NZ Satellite to Mobile competition heats up, Ransomware via Webcam + more

Episode Transcript (computer-generated)

Paul Spain:
Greetings and welcome along to the New Zealand Tech Podcast. I’m your host, Paul Spain. And great to have Jason Langley joining the show again. How are you, Jason?

Jason Langley:
Good, thank you, Paul. Thank you for having me.

Paul Spain:
Thank you for taking the time out to join us.

Jason Langley:
It’s been a while. Four years by my count.

Paul Spain:
Yes, yes, you were reminding me of that. Well, time flew by during COVID It’s. I don’t know, we’re getting into a bit more of a normal continuum now, but maybe you can remind listeners where you fit into this big wide world of tech and business and leadership.

Jason Langley:
Sure. So goes back to the last time we caught up, you asked me the company I was working for at the time, Ingram Micro. Who is Ingram Micro? What do they do? So up until April last year, I worked as Managing director for Ingram Micro for the, for the prior four years. For those that don’t know who Ingram Micro is the largest IT distributor in New Zealand and certainly amongst the largest IT distributors in the world. So many companies don’t know who Ingram is and they don’t need to because they’re buying from the reseller partners, from the retail partners that buy and aggregate through the likes of Ingram Micro. Good stuff.

Paul Spain:
All right, well, let’s jump in. Before we start, of course, a big thank you to our show partners to One nz, two Degrees Spark, HP and Gorilla Technology. We really appreciate their support and keeping the New Zealand tech podcast going and of course, for all the great things that they do to help and support the tech and innovation ecosystems in New Zealand. So lots to talk about today. We’ve got news around satellite to mobile connectivity. You know, there’s been some news in the past on that front. One NZ have sort of been streaking ahead a little bit there with, with their link up with Starlink. But we’ve got news today from, from 2 degrees and spark to delve into.

Paul Spain:
There’s some, some interesting things happening on the, the AI front from Skinny, one of our mobile brands that sits under Spark. Also the potential of a deep sea power cable linking Australia and New Zealand, which is a multi billion dollar project if it goes ahead. And a couple of other interesting New Zealand stories and then some of the things that are happening on a global basis that I hope we’ll get time to drill into as well. But yeah, before we sort of delve into those topics, yeah, keen to hear a little bit around, what have been your experiences since sort of stepping down from Ingram and what are you seeing out there in the economy? I know you’ve been working Sort of doing a lot of, you know, business advising and, you know, consulting type of, you know, things. But you haven’t landed a new CEO role just yet. Although I understand you’ve had. You’ve had some. Some offers on the table that you haven’t felt have kind of been the perfect fit.

Jason Langley:
True, true. It’s been a. It’s been an interesting journey, actually. And one of the things that I’ve always said to people as. As they’ve exit a business through. Just through leaving the business or through a restructure or reorganisation, I’ve said personally, I’ve never been out of work involuntarily throughout my career. So when I resigned from Ingram back in. It was actually a year ago yesterday that I resigned, had my resignation.

Jason Langley:
I had this wild assumption that I was going to land something within three months and something quite exciting. I was fully aware at the time that the market, the employment, labor market was quite soft, but didn’t really think too much of it moving forward. It’s been very, very soft. So there’s not been a huge amount out there, particularly at the senior levels. And if I look at some of the roles that I’ve looked at outside the IT industry, there have been 250 people applying for some of those roles. So it’s absolutely an employer’s market at the moment. But that really is just the experience, I suppose, in terms of what’s going on right now. It’s been really encouraging to see business confidence on the up, see consumer confidence on the up as well.

Jason Langley:
On the. So I think it’s heading in the right direction and there’s a number of things that will play out this year, particularly in the IT space, that I think will create a much better year for all the resellers and partners in the market. In terms of the first couple of months, I wanted to just unwind from Ingram from my time there and just relax, rejuvenate, recuperate and get healthy again. I was never not healthy, but I wasn’t particularly fit and I was probably 10 kilos too heavy because I didn’t spend enough time looking after myself with no excuses. I can now spend a lot more time getting fit and exercising and doing all those sorts of good things. So I lost around 10 kilos. I’m thinner.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, I thought you were looking pretty good when I walked into the studio.

Jason Langley:
Certainly a lot thinner. Face is a bit thinner too. I don’t have the pudgy cheeks anymore. And my fitness has gone through the roof, which is good. So happy with that. Tick that off. If we get back to the work and business front for a sec. I remember saying to my wife back in June last year, as I was kind of just coming back up the air and starting to contemplate what next, and this kind of rolls forward into the cxo, the Independent Business Advisor coach sort of context, I said to her, I’ve got a huge amount of background and skill, particularly sales and marketing and now business leadership.

Jason Langley:
Wouldn’t it be great to be able to leverage that skill on a part time basis and offer that to small companies that can’t necessarily afford the full time salary of, of someone at that sort of level?

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yep. Kind of fractional role.

Jason Langley:
Yes, exactly, fractional role. But I didn’t, I hadn’t heard the term at that point.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, okay, yep.

Jason Langley:
And, and I was talking specifically about sales management and putting in place things like sales discipline and governance and forecasting accuracy and CRM tools and what have you, and actually leveraging the huge amount of data that a lot of companies sit on that they don’t realize is a gold mine that they’re not tapping into.

Paul Spain:
Yes.

