a technology voice to this piece, as a member of the Digital Council for Aotearoa New Zealand. I think it's important that our communities understand facts and don't get caught up in misinformation which is so easy to do these days. Also Ngahere Communities was great to work with, it's important that we have businesses involved that are connected to the pulse of our communities and know how to engage them."

The first video, focusing on explaining the potential of 5G, was shared by Torrell Tafa on Friday 20 November - with two myth-busting videos going live on Torrell's social media channels on Friday 27 November (video 2: 5G myth-buster on EMF) and Thursday 3 December (video 3: 5G myth-buster on environmental concerns).

Vodafone NZ will then share from their social media channels (including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tiktok) both organically and via paid adverts, as follows:

-          Video 1: 5G explainer, from 28 November

-          Video 2: 5G myth-buster on EMF, from 1 December

-          Video 3: 5G myth-buster on environmental concerns, from 8 December

For more information about Vodafone NZ 5G, please visit www.vodafone.co.nz/5G. For factual information about 5G, head to www.5Gfacts.org.nz, which was created by the Telecommunications Forum industry body and launched in September.

This week's another busy one, with ITP's National Board meeting on Wednesday to talk through strategy and planning for 2021, subsidiary company Escrow NZ's board meeting on Tuesday, and heaps of other activities on this week.

And don't miss this week's Thursday Live Webinar, featuring Chorus' head of network strategy Kurt Rodgers talking through UFB, HyperFibre, and what's next for NZ's fibre infrastructure.

Great 60th Celebration in Dunedin

Last Thursday we had our first 60^th Anniversary event, organised by our Dunedin branch. It was great to be able to be down at my home town to celebrate with our members.

The evening was MC'd by Keith Lightfoot, a longstanding member who was also our after-dinner speaker 10 years ago at our 50^th Anniversary Conference. Keith is great - as well as talking through some of his memories, he entertained the audience with anecdotes and more. 

I had the opportunity to speak about the many people who have contributed to ITP, especially over the last decade or so I've been involved. ITP is a community, and it has taken hundreds of people drawn from our thousands of members to grow and develop our community. 

Sometimes our army of volunteers aren't as visible externally as people like me, however they are the lifeblood of our organisation - ours boards, our branch committees, our working groups and taskforces, speakers, and so many others who contribute in all sorts of ways. It was great to able to acknowledge some of their efforts over the years, especially our ex-Presidents (3 of whom were in the room).

We were also treated to hear from Rasha Abu-Safieh, who talked about the hope that technology can bring to an otherwise hopeless situation. She talked about the challenges of life in Gaza, Palestine. Raising a young family of three, Rasha could see a need to create meaningful work for woman. With a degree in IT in hand, Rasha was inspired to create an NGO called GGateway that went on to train over 1000+ people and create over 300 long term jobs and is now funded through the World Bank. 

Rasha Abu-Safieh talking about tech giving young women hope in Gaza

Now living in Dunedin, I have absolutely no doubt you'll be hearing more about Rasha in the months and years to come. 

It was also great to catch up with some of our long-standing members and others in the tech community, including all of our southern Fellows and Honorary Fellows (Keith Lightfoot, Mike Harte, Steve MacDonell, Ian Taylor, Neil James and Nicola Walmsley) and many others. Also excellent to see Clare Curran along plus Dunedin Mayor Aaron Hawkins and others.

PocketSmith co-founder Jason Leong talks with Keith Lightfoot about their journey.

A huge thanks to our Dunedin Branch Committee for pulling the event together, as well as Jamie at Gallaway Cook Allan for hosting the celebration - great job.

This week's ITP Thursday Live Webinar:
UFB and the Future of Fibre

4-5pm, Thursday 3 December 2020

Where would we be now without UFB?

Clearly the decisions made about connectivity and fibre a few years back unknowingly prepared New Zealand for the Covid-19 pandemic. With remote technology uptake at an all-time high now, what does the future hold?

Join Chorus' Network Strategy Manager Kurt Rodgers as he talks through the UFB rollout (the good, the bad and the ugly), the massive rise in data consumption, HyperFibre, and the future of connectivity in New Zealand. This will be a hugely interesting talk.

More details and register for free

Get an ITP Industry Mentor

By now, all eligible members should have received an invitation to sign up for an industry Mentor, now a free service as part of ITP membership.

As you may know, ITP re-launched our Mentoring Programme this year as a more stream-lined and free service to members. We have lots of mentors ready to go and if you're keen to be advance your career, we can match you promptly and kick off your mentoring partnership.

What is the ITP Mentoring Programme?

The programme continues to be built around professional development or career-focused mentoring - helping IT professionals set clear career goals and objectives, understand that they have the ability to achieve these, and putting in place a plan to do it.

If you haven't been involved in mentoring before don't be shy - this programme is purpose built for you. The programme has been designed to scale and we see it as a core part of professional growth.

The programme is also completely free for non-student ITP members, as part of our overall goal to help further those in our community. We'll be providing other career guidance for students but mentoring is for those currently practicing.

