Kiwi Apps Win Big, Open Banking Arrives, and India’s Digital Mandate

Paul Spain:
Hey, folks, greetings and welcome along to the New Zealand Tech Podcast. I’m your host, Paul Spain, and great to have Bill Bennett back in the studio. How are you, Bill?

Bill Bennett:
I’m good. Paul should be in a sling, but I forgot it.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. You’ve been in the wars a little bit. Thanks for making the effort to come out and join me in studio. Maybe a little reminder of where you fit into this big wide world of tech for new listeners.

Bill Bennett:
I’m a journalist, I work for. For newspapers. I’m a freelance journalist. I work for the newspapers. I do quite a lot of work for the Herald and I’ve been writing about technology now since the early 1980s. If I’m not writing about technology, I’m writing about business. So I tend to focus more on the area where those two crossover.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, that’s good. And of course, folks can go to billbennett.co.nz to see some of the content that you put up outside of those media outlets from time to time as well.

Bill Bennett:
Right, yeah. It’s mainly a weekly newsletter. I have. Newsletter goes out every Friday and that’s the main focus. But occasionally it’s other things as well.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, Good, good. Before we jump in, of course, a big thank you to our show partners, One NZ, Spark, 2degrees Workday and Gorilla Technology. Really appreciative of their support. Now, let’s jump in. We’ve got some things on a New Zealand perspective, some more global topics, and we’re also running our survey and giveaway contest and I’ll share those details shortly. So we’ll come back on that. But yeah, some local news, international, our giveaway, some freebies from some of the tech companies and also we’re gonna talk a little bit, being the time of year that it is around, some Christmas tech gifts.

Paul Spain:
So some of the things we’ve been looking at this year that might be of interest and worth thinking about to give to somebody or maybe give to yourself, as often happens at this time of year. Now, delving in on the New Zealand news, I saw an email come through from Apple around their App Store Awards, which is something that they do each year. And I was kind of thinking, oh, yeah, what’s gonna be in here? Didn’t really expect much of kind of relevance, particularly New Zealand perspective. But it turned out that in the list we have two New Zealand apps that got global recognition in Apple’s App Store Awards for this year. And in fact, drilling in further, I think they were both from Christchurch. So the first one I came across was the Vision Pro App of the Year, which of course the Vision Pro isn’t even sold in New Zealand, but we have a photographer and filmmaker based out of Christchurch who’s been getting this incredible immersive 3D content of travel experiences around the world, incredible scenery and locations, and wrapped that up in an app called Explore POV. And as part of that, he’s been whisked off to Apple HQ.

Paul Spain:
And all the rest of it and it was just like, wow, that was not something I would have expected, but there we go.

Bill Bennett:
Two reasons I wouldn’t expect it. First is Vision Pro is not exactly. There’s not exactly a lot of content for that product and that’s where it’s been struggling. I mean, and that’s with anything that’s 3D immersive multiverse. It’s no accident, by the way, that this week Facebook, or rather Meta, who changed the name for the Metaverse business, finally admitted that they have given up on the Metaverse. So all that business is changing the name and everything was obviously a waste of time. But anyway, getting back to this one, Apple’s if you like.

Bill Bennett:
I don’t really like the term Metaverse, but their sort of spatial three dimensional immersive product, Vision Pro, it’s interesting that someone in New Zealand has done that because I would imagine that you need quite a lot of resources. One of the problems with content for those, those devices is that it’s actually very expensive to produce. It’s why, for example, 3D movies are not never really took off, because it actually requires a lot of resources, a lot of work to put that extra dimension stuff in. So hats off to a company in Christchurch which actually had the technology to be able to put that together.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, well, I think what I read from looking at his website, and maybe it was some other media sources as well, the Herald sort of certainly reported on it, but I think it was, I discovered it sort of when the.

Paul Spain:
You know, after this email came through was, yeah, he’s an individual, you know, he’s been traveling. He initially.

Paul Spain:
Think developed it himself, the initial app, and then got some help. But the big work has been very much around the content. But he’s ended up with.

Paul Spain:
A camera that is specifically for getting 3D, so it’s got the dual lens, so you’re able to capture in 3D, which I think comes in around 50K. So this is not a, not a small investment and you probably need some.

Bill Bennett:
Processing power to put it together as well.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. And you know, although the Macs these days are pretty good, you Know, with the M series chips, if you’re on an M4 or an M5 based MacBook, you’ve actually got a reasonable amount of, reasonable amount of power to deal with these things. But yeah, obviously reflection of sort of the, the creativity that often sort of comes from, you know, kiwis and, you know, he’s throwing himself out there and building this app. That’s the point.

Bill Bennett:
I think that’s the point, Paul, is I think that despite everything, we’re still a bit on the edge of the world in some ways and it’s the place where people are going to experiment with these things. So hats off to him. I’m actually really quite impressed by that. And the other winner, the Fishing Adventure, which is on iPad, sold two and a half million sales, which is again, is very good and obviously made a fair chunk of change for Apple in the process as well.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, there was an article around and James Hustler’s got a website@james hustler.com. but yeah, on there there was a story around there app hitting 10,000 Vision Pro downloads and being featured by Apple and this was May last year, so we’ll have no doubt picked up steam from there. But yeah, it’s really interesting looking at his social media and looking at some of the content that he’s put together, the different areas that he works on. So, yeah, I think full credit to both Black Salt games with Dredge for their iPad game of the year. And yeah, incredible to see that level of pick up the two and a half million sales.

Bill Bennett:
And the other thing, of course we should probably just mention is how the app Store for all the people that are critical of it. One thing it does do is it enables the smaller players to get in front of an audience, which is, you know, in the past it would have been really hard to launch those games into stores around the world and so on. So it’s actually something where it puts us, you know, more on a level playing field.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, look, I mean, you know, we like to beat up the big, the big tech companies for taking their slice on these sorts of things, but yeah, there’s definitely a bunch of positives and you know, I guess we have seen the world change a little bit where.