Jason Langley:
So we were talking about that briefly and then I happened to stumble across an event which was a fractional leadership event that was being run by Bob Pynchon and Michael Freeburg at the time in conjunction with Fractional Directory. So I went along to that and had a look, and this is exactly what I’ve been talking about or thinking about and started to talk to a few people about their experience and how that was going for them. And at the same sort of time, I had a supplier that I used to work with at Ingram who’d done a bit of work for us, called me up and said, Jase, my business is growing well, but I’m at a bit of a crossroads. I really liked what you were doing at Ingram. Liked your style, liked your strategic approach. Can I pick your brains? So I said, sure. We went out for lunch and threw a bunch of ideas at him as we were just chatting away. And he was saying, oh, I haven’t thought of that, or I haven’t thought of that or I hadn’t thought of that.

Jason Langley:
Can I get you to do some consulting for me? And I said, sure, thinking three or four hours worth of consulting, that’ll be fine to help keep my brain engaged. And that actually turned into two days a week for two and a half months as I was building or helping him build things like a strategic plan and programs for his team, his growing team. So it was quite entertaining. And enjoyable from my perspective, being able to leverage that experience for the benefit of a much smaller organisation.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Jason Langley:
Which is when I started thinking about changing my LinkedIn profile to say, CxO Independent Business Advisor. Anyone that thinks they need some guidance or some support in that space, reach out.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, brilliant, brilliant. Oh, that’s, that’s, that’s good. Oh, thanks for that update. Well, let’s jump into some of the things that are happening in the tech world. So Two Degrees and, and spark. I think the. Yeah, the initial comms we got through was from 2 degrees today, but also heard SPARC have penned. I don’t know if that’s a current term.

Paul Spain:
Is it. Do people pin agreements anymore? Do they sign them? I guess digitally and an agreement with AST Space Mobile. So both of them independently and this effectively, if it all plays out well, means in maybe, you know, 12 months from now, we will be in a position where regardless of which mobile carrier using in New Zealand, there will be some reasonably capable mobile coverage. When you’re outside of the zone where traditional cell sites are. A couple of things that sort of come to mind. I’ve heard a lot of talk around AST Space Mobile. Followed them, looked the share prices along the way. What’s going on? What’s the, you know, what does the future hold? Because they’re taking a different approach to what we’ve ever, ever seen before.

Paul Spain:
They have these, these huge satellites that, I guess they’re not huge when they’re, when they’re sent up to space, but they fold out to, you know, have a huge coverage area, 220 square meters for, for each one. And one of the background information things that I read indicated that their, their aim is by the end of 20, 26 to have around or in the direction of 60 of these really big satellites. So we think of the Starlink constellation and you can fire up an app and you can basically, you know, the whole planet, you know, if you see them spinning around the globe, you know, it’s like there’s this mesh spinning around the globe because, you know, there’s, I don’t know, north of 5,000 of these satellites. Right. So this is a very, very different, you know, take from AST Space Mobile is that you don’t need a, you don’t need a whole, whole lot of them because they’re this, they’re so big and designed to cover a really big, know a really big area. So I guess, you know, one or two thoughts. You know, one of them is, how long does this take? Can AST space mobile, you know, achieve it 2 degrees and Spark had previously signed agreements with, with Link who, you know, they’ve done some, some satellite to mobile tests but you know, they’ve got very few satellites up, up there. Possibly.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. I mean last I looked you could, you could probably easily count them on one hand. So yeah, really interesting. But if that really works, then we’re in this position where there’s two, you know, very capable providers who can provide, you know, 4G and I think possibly 5G connectivity and the whole world is covered. It’s a very different future, isn’t it?

Jason Langley:
It could potentially be, yes. Is it a Betamax vs VHS scenario where one technology outplays the other and is it a case of this latest approach? Will that wind up being better? I guess time will tell. Then you’ve got the advantage that one has at the moment, having first mover advantage and bringing people across that need that sort of capability right now. And will those people jump back if they see a slightly better option later on? I think it’s going to be an interesting period to watch over the next 18 months or so. Interestingly, I’m on SPARC personally now and I don’t have access to satellite coverage, whereas my wife is on one and does. And we’re quite competitive so she’s quite happy she’s got satellite coverage in the areas that we go to that we don’t have normal cellular coverage.

Paul Spain:
Yes, look, there’s two sides to that because it’s actually quite nice to be out of coverage at times, but then you do want your occasional access without necessarily having to hike up a hill or go for a half hour drive or, you know, whatever it is to get, to get back into coverage. But it does very much seem as though we’re headed in that direction where we’re all going to have coverage. And of course the Starlink coverage to start with is for texting. And despite there being north of 500 satellites that are enabled with cell towers, you still can be waiting minutes sort of between one flying over. So what was the experience when this was tried out? How long did it take to sort of send or receive?

Jason Langley:
I was driving at the time, so I didn’t have a stopwatch on it, but it felt like it took a long time to send a data and we all know from years gone by that while a phone call wouldn’t necessarily go through properly, a text would because it only needed a very small amount of coverage. So our experience was moving from Kopu down to Hakawai through the gorge down there and there’s invariably a black spot on both. All three of the major networks. They seem to have gotten better for the fact we got well further into the gorge before we dropped off 5G, 4G and then ultimately 3G. But the experience was that it took probably a couple of minutes from send to delivery, which clearly early days in the technology and in the, I guess the partnership that one has with Starlink. But it does need to get better for that customer experience to be satisfactory.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, I’m really curious how this works out from. Yeah, I guess Starlink having, you know, what it suggested ultimately could be tens of thousands of satellites to ast most space mobile’s approach of, you know, maybe 60 satellites would be enough to, you know, to, to cover the whole, the whole globe. Obviously, if you’ve got a lot less, the distances might be further. So there’s, you know, maybe some, some other latency things. They’ve done some testing, but I think there’s a bit of a way to go. So we’ll keep watching this space. But the thing I like is when we see some good competition between companies and different technologies vying for a leadership position. But certainly Starlink are in a pretty strong position at this point, but we don’t expect that to last forever and it’s really a.