Once matched, mentees and mentors can expect to meet once a month (for approximately an hour) over the 12-month period. This can be in-person of via a videocall. We provide guidance, resources, career planning templates and more, and you also have access to a mentoring facilitator to help work through any issues you might have along the way.

Now's the right time

It's been a tough year for everyone, but now is the absolute right time to focus on career development and the future. It's also a great time of year - we can get you set up now, meet your mentor before Christmas, then kick things off properly in the new year.

It's easy to get started - just join the mentoring programme online. We ask you a few questions to help match you to the perfect mentor and the whole process only takes around 10-15 minutes.

Find out more or sign up here

Exclusive ITP member offers

We're really excited to have a bunch of new deals and offers available for ITP members, thanks to some of our awesome Corporate Partners. Check them out on the ITP Member Offers page.

This includes huge offers on tech-related courses from Yoobee, NZSE and ITP, plus excellent offers from GoWirelessNZ, EscrowNZ, The IT Psychiatrist, insurance offerings, events and conferences and more.

Check out all of the ITP Member Offers

Offer of the week:

The IT Psychiatrist is an "on demand" tech executive that can help your organisation, or boost your capability, across cost, tools, information and skills.

ITP members and partners exclusively receive 10% Discount on all engagements.

If you're an ITP member or corporate partner, check them out here

123Tech National Finals

We're really excited about the Tahi Rua Toru Tech National Finals this year!

As most will know, Tahi Rua Toru Tech (123Tech) is NZ's in-school project-based digital tech challenge, with teams of students across New Zealand using digital tech to tackle a problem in their local school or community.

The challenge is co-funded by industry and Government, and many thousands of students have taken part over the last three years to help usher in the Digital Technologies curriculum.

Given Covid and its impact on travel and other activities, we've opted for a livestreamed broadcast event rather than the face-to-face finals event this year. While on one hand it'll be sad not to welcome all the finalists to Wellington, it gives us the opportunity to put together an amazing showcase of both school student work, and our industry.

The finals event will be in the afternoon of 10^th December, so keep this free from 2pm. As well as announcing and celebrating the national winners live, the event will feature virtual tours and interviews with some of the most innovative tech companies in New Zealand and quite a few surprises!

Previous webinars - all available free to members

All past webinars are available on the ITP Video Library for members:

• Down-to-Earth Leadership Skills for Tech Geniuses
• How technology enabled the health response
• How Covid is impacting the Gaming Industry
• Creating a plan for Digital Skills
• Cybersecurity and the recent attacks
• Tech legal update - what you need to know
• An afternoon with Nanogirl
• Taking kiwi tech to the post-Covid world
• Tech startups in a post-Covid world
• The IRD Transformation
• Digital Government and Covid-19
• Tech and the Covid-19 recovery
• Privacy in the days of Covid-19
• Leading Wellness in uncertain times
• Meet the ITP Workshop Presenters
• The data behind Covid19
• Innovation in tough times: Don't Hunker in the Bunker
• Covid19: Tech and the Law
• Cybersecurity from home
• Clarke Ching on disaster innovation
• CITPNZ and CTech: The What, How and Why
• Working Remotely - How to get through

Check out the webinar section here

We've seen Google publish suppressed court details, we've seen Facebook share offensive material, we've seen tax manoeuvres that would leave a fighter pilot breathless and giddy and of course we've seen a gutting of local media outlets and capability, a thumbing of the nose at New Zealand's requirements for everything from defamation to the Fair Trading Act through to Broadcasting Standards Authority and beyond.

If every you've complained to Facebook about a post or a group you'll know the company has its own rules about what is considered acceptable content. No, you can't see them and no, you can't amend them but you must abide by them. Oh and if you break them, you can't appeal that decision.

This isn't a problem restricted just to New Zealand either. All around the world regulators and policy makers are struggling with tech and the disruptors, from Uber and AirBNB to Google to Amazon and others. They all used to say they of course would abide by New Zealand law and of course they would work with the authorities around making sure the services offered in New Zealand meet New Zealand standards, but they seem to have gone quiet on that front these days. Even venerable old Microsoft has settled with Inland Revenue and paid some tax, albeit far less than you'd consider likely for a company of its size with the amount of sales it makes in New Zealand each year.

As ever the Europeans are more than happy to write the book and then throw it at the tech giants. Google has racked up US$8 billion in fines and continues to argue through the courts about privacy and its monopoly or dominant market position on search.

But even with its impressive privacy laws and focus on user rights, the EU is constantly frustrated by tech efforts in this space. Across the pond in the United States, incoming president Joe Biden is expected to be somewhat less troublesome for tech companies than his predecessor, but if the Democrats win both Georgia senate seats in the run off in January, the majority rule will give the party the firepower it needs to go to town on the companies that don't pay tax, have helped spread false information and fake news and who continue to pretend they're not responsible for the content they carry. Currently, the tech stocks are surging high on the change of leadership, clearly expecting Biden to be hamstrung in any efforts to regulate, but that may soon change.