Paul Spain:
In more ways now you can get apps, especially if you’re in Europe and most people appear to be sticking to the mainstream app stores and there’s definitely some benefits there. Also on the New Zealand front, we’ve moved into this world of open banking that’s now, I guess we’ve hit the date this month. And, you know, that’s now officially mandated in New Zealand. And I guess we’ve been through different eras of, say, telecommunications where it ultimately got mandated that there had to be number portability. And, you know, it used to be if you had your 025 number and then, you know, and so on, or your 021 number, those numbers that would tell you what network you’re on and you couldn’t move your number around. You wanted to change network, you had to change your. Your phone number.

Bill Bennett:
Right. It’s regulating for competition, which is basically part of the Commerce Commission’s job, in fact. And it needed to happen because just as the two big mobile companies dragged their feet over mobile termination rates, what, 15 years ago now, 10 years ago, the big banks have been dragging their feet on open banking. It’s going to open up competition for them if it comes in. And that’s exactly what’s happened in the uk. The UK moved to open banking, I was going to say, a decade ago, but it’s not quite that long ago. It’s about eight years ago. And what happened was instantly there were things like apps would appear so that all your different accounts could appear on the one app and you could do transactions and you didn’t have the same big banks clipping the ticket.

Bill Bennett:
Every time you did a transaction, the ticket clip was smaller and so on. And it’s been relatively successful. It’s not perhaps used quite as much as people might have expected, but it’s still very popular and it has changed things quite significantly in the uk. I think it’s going to happen here quite fast. I think it’ll probably happen here faster because it’s happened there already. We’ve learned some lessons from what we’ve.

Paul Spain:
Done and there’s been a bit of momentum here. A bunch of companies that have sort of been working in the area that have been anticipating this legislation becoming active. And, you know, of course there are examples out of the uk, you know, Monzo was probably the, you know, the big Neo bank that has become very, very well known now. You know, out of the UK was kind of the first cab off the rack. You know, we’ve had a bunch of these newer digital entities that are not quite banks yet, the likes of Emerge and and so on across the show over recent years. And with this legislation now being in place, I think we will see some really interesting innovations come through.

Paul Spain:
One of the examples, I guess, has been, hey, you could have one app, be it Shares Ease or another bank app, one of these new startups and you could potentially do all your banking through that app. Because I’ll be able to. Well, I was going to pull in all the data.

Bill Bennett:
Right. But also you mentioned shares is because that’s, that’s a really important thing because I’m a freelancer, I work for myself, so my money comes in dribs and drabs. I don’t get a salary payment every month and sometimes I want to invest some of the money. If I want to put some of it into my shares account, it might take hours. I mean, so the money arrives in my banking account, it might take hours for me to be able to make a transaction. Now, I’m not a day trader, I’m not sort of like speculative, but you might see something you might see on shares is, oh, that’s a good price. Sparks trading at a good price or infraturn or whatever, let’s buy some. And by the time your banks handed over the money and what have you, the price has changed and everyone else has jumped in.

Bill Bennett:
So all that stuff will become much. I, hopefully will become much more seamless. And that’s where I think the power of it is, is that it enables you to move money between the different, you know, your different pots of money. They don’t have to live in, like, silos anymore. And so for things like investing, it becomes, you know, just a lot more convenient and easy to do.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. And I mean, you could see in some ways this also being a forerunner as we get more and more digitised as sort of society.

Paul Spain:
That in the future it’s able to tap into a central bank, digital currency and all these sorts of things where the lines are blurred around. Is that real money? Is that digital money? Is it this? Is it that? And yeah, creating whatever front end ultimately wins. And it’s not necessarily a, you know, a winner takes all. You know, we want to see that competition and there could be multiple players, but, yeah, Sharesies have done incredibly well on that investment side and, you know, have recently been offering, you know, a debit card with rebates. And, you know, we’ve talked to other companies, you know, the likes of Debut and.

Paul Spain:
Emerge and so on. So it’s going to be really fascinating to see how all that comes together when you can effectively kind of completely control your bank. You can get access on a data perspective, but also via APIs.

Bill Bennett:
One of the things I think was pop, I was talking to someone about this in the UK not so long ago and they were saying one of the things that’s really important is if you think back to when Xero started, there was a thing called Xero Personal, which meant you could manage all your personal money finances in one place. There’s nothing like that anymore.

Paul Spain:
Not from zero.

Bill Bennett:
No, not from zero, but there are things like that.

Paul Spain:
Blacksmith, I think, is one of the.

Bill Bennett:
Competitors and things like Intuit have something like that as well. But the thing is, in the uk, that service is now done by one of your finance companies that you deal with. So your bank might, for example, offer that service. So if you’re banking with some UK banks, you might have your shares and your other investments drawn into just one central place where you can manage everything. Well, that’s, that just makes so much more sense to be able to do that. And you don’t need an external app when you’ve got, you know, when you can do it through your banking dashboard. And the other thing, of course that happened in the UK is that basically the banks have to lift their game to compete, so they have to get into this to a degree as well.

Paul Spain:
The other area that’s had some attention to do with the open banking.

Paul Spain:
Has been to do with API fees. And there’s been a chunk of debate around this. And yeah, it’s kind of fascinating, I guess, to catch sort of the different sides of the debate. On one side you’ve got the banks who are saying, look, it’s reasonable, we should be able to charge something for accessing our APIs. I think Xero recently have started charging software developers who use.

Paul Spain:
Their APIs and build apps that tap into Xero in a new way, or they’ve recently announced.