Paul Spain:
Well, how long will it last? And of course there’s also activity going with Amazon’s competing service. And in fact, I saw that Amazon with, I don’t know how you pronounce it, Cooper Kui per. I think it is their satellite service and they’ve done a deal with the Australian government with their national broadband network to, to pick up, you know, future satellite Internet communications, which at the moment what they have in Australia is, is pretty average, shall we say, what the, what the NBN deliver when it, when it comes to satellite Internet connectivity and hence why there’s a lot, lot more people in Australia who are using Starlink than there are in New Zealand.

Jason Langley:
Right.

Paul Spain:
I mean, as you’d expect. Right. There’s so much desert and, you know, outback.

Jason Langley:
Yep.

Paul Spain:
So.

Jason Langley:
Absolutely, absolutely. I think one of the questions that kind of comes up for me and look, I’m not an expert in this at all, but to me 60 satellites up in space sounds a whole lot better than. I think you said 5,000 to begin with. Big question, who owns space real estate and how congested can it get before it starts becoming problematic? Again, not an expert in this at all. And I know there’s a massive amount of potential real estate up there. But at some point surely it’s going to get congested with things banging into each other.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. And I guess the AST spos mobile ones being so much bigger at 220 square metres, it’s going to require a bit of manoeuvring potentially to get them out of the way if there’s some space junk flying at them as well. So yeah, both of them have their challenges but until they’re actually out there in operation we’re not going to know the realities. I’m picking of just what works best and how good are they. Having something that big has some potential in terms of. Yeah, what sort of performance and bandwidth can you, you know, you provide but also on the flip side, when you’ve got lots and lots that are, that are maybe closer to you that can provide probably some, some similar sorts of benefits. So we’ll see how that all scales up.

Jason Langley:
Absolutely, yeah.

Paul Spain:
Now, heard that we have the, the potential for 2,600 kilometer long power cable to launch between Australia and New Zealand across under the, under the Tasman Sea. Yeah, this kind of caught me off guard really. I read it and I thought no, this is, this has got to be, it’s got to be science fiction. Surely that wouldn’t make any, any sense to do. But as I delved into, you know, to the information they’re talking about this, this link TasLink and yeah, 1212 billion dollar in investment apparently the, the biggest high, high voltage DC cable in the world. It would have a capacity of 2, 2 gigawatts to, to 3 gigawatts potentially and allowing Australia to sell their surplus electricity to New Zealand during, during peak periods and vice versa for us. And of course, yeah, being in different time zones and so on, there are those different peak periods and obviously differences in terms of, you know, climate and what that could mean as well. So yeah, pretty fascinating.

Paul Spain:
I mean that is a huge investment. The immediate sort of question for me was well, how much of a loss do you get? Because we’ve heard of loss even on the cable that brings power between the south island and the North Island. So I was very curious around that and the, the indications are that it would have losses of less than than 15%, possibly even less than 10%. So you know, when you think of how much capacity it can carry, that’s, that’s, that’s a lot. But yeah, obviously they think that that’s, that’s all quite viable in the, in the scheme of it. And 10 to 15% loss isn’t gonna scuttle it, the other bit I was curious around is, you know, has this been done before? What’s, what’s happening elsewhere? We were talking about it before the show and yeah, it turns out that there, there is a, a cable of 3,284 km in China and also one that looks to be in the development between Morocco and the United Kingdom, which again, that one for me was quite mind bending in terms of the distance. Why would you link those countries over such a big distance? But of course you’ve got very different climates and very different needs, so maybe that’s viable. What do you think? Can you imagine that this can be a profitable enterprise for, for people to get into? I mean, I think I look at sort of some of the past big infrastructure projects like the Channel between, you know, the UK and Europe, you know, across to France and in a brilliant project.

Paul Spain:
But you know, the company that was, that was putting it together when, you know, went bankrupt, of course, you know, society benefited from the, from the result, but some investors lost a lot of money along the way.

Jason Langley:
Yeah, I can’t talk to that, I didn’t look into that one. But I figure the opportunity here, and the article that we looked at goes into talking about peak energy usage in New Zealand being during the early hours of the business day, peak energy usage in Australia happens a couple of hours later because of the time zone difference. So you can understand that there’s an opportunity there to move some of that energy around. The other thing the article was talking about specifically was that Australia tends to use more of its electricity in the summertime through cooling houses because of the hotter climate, whereas New Zealand uses more in the wintertime. So that makes a lot of sense to me from a commercial standpoint. You would have to build your model. Surely that factors in that 15% potential drop of electricity available over the, over the 2,000 odd kilometers. And factor that in the kind of old saying comes to mind on that particular example, that 100% of nothing is nothing.

