Satellite Lifelines, EV Revolution, and Microsoft Privacy Battles

Paul Spain:
Hey, folks, greetings and welcome along to the New Zealand Tech Podcast. I’m your host, Paul Spain, and great to have Matt Archer from Quadrent back on the show. How are you, Matt?

Matt Archer:
Really good, thanks, Paul. Fun to be back here again.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, look, always good to catch up and to delve into what’s happening in the tech world. Maybe you can remind listeners where you fit into this big wide world of tech.

Matt Archer:
Nice. Well, I’m the CTO of Quadrent. We’re a leasing company putting a green product out into market. So we help larger companies put it fleets together or other forms of leasing. And we’ve been building a really exciting sustainable product in market that helps get kids that don’t have laptops, laptops as part of the whole leasing experience. So that’s fun. We’re also building some exciting software in the property management space as part of our world where we’re wanting to help customers that have IFRS 16 compliance, which is a big company accounting piece. And we’re solving some problems for them as well.

Matt Archer:
So.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Oh, good, good stuff. Well, always interesting to catch up. You’ve been around this tech world for a long time. I think we both have. So there’s always some, some good thoughts and opinions to be heard. Of course, a big thank you to our show partners to One NZ Spark, 2Degrees HP and Guerrilla Technology. We really appreciate their support of the NZ Tech podcast and of the broader tech and innovation ecosystems here in New Zealand.

Paul Spain:
Now, a bunch of things going on from a local and an international perspective. First up, we’ve heard about 2 Ans annual report. Their digital priorities report for 2025 just has come out today. Tuans, of course, are the Technology Users association of New Zealand. And in this report, really, I guess in summary, they’re really urging government to double down on partnering with industry to tackle the digital challenges that we have in New Zealand and the priorities that they’ve landed on that they believe should be our key digital challenges are cybersecurity, tech talent gaps, digital inclusion and you know, they’re really, you know, highlighting how this is essential for maintaining New Zealand’s digital competitiveness and I guess to, to help foster innovation. So, yeah, look, I, I think it’s really, you know, it’s good to see the, these sort of reports coming, coming through. There’s always, you know, a fair bit of detail behind the scenes and in this case, you know, they’ve talked to a bunch of leaders across, you know, New Zealand, large New Zealand organisations especially, I think it was 30, 36 kind of key leaders that they’ve really, you know, drawn a lot of their insights and conclusions from. There’s varying comparisons of how New Zealand is doing on a global stage from some metrics, which is interesting.

Paul Spain:
We don’t seem to be particularly on a super improvement front in a number of areas. So they’re talking about us having remain static over the last few years, but having dropped if we look over sort of five years from a cyber security perspective and somewhat similar from a privacy protection perspective. So, yeah, there’s a fair bit to sort of delve into there. But cyber security just seems to be the big trend where, you know, we need to recognize that, you know, the risks are increasing and we’re not necessarily doing any better as a country. What are your thoughts on these types of reports and on those findings?

Matt Archer:
Yeah, I think these guys do a great job. I think if we don’t have a partnership between the people that can make things happen in industry, right, A lot of amazing companies out there that are resourcing themselves up, bringing in overseas talent, if it doesn’t exist in New Zealand. And there’s a lot of people that are putting real money where their mouth is to make New Zealand a great place and give us options. But I think governments sometimes get a bit confused thinking that everyone expects them to solve the problem. And in this instance, I think a bit of leadership and a bit of sponsorship and a bit of support of the people that are investing in our country is actually where they can do a great job. And I think Mr. Luxon has an opportunity to actually listen and act right? And the power that the government holds to actually mandate certain behaviors without needing to necessarily fund it, say, look, if as a country we move ourselves from this position to this position, we’ll be stronger, more competitive. And there’s, I think, a whole lot of great New Zealand industry that would step up and say, we’re actually ready to go there.

Matt Archer:
Tag us in, we’ll do some good things here. So it feels to me like a bit of an easy win for the government. If they were to listen and act and understand that’s what their role is, is to open the door, make it easier for New Zealand companies to do business, to make money, to make a great environment for us, we’d all win. But I think unfortunately we see government wanting to own the whole thing, right? Own the whole pie, get the praise for all of the actions, but that’s quite costly.

Paul Spain:
And.