Paul Spain:
A new fee structure. But ultimately debate around, well, what’s a reasonable amount to charge for, for API access? And, you know, exactly how do you, how do you do that? So the initial draft legislation was talking about banks being up to charge up to $5 a month for consumers to access their own data.

Paul Spain:
And yeah, I think what we’ve, what we’ve now seen is that, yeah, banks aren’t, you know, basically aren’t, aren’t allowed to.

Paul Spain:
Charge for that. I think that’s, that’s where we, we’ve landed, or at least there’s back to.

Bill Bennett:
The mobile termination rates with the mobile phones. When that changed, when that was regulated, which in effect, the regulation in effect stopped them. I mean, it didn’t, it reduced them to tiny amounts, but that changed the mobile market dramatically. And after that happened, we started getting all those more innovative plans, you know, the things like all you can eat plans and so on. It meant that 2 degrees was able to grow and compete and the market and prices literally dropped overnight. You know, within within like a year or so of that happening, the price of owning, using a mobile phone came down. Same thing should happen in banking, right? Banking is quite expensive in New Zealand.

Paul Spain:
Yes. So, yeah, so interesting how that’s landed certainly at this initial point that we’re not expecting to see any fees and we’ll see how that ultimately evolves over time. But I think, yeah, great to be across the line on that. Also on the banking side, this one hasn’t had a lot of discussion, but yeah, it did spark a bit of interest and somebody shared it with me and I ended up talking with Jack Tame about this on Newstalks EDB the other day is that our banks have put in place some.

Paul Spain:
Mandatory kind of behavioural surveillance on those that.

Paul Spain:
Use their apps. Now my understanding is this covers anz, BNZ and Westpac. I don’t think ASB at this point. And.

Paul Spain:
What it effectively does is it’s looking at things.

Paul Spain:
That help identify that you’re the right user on the device. So from many perspectives this makes a lot of sense. You know, how quickly you type, how you swipe, how you hold your phone.

Paul Spain:
Even the apps that are installed, I think on Android devices and then they take that information, I think they’re using a third party entity to gives them that capability and then does the analysis. But the flip side to.

Paul Spain:
The reality that this might help identify, hey, the person using this device or that’s installed the app and logged in as say, Paul or Bill.

Paul Spain:
Their behaviour is not what we would normally expect. And so you might be able to stop some fraud, but then other people are saying, well, if this is kind of a form of behavioural biometrics and that ends up in a cloud somewhere, then that can get lost. And so there’s kind of two sides to this picture. Whether that’s actually.

Paul Spain:
An appropriate thing for banks to do or not.

Bill Bennett:
It sounds a bit like fingerprinting, doesn’t it? In some ways. And.

Bill Bennett:
I thought where you were going with that was, you know, you’re acting a bit slow making that transaction. That’s because you’re on the fourth pint of beer or whatever and you’re not going to have any more because we decided you can’t.

Paul Spain:
I thought, why let you do the transaction?

Bill Bennett:
But look, I think we do need to make sure there are safeguards around how that data is used and we do need safeguards about where that data is stored and so on. I mean, I wouldn’t be Too uncomfortable if the banks are all Australian owned. I wouldn’t be too uncomfortable if data was being stored in Australia. I would be quite concerned if it was being stored in America somewhere or Belarus.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, well I think what we’ve learned in the past is that.

Paul Spain:
You want to keep sort of biometric data as close as possible. Like I’m really comfortable about.

Paul Spain:
Having my biometric stored encrypted on a chip on my phone, but it never going to the cloud. And look, I could be proven wrong at some point and hackers may work out some way to compromise that, but it seems at the lower risk end. But when you take sort of biometric or similar type of data and you put it in the cloud, well at some stage that’s probably going to get hacked in some form or certainly there’s a reasonable risk of that. And we’ve seen it happen in the past.

Bill Bennett:
Right. Episodes that with voice recognition, recognising your voice and so on.

Paul Spain:
So there are some concerns. So I think, yeah, this is an interesting one to follow. When I researched it, what I noticed was Westpac were up front around coming out with this or utilising this type of capability about two years ago. So it’s not actually new, but it has been picked up recently. So yeah. Interested if listeners have got thoughts to share on this sort of topic. Cause I kind of look at it from both perspectives. What keeps us safer.

Paul Spain:
I think that the reason why it’s maybe getting attention now is maybe either banks have had the capability and not fully turned it on or they’ve ratcheted it up or we’ve got new banks that have entered with it. And part of that being is there’s now this need for banks to repay customers in certain fraud situations. So they’re looking at, well, okay, how do we dial down the risk? Right, yeah. Okay, so that’s us from a New Zealand perspective. Couple of things on the international and this one crosses very much into New Zealand as well.

Paul Spain:
The supply of memory, the supply of, you know, RAM for our computers.

Paul Spain:
This has become a challenge with just how.

Paul Spain:
Much need for. Well, it’s not just RAM but RAM and processes and computing power is being taken up by AI data centers and we’ve now got to a point where RAM prices, I mean this has been coming up over probably, you know, a period of months but now it’s kind of got to the point where. And probably in the last couple of weeks where it just seems to be sort of.

Bill Bennett:
It’s hit a tipping point.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, really going crazy. These, these Memory prices sometimes, you know, three times the normal price.

Bill Bennett:
Well, yes, here’s the thing, Paul, the thing about AI, which is for a long time we’ve been, we’ve heard stories about how the, the AI requires processing power. Lots of processing power, lots of processing. But it’s, it probably, if anything, memory requirement is even greater. And the fact, the way that it uses memory is very memory intensive.

Bill Bennett:
Applications and basically they’ve sucked up the world’s supply of memory into those companies. And just as there’s fears about we need to build new power stations, we need to develop new sources of fresh water and so on to fuel the AI boom.