Jason Langley:
So if you’ve got it and you’re not selling it, you’re making no money. Whereas if you’re selling, let’s say it was 3 gigawatts and you’re losing 15% of that, but you’re getting some revenue for it, well, that’s opportunity too. So I’m not an energy expert, but you would argue that the people involved in the commercial discussions and the calculations would have figured that out.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, I find it really fascinating and I think there’ll be a lot of maths that’s been done in the background to work these things out. Of course, there, there’s always, you know, when you do something for the, for the first time that you could, you could really come to rely on, there becomes that question of redundancy. And we, we used to have it with New Zealand and Internet connectivity, right. And we got to the Southern Cross cables and that was, you know, that was exciting because there was, you know, there was a bit of a loop, there was, there was two. So if one was cut, damaged in some way, then the other one in theory would pick it up. And of course we’ve ended up with a lot more diversity in terms of our international Internet connectivity over recent years as, as more fiber connections have been built. But there is that aspect here that, yeah, one or, or other country or both, you know, could be, could become quite reliant with a, with a connection like this on the electricity from the other at those, those peak times and maybe not end up, you know, building sufficient, you know, capacity when there’s this cheaper power available, you know, across the, across the Cook Strait sort of thing.

Jason Langley:
Yeah, and I think that’s a really important point. The, it’s not becoming complacent because you’ve got this, got access to this extra source of energy by not building enough infrastructure in our own country to support our growing needs. And it’s going to be a growing need scenario with data center AI growth and the electricity consumption that’s going to come with that EV electricity consumption, as that continues to grow over time, we’re going to need more and more and more. To me, it seems like it makes sense to have a connection between Australia and New Zealand. And while we didn’t discuss what the Morocco connection to the UK is, it seems logical that it’s probably solar energy that’s driving ultra stick up to the UK from Morocco. That’s got a lot of sunlight.

Paul Spain:
Be pretty handy in winter, wouldn’t it?

Jason Langley:
Whereas the UK doesn’t have as much.

Paul Spain:
Sunlight because the winter, because it’s winter all year round in England.

Jason Langley:
Correct, correct. So you could, you could actually see the same happening in Australia where as those photovoltaic cells become more and more energy efficient, generating more electricity with that huge amount of desert that they’ve got and the sunshine falling on that, you could even get a second cable if it was successful.

Paul Spain:
Well, it’s going to be an interesting one to watch. And I misspoke before I was meaning across the Tasman, not across the Cook Straight, but actually it tweaked my memory that actually haven’t there been issues even with the Cooke Strait cable and in, in fact Transpower are due to replace the, the Cook Straight cables over the next, I think something like seven, seven years or so. So there are, yeah, there are challenges there. And of course, you know, you put a cable in and over time it, it does age and these things don’t last forever. So yeah, it’ll be really interesting to see if they can pull it off and you know, how, how long it takes and so on. Now, interesting details came through from Skinny around their, what they, they’re calling their new AI brand ambassador. And so Skinny have, have gone through this, this process of selecting someone to be an ambassador on behalf of the brand, but an AI ambassador. So Liz Wright, I think from Northland, was selected from the Bay of Islands and she has basically is in a partnership with Skinny whereby they can use her likeness to generate AI versions of herself, AI video and audio, I suppose to represent themselves in varying forms, but deliver their campaign messages without having to spend big chunks of money getting into a studio and basically creates a situation where you can, you can create a new ad spot or online marketing message and in a matter of seconds rather than, you know, days or weeks or months.

Paul Spain:
Right?

Jason Langley:
Absolutely. I think it’s a really interesting development and I think it’s. We’re probably going to start seeing more of that as the technology continue. The AI technology continues to evolve and there’s so many different examples out there now. The early movers, the likes of Dali, stable diffusion, and they’re getting better and better and better. They’re continuing to improve. So I think we’ll start seeing more people adopt this type of approach. What I do think though is that it’s going to create a need for a transparency from the companies utilizing this technology so that the consumer knows that it’s not a real person and that it’s an AI driving the message.

Jason Langley:
B, it’s going to require legislation to catch up because while consumers are protected by things like the Fair Trading act in New Zealand, consumer guarantees law and what have you, there doesn’t seem to be anything at the moment that really covers AI yet, unless there’s been developments that I’m not particularly well across. So I think that need for transparency is going to be imperative so that the consumer knows what who’s delivering the message, whether it’s a real person or AI.

Paul Spain:
What would be your concerns around if that transparency does exist, what could be some of the side effects?

Jason Langley:
If the transparency exists or doesn’t exist.

Paul Spain:
Doesn’T exist, which is kind of, you know, the potential position we’re in today where there isn’t necessarily legislation in place so you could be chatting to, you know, what you think is a real person. And actually this is an AI bot that, you know, really knows how to, how to twist a person’s arm. Yeah, I think when we were chatting beforehand, you, you, you mentioned there’s, there’s, there’s an example where, where this, you know, had, had happened in, in the past.

Jason Langley:
There is. And so I was at an, at a conference in the US and I think was the CIO or CTO of Geico Insurance jumped up on stage and was talking about their experience with generating an AI chatbot and pitch this as a wonderful thing, a fantastic thing that blended the lines between human interaction and AI artificial interaction. Now the example was a late night worker was purchasing insurance online through Geico insurance. It was 2am, 3am in the morning, chatting backwards and forwards with this AI bot, not realizing it was an AI bot and said at the end of it, after he had said, yes, I’ll buy this insurance, sign here and he’s signed up and what have you, he said, us late night workers have got to stick together right now I thought, okay, that’s fantastic. It’s been a win for AI.

Paul Spain:
Was it the AI bot that sent that message or was this. Was the buyer.

Jason Langley:
Good point. It was the buyer that sent that message. So the buyer was blissfully unaware that it was a, he was chatting with the AI bot. Now for me, the concern with that is as AI continues to evolve and improve and get better and better and better, you could conceivably see the best sales organism or entity in the world being an AI rather than a human and being able to sell anything to anybody, particularly those that are a little more vulnerable, a little less savvy.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, because you can imagine that comment coming from the other side. Right? A bot that’s got enough information about you that wouldn’t matter. You know what it is? It’s like, oh yeah, I’m in the same boat as you, I’m a single parent that blah, you know, whatever the scenario is, join up some dots and you know, basically, you know, clone that person’s scenario and be like, oh yeah, I can really empathize with you and yeah, we should stick together.

