Writer & Tech Journalist
Last week World Rugby sold local broadcast rights to the 2019 Rugby World Cup to Spark, which will partner with TVNZ to cover the tournament. Spark plans to live stream much of the event, via a new streaming app it has promised to build. It will be a huge test for the company, especially given New … Read more
After his grilling last week before US Congress, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has some serious thinking to do about which direction his company takes now – not only to avoid government interference across the world, but also to find less privacy-invasive methods of growing revenue. One of the intriguing notions to come out of Zuckerberg’s … Read more
The Inland Revenue Department has finally released its guidance about cryptocurrencies, months after its Australian counterpart did the same. No surprise, the upshot is that cryptocurrencies will be treated like property for tax purposes. “Just like with property – when you acquire cryptocurrency for the purpose of selling or exchanging it, the proceeds you make … Read more
This week I started a cool new job at Newsroom, one of New Zealand’s premier independent media companies. I’ll be their Chief Product Officer for a few days a week, and also writing my weekly technology column for the site. As I noted in my LinkedIn profile, I’ll be responsible for building the Newsroom technology platform … Read more
Facebook is getting a lot of bad press currently, but for one demographic there’s even more to be unhappy about than privacy breaches and fake news. For young people, Facebook is increasingly irrelevant because it simply doesn’t meet their needs. The biggest reason millennials (and Generation Z as well) are abandoning Facebook is because it’s … Read more
The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment recently released a discussion document for 5G, the next generation cellular mobile network. Among the issues raised in the document is how 5G will be rolled out in New Zealand and what the societal impacts will be. In particular, there are health concerns about the increased number of … Read more
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
I’ve been doing a lot of writing recently. While I’m taking a break from the book world, I’ve been full-on with a new blog and my weekly newspaper column. Here are a few quick highlights… My new blog about blockchain and cryptocurrencies, Blocksplain, has been making an impact in the emerging “Web 3” ecosystem. As … 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
It’s been over five years now since I left ReadWriteWeb. During that time I wrote and published two books – Trackers (2014) and Presence (2016). But it was time for a change in 2018, so I’ve started up a new tech blog. That’s because I’ve become obsessed, in a healthy way, about blockchain and cryptocurrencies. … 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