Bill Bennett:
We’re gonna be paying a lot more for our computers and everything because of the AI boom sucking up all the memory chips in the world. And you know, the appetite for this is insatiable. At some point that has to stop at some point. I mean we’ve heard lots of talk about the fact there’s an AI bubble and.

Bill Bennett:
It seems pretty obvious there’s some kind of bubble going on. And.

Bill Bennett:
I’ve seen these trends, these bubble like trends in the industry over the years come and go. I mean I’ve been writing about technology for 40 years and I’ve definitely seen three or four similar bubbles happening in the same way. And they burst eventually. But here’s the thing that, here’s the thing that I’ve learned over these various.

Bill Bennett:
Surges of activity like AI at the moment is generally speaking only 1, 2, 3, at most four companies end up making all the money or the lion’s share of the money. So if you think for example of the mobile phone sector, there’s pretty much two companies that make all the money from mobile phones. I mean there are some smaller ones, but basically it’s Apple and Samsung. It’s clear blue sky between them and the rest in terms of making profit, cloud’s the same. There’s three companies that dominate cloud. I think between Amazon, Microsoft and Google, that’s 67% of the world’s cloud.

Bill Bennett:
What happens is once we go past a certain threshold, it just collapses into this small number of companies. So I’m saying here today, this is my sort of prediction of the moment, is that at some point the AI sector is going to collapse into a small number of companies that will have all of it, or not necessarily 100% of it, but they’ll be. But like the three big cloud companies are now two thirds of the world, the entire world supply of cloud computing. And same thing’s going to happen with AI that it’s going to collapse into.

Bill Bennett:
Three. Maybe there’ll be a fourth one, but there won’t be lots and lots of AI companies. If you look at the market today, there’s probably about 12 companies that are shooting for one of those positions. Well, they’re not all going to make it. And when that happens suddenly, when that.

Bill Bennett:
It’S probably going to happen in. When I say sudden, I don’t mean it’s going to happen on Monday and it’s all happened by the end of the week, but it’s going to happen very quickly over the course of, say, a year or so that it will consolidate very fast and suddenly there’ll be all the RAM you need because there’s only so many companies still buying it. And a lot of that investment just gone into those other companies that will get snapped up by the. The surviving players anyway. So I think it’s very temporary and I think it’s a sign. I think it’s actually yet another indicator that there’s something’s probably going to snap quite soon.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, I’m really fascinated to watch how it plays out because other people are saying, oh, this is going on for years. You know, you’ve got things in the background with, you know, some new technologies kind of coming through that seems to be more efficient ways of running AI. That’s something that could dial down Chinese.

Bill Bennett:
Good at that too.

Paul Spain:
You know, the usage. Right. So there’s always a bunch of factors at play as well as, you know, as you highlight sort of the, you know, commercial realities and. Yeah, that scenario where the market does, you know, ultimately sort of, you know, consolidate. But I’m not sure, you know, I did an interview for one of the TV stations a couple of weeks back and, you know, they were talking around the AI bubble, maybe it was two or three weeks ago. And, you know, that was kind of, I guess, a big, A big story there for, you know, for a week or two. And, you know, it’s still being discussed. But I guess my point was that we haven’t.

Paul Spain:
I don’t think we’ve reached, you know, peak AI from a usage perspective. Cause there’s a lot of scenarios sort of still ahead.

Paul Spain:
And so therefore, you know how that kind of plays out. Usage versus share prices versus memory requirements and so on. I’m probably not.

Paul Spain:
As clear as you on how it actually plays out.

Bill Bennett:
Yeah, there’s one other factor you didn’t mention. Right. And that is, is it looks as if none of the players are actually making a profit from it at the moment. Right. So they’re all, and it’s. If you think back to when Uber started, right, Uber had this huge part, I think it had 50 billion in investment capital and it used that money to buy market share, in effect. And what you’ve got now, you’ve got these 10, 12 companies that are using huge piles of capital to buy market share and there’s not enough market share, there’s not enough for all those investors to get their money back. There just isn’t that there.

Bill Bennett:
And they’re not making.

Bill Bennett:
They’Re not all making a profit. They’re probably.

Bill Bennett:
Profits are probably not there anyway at the moment, but they will be when it consolidates, when it consolidates down to three players or four players, then suddenly those players will scoop up all the business. You can probably expect the cost of using AI to increase as well at that time, but it will possibly be profitable at that point. But that’s the crunch thing, is that you can’t have, you can’t keep pouring money into things. It doesn’t show a payoff. In some point in the future, some point, investors are going to think, well, hang on, this second division AI company which we’re pouring money into, we’re never going to get it back.

Bill Bennett:
If that sounds crazy, right?

Bill Bennett:
What used to be called Facebook poured 77 billion into the metaverse. Are you using the metaverse?

Bill Bennett:
Is the metaverse still even a thing? Because you don’t hear of it suddenly. And they spent 77 billion. So that tells you that there is a kind of madness about this. I mean, Facebook has the cash flow to do that, but I don’t think 12 companies have the cash flow to do something similar with AI.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, there’s only so far, isn’t there on these things. Great point, great point. And lastly on the news front.

Paul Spain:
India has moved to an interesting, you know, place when we, I guess when we look around the world, they have been really digitising pretty fast as a, as a nation, which is quite fascinating to kind of look at, I guess from a, from a, from a case study standpoint. But the newest news on that, so they’ve kind of mandated a digital ID system and then the latest is that they’re asking smartphone manufacturers to put.

Paul Spain:
A state run cyber safety app on new.

Paul Spain:
Devices. So apparently whether it’s Apple or an Android device, within 90 days they’ve got to ensure all the, the new devices.

