Richard MacManus

Silicon Valley is the unquestioned home of technological innovation. Ambitious entrepreneurs from across the world still flock to it, despite a housing crisis even worse than Auckland’s. Just as a successful Silicon Valley product is often copied and pasted overseas (TradeMe was New Zealand’s version of eBay, for example), there have been many attempts to copy … Read more

Cryptocurrencies are proving to be a headache for local and global regulators alike. In New Zealand, no decisions have yet been made on how to apply the law to these new technologies. To help local regulators make those decisions, the Edmund Hillary Fellowship (EHF) has written a white paper with its recommendations. The paper was … Read more

When you see Artificial Intelligence in the news, the topic is typically robots taking over our jobs or the dangers of super-intelligent computers. You don’t see Elon Musk or Bill Gates opining on how AI is improving the way we do data analytics, for example. But kiwi startup Thematic is doing exactly that. It’s using … Read more

Recently I booked a virtual meeting with an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. We were going back and forth on email, trying to find a suitable time. Then in stepped someone called Fin, who said he’d “be happy to find a time that works.” He offered a couple of suggestions and I emailed back the one … Read more

Fake Facebook profiles and automated Twitter bots have been around since the beginnings of social media. One of my siblings once created a fake family member called Fred, who was a madeup character from the Zynga game FishVille. Cousin Fred amused us all for several months, but of course nobody ever took it seriously. Fast … Read more

When Twitter was launched in 2007, even the founders had no idea what they had released. Co-founder Evan Williams said several years later that Twitter “was hard to define, because it didn’t replace anything.” In retrospect, we can see now that Twitter had invented a new Internet platform for short-form, public messaging. What’s more, it … Read more

Last week Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella sent out a tweet announcing a partnership with Publicis Groupe, a multinational advertising and PR company. Nadella said they were going to build an AI product called Marcel, as some type of collaboration platform to “empower” the 80,000 employees of Publicis Groupe. Nadella’s tweet didn’t offer much detail about … Read more

Earlier this month a New Zealand blockchain company, Centrality, announced that it raised US$80 million (NZ$110m) in cryptocurrency via a “Token Generation Event.” That’s a staggering amount and would rank among the top ten biggest ICOs (Initial Coin Offering) of all time, according to the Coinist website. Although as yet, Centrality does not even appear in Coinist’s directory. I … Read more

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is held every January in Las Vegas. It’s typically an event dominated by state of the art TVs, concept cars, the latest headphones, and cute robots. This year’s CES was no exception, but we also saw developments in three other technology categories: voice assistants, virtual reality, and health tracking. The … Read more

Cryptocurrency continues to dominate headlines; and it’s no longer just focused on Bitcoin. Speculators are now flinging their money into hundreds of newer cryptocurrencies, such as Ripple, Litecoin and Doge. These so-called “altcoins” are risky enough, because their prices (at time of writing) are highly inflated. But the risks don’t stop there. Storing your newly … Read more

Apple’s App Store editors have identified four breakout trends in app culture this year: augmented reality, real-time competitive gaming, mental health and mindfulness, and apps that transform storytelling. Let’s take a look at each of these four trends and the leading apps in those categories. Augmented Reality (AR) got a big boost in September when Apple … Read more