techbizcult

I recently attended a service of spoken (i.e. not sung) eucharist (or, communion) at St Peter's church. St Peter's is the Waikato Cathedral, perched atop a hill in the centre of town. Knowing not one person there, I was able to just be my self by myself, responding to the experience of what, years prior, I would have described as a musty, dull and uninteresting service. For me, the service itself became a carrier of beauty and truth, a truly divine encounter: beautiful, in its words, its symbols, its place and via the connection to God through his spirit and through the beauty of scripture. A homily (the sermon) asking the question posed by Christ himself, "And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?". This became a truly special space, curated and inhabited by the clear, real presence of the Creator. I found myself struck - in fact, blessed - by the practice and liturgy of communion itself, laden with symbology, colour, art, beauty, s...

As an infrequent visitor to BBC’s Question Time - a British news and current affairs show - I chose to watch it – online of course recently. The dynamics of live audience / presenter / panelists paired with an explosive topic can, I find, be quite exciting and revealing – as much as a study of people watching as it informs my loftier political understanding! So, buoyed by an eager anticipation, I was excited to discover how Fiona Bruce would hold proceedings (having inherited the presenter’s mantle from the venerable David Dimbleby at the start of 2019). As you’d expect, there was the typical political posturing from the panelists on a variety of topics including knife crime, mandatory vaccination and Brexit of course. As the show unfolded, a couple of things caught my attention as being, dare I say it, even more interesting than the mildly interesting cycle of panelists’ responses and audience retorts. What struck me? A couple of audience questions were handled in a very ...

Let's move past the plethora of “driverless cars” articles, interesting though they are. For this piece, I want to take a different angle: the user experience. In life, after all, we know there's value in enjoying the journey. Right? First up, terminology. For now let’s assume autonomous vehicles (where a ‘pilot’ can take over when needed) soon mature and morph to become truly driverless vehicles. Getting up to date Understandably a whole host of car manufacturers want a slice of the future action - even if the future is not clear: Audi, GM, Lexus, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Peugeot, Renault, Toyota, Volkswagen and Volvo have all been developing vehicles. No problems there - as a CEO, I’d be remiss if my company didn’t have an active interest, with or without Google (for that matter, here’s a digest of Google car videos   [Ed. note: no longer available on YouTube as at September 2019] freshly squeezed from from Mountain View). Driving_Google_Self-Driving_Car.jpg: Ste...

On 9 May 2015   an Airbus Atlas military cargo aircraft crashed during initial climb following take off, on its (first) flight from the factory. Only one of its four engines was producing power as expected at the time of the accident. The A400M as the Atlas is also know, is aimed at the military as a replacement for air forces' ageing Hercules fleets. On this particular flight, with a crew of 6, there were 4 deaths and 2 serious injuries - plus a destroyed aircraft, significant dent to the new type's fragile reputation and an unwelcome slur on the Airbus brand. Aside from the horrors and sadness of the crash event, it is intriguing to note the event has been attributed ( albeit not publicly ) to a technology issue. For now though let's take a step back. Copyright Ronnie MacDonald, Chelmsford, UK. Licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic licence - see: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en As someone who has studied avionics cl...

I encourage you to reflect on what life was like a very short while ago. 2010. Yes, a whole five years ago. I am going to present just 4 bullet points: 2 facts and 2 comments. • In 2010 Netflix were a DVD rental provider. In the US alone, they were shipping two million DVDs a day. Look at them now - and from a New Zealand perspective, you can hear more about them . • Twitter 's share of usage amongst the social media toolset remains unchanged since 2010, at 6% (this is based on page views referred by a social media site). One change however: since 2010, Twitter has jumped one spot in the market share rankings, sitting at 3rd place in 2015. My take on this: • In 2015 Netflix is doing pretty well in leveraging consumer tech + infrastructure. However don't forget forget Netflix's humble past - shipping tangible stock (DVDs, how old-fashioned) and taking the time to build a strong customer base. It's this base that became the critical mass needed to carry ...

If ever there was a time to simplify and streamline (read reduce costs of managing) the tax system, I think it would be now…or perhaps yesterday. Political persuasions aside – and besides, my policy favourites are usually formed via a 'pick and mix’ from across the political spectrum - I'd commend any government that wants to look at ways of simplifying the tax system. But how could (or should) the Government best gain traction with this bold notion of reviewing the tax system?