Paul Spain:
Come with the government’s app. Sanchar Saathi. I’ve probably not pronounced that correctly, but.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, they’ve got to put that on. And with the functionality not being able to be disabled or restricted. Now, I’m sure there’ll be a whole lot of benefits you get from, from having your app, maybe.

Paul Spain:
From some perspectives, but there will always be people that are uncomfortable about saying the government having an app on their device. And when you look at the likes, I think this sort of thing has been mandated in probably Russia and China. Right? So when you kind of look at it from that perspective, you’ve got a whole Big Brother kind of play coming.

Bill Bennett:
In here, haven’t you? Yes, absolutely that. And look, there’s two things about it. First is, yes, there’s something similar in China and it is used for surveillance and it is used to monitor what you’re saying on social media and it is used for all those purposes. And there is a sort of scary Big Brother side to it. But the other thing is that generally speaking, when authoritarian measures come in to the world, they’re always cloaked in personal safety, you know, security and safety and so on. That’s always the language used to.

Paul Spain:
Let.

Bill Bennett:
It slip under the radar because, you know, this will make your children safe. This will make you safe.

Paul Spain:
Like the speed cameras have become now called safety cameras.

Bill Bennett:
And the fact that we’ve got like, you know, police with truncheons on every corner, that makes your children safe, you know, there’s an element of that. So that’s the politics of it. And that disturbs me. But what really disturbs me about it is, is there’s just a sort of tendency around the world in, as you say, Russia and China, India now, maybe, maybe, just maybe the US in the future, where the governments are starting to get more involved in what people are doing and watching more. And even if there’s nothing in this at the moment, you can bet your bottom dollar, right, that this is the backdoor that any kind of state security in India to monitor what people are up to.

Paul Spain:
Well, this sounds like sort of a next level on the stuff that, you know, Edward Snowden, you know, revealed about what the US were, you know, were up to a decade or so back. I see the BBC’s reporting on it highlights. They make the statement under the app’s privacy policy, it can make and manage phone calls, send messages, access caller message logs, photos and files as well as the phone’s camera. And then they had a statement from Internet Freedom foundation whose comment was in plain term, this converts every smartphone sold in India into a vessel for state mandated software that the user cannot meaningfully refuse control or remove. So, yeah, I mean, this does, it does Seem like a pretty big deal, but it is part of this kind of broader digitisation of everything. And, you know, I think it’s something kind of, as a society we have to really get our heads around is how much is too much digitisation and how appropriate is it to sort of be mandating the digitisation of everything. Cause, you know, even in India there are people that, you know, don’t have access to a digital ID or don’t have access to a phone or, or don’t want to use a phone or, you know, et cetera, et cetera.

Bill Bennett:
Well, I’m just going to put another idea out there, right, that is that China is relatively homogenous as a culture and as a nation. Right. Russia is relatively homogenous. You know, the people all speak Russian and so on. India’s got like a hundred and something languages, it’s got different religions, different ethnicities and so on. And the various. What some of those groups are going to be worried about is that it’s all controlled by whoever is in charge and that it’s probably not good if you’re in one of those minorities there.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, it’s an interesting point. Certainly if we’ve got any listeners that have got comments to make on this, particularly if this is something that impacts you or your family in some way. Yeah, I’d be quite fascinated to hear how comfortable people feel about it. And yeah, I know, like governments come and go, but, you know, one thing governments do like to have is control over the populace to varying levels and.

Bill Bennett:
It never comes off, does it? Those speed cameras never came out when the next government came into New Zealand, for example.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, it usually increases rather than disappearing. So, yeah, it is fascinating. I think some people see this as kind of something where there’s no, you know, there’s never any turning back of the clock. Which, you know, as you highlight, is usually the case and maybe see this kind of as, yeah, something that is extremely dangerous. Now, I guess, you know, my hope is, is where we see these sort of technologies implemented, we work out, well, what are the right ways to do it? And that might be you make it optional rather than mandating it. It might be that you ensure that there are ways that people can operate without it. Because.

Paul Spain:
You know, it’s very easy to say, oh, well, this is entirely optional, as the UK did with their digital IDs. They said they’re entirely optional. And then, you know, very soon thereafter it was, oh, but if you own a business, then you need to use the government digital ID and opting out.

Bill Bennett:
It becomes harder and harder and harder.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Bill Bennett:
And look, here’s the thing. In New Zealand, we quite often talk about the digital divide, about how there’s people that don’t have access to, for example, telehealth. You know, if you’re in a rural area, you might want to be able to do a telecor. You want to get government services and so on. Yeah, it’s, you know, at some point they’re going to. Man. At some point a government like the Indian government might mandate that everyone has a phone as well as this app. You know, it.

Bill Bennett:
It’s just a. It’s not an impossibility that you need to have this before you can function in society. You might not be able to make, you know, you may not be able to do banking without a phone and this app, you know, for example. So.

Bill Bennett:
It’S, it’s kind of disturbing. And I don’t, I mean, I don’t know enough about Indian politics to know where that sort of goes from here, but I get the impression that it’s. I mean, I know that India is the world’s largest democracy, for example, but I don’t know, I think they’ve got a quite hard man government at the moment.

Paul Spain:
So that’s my understanding. And look, even if this sort of thing were to come in, in New Zealand, where, you know, we’ve always been pretty. Well, I wouldn’t say everybody’s always happy with the government, we’re never happy with the government. But, you know, it’s not like we’ve been at sort of the extremes of some countries, but I think we’re relatively freewheeling. You know, there’s a level of, well, we do need to, you know, we even need to balance these sorts of things and create an environment where people have choice. And I’ve heard from people that are totally freaked out by digital id, by central bank digital currencies and this exact sort of thing.

Bill Bennett:
Now, I. Paul, do you remember the vaccine pass?