Jason Langley:
And I would love to be able to refine the example of that. Years ago I was reading about neuro linguistic programming and brainwashing and that sort of thing, and I came across this example as a website that was effectively pandering to me, flattering me as the person that was interacting with this website. And it got me to follow a series of links based on what it was saying to me and the interaction that we were having and got to the end of it and said, see how easy that was that I manipulated you into coming to this outcome. And I thought, huh, that’s really dangerous. And you can see that educating a bot or AI in those sort of techniques could be quite dangerous. And it could, it becomes an ethical conversation, ethical question and the potential for those large first mover organisations who’ve got the money to invest to really take a dominant position in that space.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, I saw was ServiceNow shared shed some details which a couple of media have picked up on around New Zealanders and how much time they spend on hold. Apparently last year it was 24 million hours. And you know, of course you can imagine ServiceNow, they have a product, they have a product to sell. And this leans towards leveraging AI so people can get that faster service. But yeah, there’s a flip side to it. We need to make sure these things are done in an appropriately empathetic and transparent manner so that we’re not putting the best, most cunning and manipulative AIs onto the, the general population. Now just, we’ve got a few more topics ideally we’d like to get through. One of the ones that jumped out in news media today was hearing about electric vehicles being targeted.

Paul Spain:
Now we know there’s always a lot going on in the world of politics and you know, Elon Musk has, you know, has, it has at times been quite a polarizing character and as he’s jumped into, you know, deeply into the world of politics over the last couple of years, that seems to have really stood, stirred things up. We know that, you know, Tesla, Tesla’s, you know, sales are down, we’re seeing protests and so on, but the, the latest piece of that playing out seems to be somebody around sort of, you know, central suburbs of Auckland going and pulling out a spray can and, and spray painting over, you know, a bunch of electric vehicles and, and not just, not just Tesla, Tesla ones. You know, look, I think it’s, it’s, it’s great when we have, you know, new technologies that take us forward in varying ways. Electric vehicles I think are very much part of that. But I’m, I’m not so sure about this particular approach to a pushback and how that really helps or solves any problems.

Jason Langley:
Look, I think there’s much more constructive ways to voice your concern. Or displeasure with a certain set of events. And you think about these cars that were targeted were probably bought prior to Elon certainly getting involved in the Trump campaign and what he’s doing with Department of Government efficiency. So I think it’s probably a very misdirected approach. And besides which, that sort of approach never has any place anywhere really, does it?

Paul Spain:
Well, it’s probably going to land somebody in some fairly deep hot water, I would imagine.

Jason Langley:
I agree. The picture caught on CCTV of the property owner, the vehicle owner was very, very clear. So I’d say there’s somebody that wasn’t thinking things through properly and is going to be feeling suitably embarrassed or exposed, more to the point, having seen that article.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, well, I said the Polestar was only about a month, a month old. So, you know, brand, you know, virtually a brand new vehicle and they’re, they’re dealing with this. And of course, if it’s a, if it’s a Tesla, most of the Teslas are going to be able to record some, you know, some pretty good footage as well. So not a, helpful, not a helpful move. Yeah, and, and look, the, that is one of the, one of the benefits of the reality that there’s a lot of cameras around the place in, in 2025. And, you know, certainly at times that, that sort of stuff, you know, makes me feel a little bit uncomfortable. We were chatting before the show around, you know, me making probably a slightly illegal but, or potentially illegal but maybe appropriate move on the road. You know, we sometimes we have to, we have to do these things in a particular situation.

Paul Spain:
You know, but we’re probably coming to a time where there’s, you know, these, when we join together kind of AI with all the road rules and a lot of cameras, we will get to, you know, we get to probably some points where, where, yeah, you’re going to get slapped down pretty quickly if you, if you don’t follow the exact letter, letter of the law. And this is one of those cases where I think, you know, it’s, it’s probably a, you know, a positive win that, that this particular, you know, chap has been, you know, has, has been exposed. But there, there’s there’s kind of two sides, I guess, to, to the increasing sort of level of surveillance and something that we do need to keep thinking about.

Jason Langley:
The technology’s already there to have caught you in that particular situation with facial recognition, number plate recognition that’s available in cameras and software, driving cameras these days, as we were talking about earlier, the clarity of that Particular image was what got me. It was very clear.

Paul Spain:
I see the Heralds blurred out the face. Now maybe they didn’t initially because the first images I saw were clear and now I’ve seen the bigger, the closer one that I think you must have.

Jason Langley:
Seen as well with the spray can in hand, in operation. So there was certainly a smoking gun there. Yeah.

Paul Spain:
Yes. Think about other people first before you get your spray can out. That’s all I can say.

Jason Langley:
Absolutely.

Paul Spain:
Now one of the, and this I guess is sort of as a surveillance related, but we heard about a US Car insurer, Allstate, sued for tracking drivers without their permission. Now, different sort of surveillance, it’s not about, you know, cameras, but that they were basically unlawfully, you know, collecting certain data, using it and also selling that to other insurers and covered about 45 million Americans. And this I guess comes because application developers and if, you know, if your customer base all run your app on their phones, then you potentially can sweep up some pretty large amounts of data. And then there’s this sort of crossover between your apps or your website and then the other websites that people visit. And you know, it’s very commonplace when you’ve got these apps to then be able to tap into other data sources through cookies and the like and get some pretty interesting information. So this one is going to be interesting to see how it plays out. Apparently this is in Texas where, where the case is, is playing out. And I think there was, there was a link up also between location data that was coming from the, the automakers, you know, Toyota, Mazda, Chrysler, Fiat, Jeep, et cetera.

