Virtual Reality has had its fair share of hype over the past couple of years, not least from the entertainment industry. There’s been speculation about VR movies from the likes of Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg, and excitement about watching an NBA game or a Beyonce concert using the magic of VR. These are very … Read more

Former IBM and Siemens executive Steffen Schaefer, from Germany, has worked on mobile internet and sensor networks – what today is called the Internet of Things – since 2000. He was involved with IBM’s global Smart Cities initiative from the outset. But he says that many big tech companies have since scaled back, or refocused, their … Read more

FinTech is an emerging trend worldwide and in some parts of the world, has big banking institutions on the run (so to speak). The Economist recently named China “the world’s leader in fintech,” thanks to its thriving mobile commerce ecosystem and “backward banks.” There is a nascent FinTech industry in New Zealand too. But unlike … Read more

Silicon Valley is rightly seen as the world’s centre of technological innovation. But there’s one major technology category where Silicon Valley continues to be a laggard: e-commerce payments. Other than Paypal, a flawed product that somehow managed to dominate the early e-commerce ecosystem, there have been very few breakout online payments companies. Square and Stripe … Read more

3D printing is one of those gee-whiz technologies that pops up from time to time in the media. Rockets with 3D printed engines! Peter Jackson’s 3D printed props! Those are the glamour stories. But what I want to know – and what I set out to discover in the writing of this column – is … Read more

For New Zealand, a small country thousands of miles away from nearly everyone else, digital trade is critical to our future growth. Technology is already the third biggest export sector in this country, behind our stalwart industries dairy and tourism. But there’s still a lot that needs to be done to help us compete in … Read more

New Zealand is a proudly GE-free country, meaning it is illegal to produce or sell genetically engineered foods here. There are some exclusions for processed foods that have imported GE ingredients, like soy or corn flour, but they must be approved by a local authority and clearly labelled. However, there is zero tolerance for GE … Read more

2016 was supposed to be the year Virtual Reality (VR) made it big. Three premium VR headsets launched, prompting one analyst to forecast total sales of 12.2 million headsets by the end of the year. In reality, it ended up being 1.5 million. That’s a big miss by anyone’s calculations. The same analyst predicted Facebook … Read more

When Donald Trump was elected US President in November last year, it ushered in more than just a new era of political turmoil. It also signalled a potentially dangerous new era in social engineering. A big part of the reason why Trump won is the incredible job done by his digital team, who used a … Read more

For many years Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) has been hyped as the world’s next big groundbreaking technology. But till recently, the closest we’ve got to seeing A.I. in action was on the big screen. From evil computer HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, to Scarlett Johansson’s breathless A.I. in Her, there’s been a rich tradition … Read more