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, that’s right. I mean, you know, during COVID there were different people in different camps. And as society, we need to be able to have room to kind of accommodate for, you know, different people, you know, having different comfort levels with varying things. And, you know, that we create an environment that’s kind of, you know, good for all. And yeah, sometimes surveillance can. Can maybe be too much and sometimes the use of tech can be too much. Now, I’m pretty undecided on a lot of these topics as to what the right way about them. Is I think probably things like.

Paul Spain:
Digital ID and these other topics, things I’ve mentioned. We’re probably going to get all of these technologies because there’s a lot of sense to doing so. But it’s more around how do we navigate them so that you land in a place that you get the maximum of the good benefits and you minimise the sort of things that would freak people out from a surveillance.

Paul Spain:
Type of perspective.

Bill Bennett:
Well, I think it’s probably, I think the news from India is basically it’s a call to at least start thinking about what we want from that aspect of our society.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, alright, we’ll pick this up again, I’m sure. Future things. But yeah, certainly that was really interesting to see India make that move. I think that they are probably.

Paul Spain:
At an end of things which is gonna be really interesting to watch from a distance because of the scale of the population because their government probably is a little bit edgier than most democracies and you know, because they’re doing it and we’re not at this point. So we can learn some things and they do.

Bill Bennett:
There’s a lot of minorities in India, I know that much.

Paul Spain:
Alright, that’s through the news now. Wanted to tap into a couple of other topics. Some of the gadgets we’ve been looking at recently this time of year we’ve been prepping a kind of a Christmas sort of tech gift guide that will be up on the NZ Tech Podcast website@nztechpodcast.com Christmas I believe. So that will be kind of some sort of, I guess my list of kind of recommended things to consider when you’re looking at tech gifts, whether that’s for yourself or for others.

Paul Spain:
And so we’ll chat around some of those. The other thing as part of that has been looking at some of the newer gadgets and thinking, well, are they relevant to be part of this tech gifts list? And some of the other things are, I guess, things that I’ve been using.

Paul Spain:
This year and think, hey, that’s definitely something to recommend on the newest gadgets. Earlier on in the year we had a little bit of a look at some of Motorola’s newer smartphones. They’ve come through and done a refresh over recent months. So wanted to have a look at sort of those new handsets, the three that we’ve just looked at recently, Motorola Razr 60 and some might recall that I looked at the Motorola Razr 50 Ultra earlier on in the year. Now this is quite interesting just to get my head around cause I hadn’t really delved into what Motorola were doing on their handsets in current times, and what it seems is each year they’re launching two of these foldable phones, although we’ve just got the one launched in New Zealand officially. So last year they had the Motorola Razr 50 and the Motorola Razr 50 Ultra. Now, what they appear to have largely done, if you want to simplify it, is now we’ve got the newest additions out, and the difference between the last one, the Razr 50 Ultra, and the new Razr 60 is virtually, virtually nothing. So what was a $2,000 phone called the Razr 50 Ultra earlier on in the year and last year? There’s a few adjustments, but it looks pretty small, has now become this year’s Motorola Razr 60 and a third of the price basically knocked off as a new model.

Paul Spain:
And then if you want the top features, they’ve got a Motorola Razr 60 Ultra, which, yeah, at this point, they haven’t launched into. Into the New Zealand market. So that was just me getting my head around how they work.

Bill Bennett:
Yeah. Like I said earlier about how the mobile phone market is really two companies. There’s a third one, Oppo is probably the other significant player after those companies. No one’s really making a lot of money. I mean, and I doubt that, actually, Motorota is actually part of Lenovo as well. So it’s worth mentioning the golden age of mobile phone innovation and competition has passed. Right. It’s.

Bill Bennett:
I mean, I’m not saying this, I’m not saying they’re rubbish or anything. I’m just saying that the golden age is over. Modern phones are great in lots of ways and they’re better than the old ones and so on. But you don’t. What you don’t get these days is you don’t really get anything sort of exciting coming from left field, you know, and some of the exciting things that came from left field in the past were pretty staffed and didn’t really work out. I mean, do you remember there was the modular phones, for example, for a bit. Just that kind of stage is behind us. And I suppose where I’m going with this is it’s hard to know what Motorola’s game is, really, because it’s not going to be a particularly profitable business for them.

Bill Bennett:
I mean, I’m not saying they can’t make a profit, but it’s not going to be particularly profitable.

Bill Bennett:
So what are they doing? Are they hoping that to carve out some niche in the market and perhaps increase Their share over the years against the Apples and the Samsung’s and the Oppos. I don’t know, it’s a hard one to figure out what they’re actually, what they’re, what they’re about, what they’re actually up to.

Paul Spain:
Well, I mean, I guess for me I think it’s really important that we end up with, you know, with competition in a market and you know, Motorola obviously a brand that’s been around for a long time, as you say now part of Lenovo, you know, so they’ve got that, you know, that Chinese ownership and you know, R and D and so on. The hardware they’re releasing is really nice and you know, I mentioned there were three. The other two I looked at are the Motorola Edge.

Paul Spain:
60 fusion, which is a kind of a higher mid tier phone retailing around $700.

Paul Spain:
Really, you know, really nice design. It’s kind of got the curved edges that the, you know, the top end Samsung’s used to have. And then they’ve got their Edge 60 Pro which you know, I guess is designed to, you know, compete against the S series from Samsung. Now I think how much are they pull? That’s about 1,300 as the retail price.

Bill Bennett:
So Motorola prices top out about 1,300.

Paul Spain:
Well, if you’re looking at their Razor 60, that’s about 1,200. But the 50 Pro and I guess if they do launch the 60, sorry, the 50 Ultra and if they were to launch the 60 Ultra here, that would be at that sort of $2,000 price point. But they don’t seem to have continued at those price points in this market, which makes sense to me.