Paul Spain:
Right. Whole, you know, a whole bunch of them. So by wiring all these sort of things together, you end up with some really useful information from a, you know, a business and a selling perspective and an ability to adjust what, what you might charge people based on, you know, all the information you’ve collected. And you can nudge your prices up and up and down, you know, with that extra data because you know, whether they’re going to be more or less risky than the, than the norm, but by the looks of it, in contravention to, you know, multiple laws.

Jason Langley:
Yeah. And I read that article this morning and the part of the problem for me was that not only were they collecting the data without having informed the consumer, not only were they selling that data to other parties, they were also selling it to other insurance companies. And to just kind of go back to your point around adjusting pricing, part of that, the whole premise of the article was analyzing driving habits and then adjusting Insurance pricing according to those habits. Now to me that seems like very much of a stick approach. If we catch you driving badly, we’re going to raise your premiums rather than say a carrot approach which would be sign on here for this particular set of capabilities. We’ll collect your data knowingly, you know about it and by the way, we’ll reduce your premiums if you do this, this and this and this to really kind of help promote safer driving behavior would be maybe a better approach.

Paul Spain:
Yes, but let’s, let’s hope we, we get an appropriate level of transparency on those things and yeah, I hope this becomes incredibly painful for them because yeah, it’s a, it’s a pretty big violation of consumer trust.

Jason Langley:
The numbers involved seem pretty substantial. 45 million people and I think it was seven and a half thousand dollars plus 10,000 per incident.

Paul Spain:
So they could get fined up to. Yeah, yeah, you find, if you find all of that then you’ve, you’ve got a, you know, a potential bankruptcy on your hands.

Jason Langley:
Absolutely agree.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Which, which is unusual because most, most often the, the fines aren’t, aren’t that big for, for, for these things. But yeah, when you, when you combine all those numbers together it’s, it’s rather eye watering. So I think they will, they will have their attention now.

Jason Langley:
Yes, they will. And Texas is not the state you want to test that sort of approach either, I don’t think.

Paul Spain:
Now, interesting to hear that there’s a situation where ransomware gang have taken advantage of an unsecured Linux based camera webcam to basically get around the fact that they were, I guess the cyber attackers. Akira had got into this particular network and they were finding, trying to execute their malware from Windows machines, was getting caught by the endpoint detection and response systems and so by utilizing a webcam and I guess there’s all manner of devices they could have picked, but effectively an Internet of things, an IoT device that wasn’t secure and what was able to be, I guess, you know, piggybacked on the, you know, the attackers were able to use that to, to keep their attack going and to fly under the radar and yeah, just. Yeah, we don’t, we don’t, I mean we know these things happen but you know, this particular one just coming through is just a reminder that, you know, organisations should not be, you know, chillaxed around, around cyber risks. And it’s really, really important to, you know, to make sure organisations are looking at what they have in terms of the, the assets and the things on their network. And the technologies and, and making sure they’re being, you know, they’re being kept, secured and, and kept up to the mark and you don’t have, you know, a bunch of 10 year old things kind of kicking around on your network that you know, might have been sort of semi okay back then but in the current climate are going to be easily compromised should an attacker manage to get you near your network.

Jason Langley:
Yeah, and I think it’s a good reminder to, because this particular example there was a patch that was available and could have completely prevented this particular scenario happening. So it’s a good reminder to keep those patches up to date. Cybersecurity is not going to go away, the requirements are not going to go away, they’re going to continue to grow as the bad actors, so to speak, figure out new ways around things. Linux has always been a tool that’s been used to get around more traditional security mechanisms and I think with things like IoT devices, with shadow it as well. And this is something that resonates with me. I like freedom, I love freedom. But with freedom comes vulnerability in this particular context and what I found over the last 10 or 12 years of working in the space, those freedoms were gradually removed and the employees would just get frustrated by the fact that I can’t do this. I used to be able to do it, I can’t do it now.

Jason Langley:
I don’t like it. But there’s an absolute need for businesses to protect their assets, protect their infrastructure, protect their data by keeping things patched and up to date while also communicating clearly with employees concerned as to why and what the risks are of certain behaviours like shadow IT coming into play. And if you don’t know what shadow IT is, I know you do, but some of your listeners might not. It’s where employees are bringing in their own tools and technology and software or downloading it for a particular business purpose. But it might not be sanctioned by the IT team. So I think it should act as a pretty stark reminder of the vulnerability of the systems that we have. And it’s not just the network connection anymore, it’s any portion of the PC or the server or the network.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, and look, this is a challenging one because organisations need to be agile, they need to be able to get on and get things done. And that’s why we see these sort of shadow IT scenarios happen. But you also need to keep secure and this is where it’s important that the technologists are hearing from the business around priorities and what’s important. So you’re not Putting up roadblocks that are so hard for a business to be able to operate. But you’ve got mechanisms and methodologies in place. So when you know a team or an individual needs to get something done that you can help them get there. But yeah, that you’re, that you’re considering the bigger picture. Right.