The EU is in the throes of introducing two new pieces of legislation - the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act - that are designed to force tech companies to open their books, share information on how their algorithms work, allow regulators to see into the companies and their approach to managing content on their platforms.

Big tech is, naturally enough, horrified by this and feels it is being sorely done by. I doubt very much if those who have been on the wrong side of its decision making process would agree.

All of which puts New Zealand in a tricky spot. Do we go it alone and forge our own laws and requirements or do we wait to see how it pans out with the big boys and girls?

The argument against going it alone has often been that the tech companies will simply pull out, or stop offering those products in New Zealand. I simply do not believe they will do that. They understand the power of the network effect and shutting an entire country off rather than abiding by its requirements seems to be the last thing they'll want.

But, if the EU does introduce these new acts, and if the US does start to regulate, these companies will soon find that when you disturb the dragon in its den, even when it's sleepy and slow moving, you'd best be wearing your asbestos underpants because things will start to heat up. Eventually. Once it gets moving.

Here in Hobbiton we've already called big tech out for its failures around the Christchurch shooting. None of the companies have done more than pay public relations lip service to the idea of change - perhaps soon they will have to.

IRD won the Business Transformation through Digital and IT section of the CIO Awards, beating out strong projects from finalists Countdown and PlaceMakers. Common to all three however was a need to leverage technology to respond to the challenges thrown up by Covid.

For IRD, which was preparing to roll out Phase 4 of its $1.8 billion, six-year business transformation programme, it involved sending nearly 4,000 staff home to work remotely running the country's tax systems, and enabling the Government to dispense wage subsidies and business loans.

"When it came to small business loans, we made $600 million available in the first week the scheme was live," Gary Baird, Inland Revenue's Deputy Commissioner, Enterprise Services and Chief Technology Officer, told me earlier this week.

Enabling policy agility

"It was literally six weeks from the minister raising the question of whether it was possible, to literally turning the system on."

The new integration tax system IRD has implemented as part of one of the biggest IT upgrades in our government's history allowed the team to move at a pace that wouldn't have been possible if the old infrastructure was still in place.

"We made significant child support changes back in about 2012," says Baird.

"But implementing those changes took around three years, with a couple of hundred people on the project, and well north of $100 million in investment."

A move to Microsoft 365 and upgrade of core admin functions to cloud services had allowed a fairly seamless move to working from home too.

Baird says the Covid response proved the ability of the tax system to deliver the "policy agility" the Government was seeking as an outcome of the project, which will enter its final phase next year.

Also transforming at speed as a result of the pandemic was supermarket retailer Countdown, which had to reconfigure how its stores operate to accommodate social distancing measures and accommodate a surge in online shopping.

A key priority, says Sally Copland, General Manager, Brand and Countdown-X and acting Managing Director, Countdown, was adapting the online shopping system to prioritise the elderly and immuno-compromised

"We had to play our role, to feed those most vulnerable in New Zealand. That was the most important thing," says Copland.

To meet the online demand, Countdown made the decision to convert some of its supermarkets into "dark stores" that would fulfil online orders only.

"We would actually shut supermarkets," Copland told me.

"That decision was made in one meeting. In the second meeting, we determined which store locations we would go for first."

Countdown's Sally Copland

Going dark

Major changes to Countdown's supply chain and distribution were needed to keep the groceries moving and there was even time for new innovations to be rolled out with the supermarket chain piloting a contactless shopping system at its Ponsonby store which allows shoppers to bypass the checkout and scan and pay for everything on a smartphone app.

Copland, who this week picked up the CIO of the Year Award, credits the team and culture at Countdown-X, the supermarket chain's technology and innovation division, with allowing the company to move at speed to handle the crisis.

Also adapting to the new normal was building supplies retailer PlaceMakers, which was in the midst of revamping its customer experience when the virus struck. After several years of upgrading and digitising its core systems, PlaceMakers accelerated development of its PlaceMakers Trade. It lets builders order, track and collect their orders from PlaceMakers outlets with the use of QR codes using the Skip the Counter service. 

It's a stark difference with the traditional way of doing business in the PlaceMakers supplies and timber yard.

"People were handing bits of paper to each other," says Wayne Armstrong, Head of Digital Channels at PlaceMakers.

Skip the counter

"Jobs were priced separately and with a lot of specialised products, there was a lot of scope for mistakes to be made."

PlaceMakers used to print off 22 million pages of paper a year. The digitisation of processes and use of handheld computers and barcode scanners has reduced that by more than half. That initial work allowed 800,000 manual transactions to be automated too.

With nearly a quarter of PlaceMakers' key accounts now using the Trade app after just a few months, digital channels are now integral to doing business with customers in an industry considered to be one of the last still to experience significant digital disruption.

Congratulations to all winners and finalists in the CIO Awards 2020.

Check out my case studies on the business transformation programmes at Inland Revenue Department, Countdown and PlaceMakers.