Bill Bennett:
So that’s what, and that’s what appears to be happening. Isn’t they coming down the market in terms of price?

Paul Spain:
And then they’ve got some, you know, they’ve got other lower end models. So I think what they do is they, you know, they give a bit of competition some other options in the market.

Paul Spain:
The hardware I think you’re arguably getting, you know, better bang for your buck than you would be with a Samsung. The big concern that I have, and maybe this is a market sort of scale thing, is they’re behind on.

Paul Spain:
Software updates. And to me, if you’re not delivering consistent, fast software updates as well as committing to a longevity of software updates, then that really dents my confidence in the brand.

Bill Bennett:
And the other thing I think is that if you’re spending two grand on a phone, right, you know exactly where you are with a Samsung or an Apple, you know, precisely what you’re going to get, you’ve had it, you know, you’ve been there, you had it before. They’re asking for quite a leap of faith to go and spend two grand on a phone from a brand which they may, you may have distant memory of. But that’s quite a, that’s asking people to take quite a leap of faith and I think oppo do that operate in that space really well. You know, they’re brave and they’re successful at it. I don’t think there’s room for another player to do that. I just don’t. And I’m quite conscious that I think, I think it may have been been with you on the podcast. We talked a few years ago about the Nokia phones.

Bill Bennett:
Do you remember there was a wave of Nokia phones coming back into market. They came, they were around for a little bit and they just faded away again. I think probably I could be wrong. There could be a market waiting for the Motorola phones, but I can’t see it.

Paul Spain:
Interesting. Yeah, yeah. Well I certainly hope that I like.

Bill Bennett:
The competition by the way.

Paul Spain:
These other brands could keep competing.

Bill Bennett:
Yeah.

Paul Spain:
And keep winning market share. But yeah, my concern would be without that commitment to the software updates that we’re seeing Samsung deliver on from a security updates perspective as well as actual Android new versions. Commitment and a pace to then the ones that they do commit to.

Bill Bennett:
Your.

Paul Spain:
Device two or three years down the track, whether you hand it on to someone else or you know, you like to use it for sort of, you know, five to seven years.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, you basically. It gets to a point where it’s going to be insecure, it’s going to be missing out on those and that’s.

Bill Bennett:
Going to happen quite quickly, I would imagine.

Paul Spain:
So that’s the challenge.

Bill Bennett:
Yeah. No, look, my, my feeling is that if you’re going to, if you’re going to be an effective competitor in the phone market, you need to have something fresh, something new that is the other, you know, and I think phones have evolved between the, the folding phones and the models like the, you know, the high end apples and so on. They’ve kind of evolved to their end point. You know, they’re not, there’s not really another iteration of evolution from there. So it needs something radical to come from left field. I think if you had something radical coming from left field, you might just get away with it. But they’re a bit. Me too ish.

Bill Bennett:
You know.

Paul Spain:
Interesting. Yeah, yep, I hear what you’re saying. All right, well for those that are kind of curious around the Motorola. We are giving away a Motorola Edge 60 Fusion with our listener survey. So we’ve got a bunch of prizes in there which you can find if you go to nztechpodcast.com survey I may have mentioned this previously but most listeners don’t get around to entering. So you know, it’s one of those draws. You’ve got a much better chance of winning something than you have with Lotto.

Paul Spain:
And it helps us if you fill out the survey and share some feedback on your listening experience and any advice as we think about changes for NZTech podcast for the year ahead. And yeah, you’ll find all those details up there@nztechpodcast.com survey and there’s also some other gadgets in the mix as well. So yeah, well worth doing I might say.

Paul Spain:
Now yeah, I mentioned a bit of a Christmas sort of tech gifts. Top of the list actually for me is the new Rocket Lab book. That’s about a 75 odd dollar purchase or.

Paul Spain:
Less depending on where you get it from. But yeah, I’ve really enjoyed reading it and.

Paul Spain:
Pretty, I think, you know, pretty inspiring to you know, read around what Peter Beck and the Rocket Lab team have achieved, you know, both here in New Zealand and, and, and in the U.S. so that’s, that’s, that’s old school but being a book but yeah, a pretty nice thing to have around and it’s likely probably to last longer than, than most $70 gadgets that you might buy.

Paul Spain:
And also in, in there something else I found is.

Paul Spain:
Pretty useful is the sort of the new, I guess the newest iterations of earbuds in my case this year I’ve been using the Apple AirPods Pro 3. From the perspective of the noise cancellation and just the overall kind of audio quality now that’s a bit more of an expensive buy, especially Apple’s iteration I think retail here is 479 but taking those on a few flights and just the way that it cuts out all.

Bill Bennett:
The noise, yeah, it’s great. And my endorsement of the AirPods is I have a lawn mowing contractor who comes around at 7am.

Bill Bennett:
About once a fortnight and if I’ve got the AirPods on and I’m watching, you know, perhaps watching some Premier League football from the UK or listening to a podcast or listening to, even listening to broadcast radio at 7am While I’m making the coffee and tea and so on, I don’t even know if the contract has been it’s that good.

Paul Spain:
Yeah and I’ve noticed that. And yeah, similar, similar sort of Scenarios on a flight, et cetera. There’s the one scenario where you’ve just got them in and they’re doing the, you know, the noise cancelling. They bring down the kind of, you know, the noise. But if you hit play or you watch something, you know, whatever, you know, you’re listening or watching something, then that plus the cancellation bit means, yeah, you’ve got no idea about whatever the annoying sound is.

Bill Bennett:
My last long distance flight, I slept for about eight hours because of having the noise cancelling.

Paul Spain:
Right. You just have to run a bit of gaffer tape around your head to keep them, to keep them in your ears. But actually I do find that they stay, they stay, stay in pretty well. Now you’ve got the different size tips.