Paul Spain:
And some of that is security, you know, some, some of that is probably in a range of, a range of other areas because you introduce a bit of new technology into an organisation, you, you’re kind of setting a new standard and going, well, this is now what we use. We’ve got our data in there. Oh, is it private? Is that the tool that you want to be rolling out across an organisation? So there are many potential consequences if you get that wrong a through just IT saying no on one side or on the other side if you say yes to everything. So you’ve got to have those mechanisms in place that allow you to find your way through and at an appropriate sort of pace, depending on what it is.

Jason Langley:
I think so. Because if it always says no, humans are humans, they’re going to find a way around it somehow and that’s going to cause risk and cause exposure. Whereas if you’ve got a progressive IT or security team that is looking for ways to enable the business rather than just putting up a wall and saying no and or explaining why they’re doing what they’re doing, then I think that’s the right approach. What I’ve been exposed to in the past is go to an IT team and say, hey, I need this particular piece of software or this particular piece of hardware to achieve this and they’ll go away and evaluate it, test it, put it through its paces and say yes, we can use that or no we can’t. Now that’s the right approach. I think the question becomes how quickly and how agile can they be to be able to respond to the business’s needs. So that’s an important factor to consider too.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. And then other ones are, can the non technologists interact well enough with the technologists to maybe go to them with the business problem, not just always with the solution and go, I think this is a solution so you can benefit from the knowledge and the expertise to get something. So there are, I guess, different situations and it depends on the size and scale and what it is whether you need to step back a little bit more or whether it is just quite a quick and simple exercise. But yeah, certainly within my business we see a good variety of these sorts of, you know, challenges from you know, someone saying, hey, we want to implement XYZ software, you know, through to, through to things that are very, very small. But sometimes that, that XYZ software might have, you know, a decade’s worth of implicit, you know, implications on, you know, maybe it’s dozens or more staff. And then, you know, the clients that are going to be impacted if the software works really well, they’re going to be impacted really positively if it doesn’t, negatively. We’ve certainly had it where our client says, hey, we want you to kind of sign off and get this software implemented lickety split. And then you go in and you have a look behind the scenes and you realize this is probably going to be detrimental rather than a benefit to go ahead with.

Paul Spain:
And those are. It’s easier said than done to work out how you navigate some of those situations.

Jason Langley:
And I think that’s why choosing the right partner in that space is the way to go. People that have been there, done that, have the experience and can prove that they’ve got the experience. Like I said before, it’s not going to go away. It’s only going to continue to accelerate, particularly as the orchestrators of malware and viruses and encryption and what have you, using AI themselves to find better and smarter ways to find exploits and take advantage of them.

Paul Spain:
Before we wrap up, I was just keen to sort of, you know, hear your thoughts around, I guess, some of the, you know, some of the challenges and changes we’ve seen in the economy. There’s sort of this cross into changing demands from within business around what was very much the norm during COVID which is working remotely. In fact, I think many, many people had no option. If you were going to work, you were going to be working remotely and that was it. Some people really enjoy that way of working, of not coming into the office, particularly if they’ve got, you know, potentially two or three hours of commuting in front of them to get, you know, to and from the office each, each day. But we sort of see, we’ve, you know, we’re seeing moves that are, that are, you know, in the other direction. I, you know, I read, you know, read it, read a statement, I think a big US firm, you know, recently, and it was just basically, look, we want all our staff to be in the office. And in fact, if you don’t need to be in the office, then, you know, if this work can be done entirely remotely, then why would the work be done in country? We’ll get the work done in another country, you know, with a Different economy where we can get the work done for, you know, potentially a fraction of the price.

Paul Spain:
So there’s some, you know, interesting sort of, you know, dichotomies as we bring these things together. And then, you know, you’ve got, you know, I guess the current economy, a lot of property available and, you know, commercially in some areas, but of course, you start turning the knobs and everyone comes back to the office. Then, you know, all of these things can. Can change quite quickly.

Jason Langley:
There’s a lot there. I know there’s a lot there, but. But you’re right and, you know, I think there’s. It’s going to create opportunities. Certainly businesses, I’ve heard, are starting to ask people to come back into the office more often than they were if they are working two days a week from the office and three days remotely. A lot of businesses are starting to ask, come in three days a week and two days remotely. You pick any number of days, it doesn’t matter. The impact is the same.

Jason Langley:
The negative aspect of it, just from an employee experience perspective, is a lot of these people, over the last four years, since struck five years, have set their lives up around working remotely. They’ve organised their schedules around childcare and appointments and what have you, and getting things done during the day, but also taking on a little bit extra at the front end and the back end of the day to compensate. You’ve got the cost of petrol, the cost of driving and the cost of parking in a lot of instances where you’ve still got this cost of living crisis going on. So that’s playing on people’s minds as well. And that’s some of the conversation that I had in my last role. The opportunities for the industry or for the IT industry per se, as people start to make their ways back to the office, their way back to the office is around making sure that there’s seamless interaction ability between home and between the office. And that’s already started to happen. But it’s.

Jason Langley:
I think we’re only scratching the surface in terms of the meeting rooms, the huddle rooms, putting together the digital capability with the likes of zoom and teams and what have you to have a really clear conversation and engaging the people that are remote. How many times have you sat on a teams or a zoom call, for example, and you’ve been the one person sitting remotely and there’s been 10 other people in the room. It’s really hard to get your point across and hard to really participate. So those are some of the concepts I think we have to Explore.