Bill Bennett:
The secret for AirPods is to make sure you get the right fitting. You actually have to work at that.

Paul Spain:
It definitely makes a difference. And I know they’ve got four size ear tip things that you put on them to make so you can get the ones that sort of fit the best.

Bill Bennett:
And also. But the other thing I found right is over time they might get a bit loose. So you might want to change the size if you’ve been using them for say, nine months or so.

Paul Spain:
Okay. Okay, good tip. We will talk through some of the other gadgets that have been looking through recently and we’ll recommend, we won’t squeeze that in today, but been looking at some of the newest smart lights from Philips Hue and Wiz. Been having a look at Dyson’s pencil vac. So the sort of miniaturization of the, the vacuum cleaner. Actually, I’ll give that one a mention. Cause we’ve been playing around with that over the last 24 hours since that arrived. And yeah, when I saw it I thought the Dyson vacuums are already sort of small as it is.

Paul Spain:
Why would you want something smaller? But this thing, it sort of feels like it. I don’t know, it floats when you kind of push it around the floor. I guess it’s to do with the rollers spinning and whatnot. But yeah, it’s very cool. But it’s also $1049. So this is kind of where it’s like, okay, that’s amazing miniaturisation that they’ve squeezed a tiny motor basically inside the rod of the vacuum cleaner, which is, I guess why they call it the pencil vacation.

Bill Bennett:
And the batteries. Slip the batteries in as well. It’s quite impressive.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, it all squeezes in there. It’s got a really nice stand. You actually link it up to your phone, I think that. So it can send you reminders if you don’t empty it. Cause being that slim, there’s not a lot of storage and the recommendation is you empty it.

Paul Spain:
After each use or.

Bill Bennett:
You get the state owned phone app. Paul Spain, you haven’t cleaned your house today.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, I guess it could do that as well. That sort of different commentary I’ve seen on it is, hey, you know, because a couple of things, it’s designed for hard floors, I’ve tried it around the office on sort of the carpet tiles, works totally fine on those, but it has got less suction than what Dyson are sort of known for. So, you know, I’m not sure for most people that, you know, this would be, you know, a replacement, you know, like their other vacuum, the cordless ones are a replacement for, for generally any other vacuum cleaner. Unless you’ve got a robot vacuum cleaner. It seems like the sweet spot for this is maybe those that have got a robotic vacuum cleaner doing most of the cleaning and they want something for the other bits and pieces.

Bill Bennett:
We’ve got a robot, a stick and a conventional one.

Paul Spain:
Right, okay. Oh, there you go.

Bill Bennett:
We’ve bought them at different times. Look, I mentioned to Paul before we started the broadcast that one of the problems with Dyson, the Dyson stuff’s good, by the way. But one of the things is that usually about nine months to a year after the new Dyson product, you can go on Alibaba and find the clone versions. Some of those clones are good, some of them are trash, actually.

Bill Bennett:
But.

Bill Bennett:
It does seem to be that Dyson’s got a lot of fast followers in terms of their. The technology. They’re very fast followers. I would imagine that someone in some province in China is pulling that apart already in their company labs. And can we get the price of this down to 120 bucks? It’s probably the instruction.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, look, they’ve got a bit of a halo as a brand. A bit like Apple and others. They are known for innovating and doing things a little bit differently. And I was chatting with someone recently on why we haven’t seen Dyson say dominate on the robot vacuums. And we’ve been into a bit of a discussion on that. And part of that being that they like to really differentiate and do things really different to everyone else. But this is one of those examples of a product that we don’t see in the market. I’m sure there will be brands trying to emulate and copy what they do, but certainly for now this is one of those unique kind of standout products from Dyson.

Paul Spain:
I think it’s a niche in the market that will want this. I don’t think this is your mainstream for everybody vacuum. But there’ll be some folks and scenarios where it’s no doubt the perfect fit and just what they were looking for. But I would say if you’re looking into this, just check your use cases. Cause it isn’t designed for your typical carpet scenarios. It is for primarily your hard floors. And it’s got a lot less power than the typical Dyson vacuum cleaner or you know, even your normal kind of plug in.

Bill Bennett:
So it’s one for the Dyson enthusiasts.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. It’s definitely more down that track. It’s very, you know, very much a premium device. There’ll be a percentage of the market that loves it and no doubt in another few years there will be another, another iteration on it as well. You know Dyson are quite good at iterating on their initial designs. Well, I think that’s us for this episode, Bill. Really great to catch up. Thank you.

Bill Bennett:
You too, Paul.

Paul Spain:
Now folks can sign up for your newsletter at billbennett.co.nz.

Bill Bennett:
Yeah yeah. And I’m there on Blue sky if you wanna find me there as well. I’m actually on Mastodon as well. But Blue Sky’s probably the not threads. No, no, because that seems to have.

Paul Spain:
Been getting quite, quite busy.

Bill Bennett:
Well the thing is I think don’t spread yourself too thin on these things.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, yep. The joy of social media. Right. And yeah would encourage listeners, please jump on nztechpodcast.com survey. Would love to hear your feedback and your thoughts and very happy to give away some prizes. So we’re really looking forward to doing that and of course a big thank you to our show partners. So thank you to Gorilla Technology, Workday, 2degrees Spark and One NZ for their support of the New Zealand Tech Podcast. We’ll be back again next week.

Paul Spain:
We’ll be delving into some interesting stuff between now and Christmas and we also will have some listening to kind of keep you occupied over the break as well. So we’ve got some, some really interesting pre recorded interviews that we’ll be, we’ll be unleashing between now and early January. So thanks everyone. Appreciate you joining us here on the New Zealand Tech podcast. Catch you next week.