Paul Spain:
And you know, it does vary a fair bit between differing roles. Some roles makes a lot of sense that you don’t necessarily need to be in an office environment so much. And especially where I think software development is one of those sort of big ones where often there’s that need to be productive to actually be away from a whole lot of noise and the hustle and bustle to get in and get coding done. Right. And there’s many more examples where that can make a lot of sense. But on the flip side, there are other examples where there’s a lot of benefit from the collaboration side. But as you, as you say, if the technology and the way the software and these teams and zoom type mechanisms work, which they don’t always for every situation, but if they’re, they’re made to fit a broader range of scenarios, then you can end up with, you know, with a good outcome without being there in person. And of course I think these technologies have, have made it easier for a country like New Zealand to do business on the global stage because they’re just now so normal.

Paul Spain:
So every day that, yeah, we, we can totally benefit and do business across the world on virtually an equal basis in many regards as to somebody doing business interstate in the US without traveling.

Jason Langley:
Right, yeah, yeah. And look, I think it’s going to come down to individual preferences as well. Personally, even at Ingram, when I was at Ingram, we had two days in the office was a requirement. It wasn’t an enforced or monitored requirement, it was an honesty sort of system. And then three days remote, I was still in the office five days a week, most weeks, just because that’s my style and I like to be near the resource, near the people interacting, having conversations, learning from the people as well, from what was going on. The software example you mentioned, sure, you can operate that remotely, but then there’s a lot to be said for more senior staff helping coach and teach some of the junior staff, despite the fact that AI is coming along to start taking up some of those more simple coding capabilities.

Paul Spain:
Sure.

Jason Langley:
And I think you know, that seniority aspect and the collaboration collegial aspect of being in the office is really, really valuable and something you can’t dismiss. But at the same time flexibility of that remote working is, has got an allure to it as well.

Paul Spain:
Sure, sure. And what did you see in terms of the growing sort of role for New Zealand based firms to have international teams and international staff? Because that certainly became a really big thing for the US to sort of offshore things to India, but that has Kept growing in differing ways. We see US companies keeping customer service in largely the same time zone by moving the workload to say, south or Central America and varying variations of that for say New Zealand and Australian companies, where there are alternatives that when we look north that aren’t necessarily a million time zones away so that they can interact with, with local customers during appropriate time zones to be able to work.

Jason Langley:
Yeah, I think there’s the way any business needs to be looking at that is where are they going to get their advantages? Where are they? The pitfall is going to be all the disadvantages. Certain roles, certain types of function work really, really well in that regard. You’ve seen a lot of companies operate call centres up in Southeast Asia, for example, and with the right level of training and the right level of inclusion of those distant team members within the local team, you can get some really good results. Where I’ve seen it hasn’t worked so well is some of those more traditional, typically customer facing sort of roles or people facing roles where they’ve been taken off to say the likes of Australia and the big fish always gets the attention or tends to get the attention and the poor cousin that does the smaller market tends to get a little less right.

Paul Spain:
So that’s where we’ve kind of seen say rather than, you know, a company having a, you know, reporting lines within country or all the leadership within country to go, oh, we’ll group together, Australia and New Zealand or Australia and New Zealand and you know, you know, another, another country sort of thing. And then, yeah, the, the smaller one maybe doesn’t get catered to at the same level as they were previously.

Jason Langley:
Correct. And I’ve, I’ve seen examples of, of that work and I’ve seen examples of it where it hasn’t worked and 18 months after making that initial move, it’s been rolled back again so that you’re getting that in country face to face engagement again. So I think it requires a lot of thought as to how you’re going to do it. Yes, there’s some cost benefit or some savings that can be made through that level of consolidation. But is this the right level of consolidation and the OPEX savings that we’re going for for this particular type of function?

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, it is, it’s interesting to watch as different countries have been through some of that and, or yes, different, different companies have, have been through. I think Microsoft, you know, their Australia and New Zealand have, you know, kind of come together and in recent years and yeah, I think there’s probably some aspects of that, that have, that have worked. Okay. Other ones, you know, probably not as, as, as good, but, you know, those are the, those are the calls these, these companies make. And sometimes you’ve got to try something out to decide whether it works or, or, or it doesn’t work, but it, it may, it may cost you in making those calls. Right. So. Yeah, but you know, business can’t stay the same forever either, right?

Jason Langley:
No. And I would just say if you’re going to try something new, be prepared to fail fast and then move on. But innovation is a key to growth and ongoing success. Great.

Paul Spain:
Well, thanks for joining me on the show, Jason. It’s been great to have some of your thoughts and insights and opinions. Anything else you’d like to add before we finish up?

Jason Langley:
I hadn’t thought of that. No. Look, it’s been a pleasure being invited back, so thank you for inviting me to join you. It’s been, like I say, four years since we last caught up and I’ve certainly enjoyed the conversation. It put me on the spot a couple of times, but it’s good to get the gray matter going. Excellent thinking about.

Paul Spain:
And if folks are wanting to get in Touch, is LinkedIn the best place to connect with you?

Jason Langley:
LinkedIn is a good place to get in touch with me. So my contact email, my contact mobile phone number is available through my LinkedIn profile. Excellent. And I’m pretty active on there, maybe not as active as I could be, but certainly, by all means, reach out.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, good stuff. Well, thank you again and thanks everyone for listening in. And of course, a big thank you to our show partners, Guerrilla Technology, One, NZ, HP, Spark and 2degress. And look, if you’ve been finding us on social media, make sure you are following us on the relevant audio platforms such as Spotify or Apple podcasts, et cetera. And of course, we’re across the likes of YouTube, LinkedIn X and Facebook. You’re wanting to get access to our regular videos. All right, thanks, everyone. Catch you next week.

Paul Spain:
Cheers.