Matt Archer:
And now it becomes, what do I pay for what I don’t pay for what starts, what doesn’t so yeah, these guys do a great job. I think if we could encourage the government to have a good look and listen, I think we’d win from it.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. One of the areas that they specifically highlight is the challenges that we have in terms of a growing shortage of skilled, you know, professionals, you know, in, in the, in terms of the tech area. And yeah, this is, I guess, you know, one of these trends that we kind of keep hearing year after year in, in varying forms. And one thing that, that jumped out at me is announcements by China and the US about teaching in schools from it sounds like a reasonably early age artificial intelligence and teaching people about AI. I think China made the announcement first and then a few days later the US kind of were following up quite quickly. Now let’s say New Zealand sort of sits back on AI and doesn’t lean into it. I mean this is something that, you know, by not educating in that direction and not encouraging the safe and appropriate use of AI, you know, that’s just one area where it could make a massive difference in a good direction or a bad direction. Right.

Paul Spain:
And of course there’s a whole lot of other areas to this, but that’s.

Matt Archer:
Yeah, because kids, I like the point kids, children nowadays come out of high school with often more skills than, you know, IT professionals that have been in there for forever. Right. And particularly I’ve got a number of friends that, you know, encourage their, their pre 10 year old kids to get involved in how to code and how to play with robotics and a lot of these things and you end up talking to some kids that are in their 11, 12, 13s and it feels like you’re talking to an IT professional in their mid 20s. So I agree if the government was to say let’s support maybe the education piece, bring in curriculums or make the people that want to write those, help them be successful, you know, at least we keep up.

Paul Spain:
There’s a, there’s a fair bit more. We will, we will. I think we can share a link to this in the, in the show notes. So we will try and we’ll try and squeeze a link in there in our show notes to those that are, that are, that are interested. And so yeah, big thanks to Two Hands for giving us early access to this and to One NZ who, who were of key sponsor on this particular report. So yeah, really, really good to see this sort of analysis and research being done and the surveying and so on to bring it all together. Now, talking of One nz, I see they’ve been in the news in the Last few days around their partnership with Starlink and this satellite texting service looks like they’ve hit a million messages that have been delivered. So I was sort of quite surprised.

Paul Spain:
I mean, I guess you average that out across the population. It’s, it’s, I’m just trying to work out how many customers they would have and so on. It’s, it’s virtually, I guess in the end or maybe a bit under, you know, one text message per customer for them. But when, yeah, when you add it up to, to a million, that means there’s, there is a fair bit activity going on in terms of messaging when people are outside of normal, normal coverage areas. And the news piece that I mentioned, I think this was something that Chris Keel maybe did, was calling out that this service was used to contact emergency services in the last few days after a crash happened in a mobile black spot. So yeah, really, really interesting to sort of see this. This, you know, there’s, this is an area of crossover and of course all our telcos are now committed in one way or another to satellite mobile, whether it’s texting or further, you know, this will develop over, over time. But yeah, you can, you can see this is going to become something that’s just, just as every day as every other bit of technology that we’ve quite used to, isn’t it?

Matt Archer:
That’s good from a life saving point of view as well. Right. And I went and saw my, got a sister who lives up in Darwin and up there there’s pretty much no cell coverage wherever you go.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Matt Archer:
And you know, watching the phone move to satellite mode as you travel around and about the place, it just gives you a little bit extra, you know, sense of safety and security. Right. All of a sudden this device can actually be used to get help if you come across it, especially if someone’s been injured like in this article, you know, you are the person who first responder, you know, you may have first aid training but if you can’t get people with real gear to help, you know, you’re going to be a bit stuck. So yeah, yeah, yeah. From a humanity point of view I think it’s great.

Paul Spain:
Well, it’s certainly, you know, in these sort of cases, you know, can really speed things up if you can get some comms out. And you know, I think the talk is that we, you know, it could be as soon as the end of this year when satellite calling becomes an option through Starlink and the like. I guess initially it’s probably Starlink is going to be at the forefront on that one. But it is interesting to see that there are others in this space. Now, we did mention a few weeks back on 2 degrees announcements and on the same day we picked up some media coverage that was saying that Spark were also going to go with the same company as, as 2 degrees AST space mobile, who taking a very different approach to Starlink. Since then, I haven’t actually got. We haven’t got any official clarity over who Spark are partnering with, but they are partnering with someone. So, yeah, I haven’t, haven’t seen that through.

Paul Spain:
So just to clarify that, I can’t remember exactly what we said we’d heard, but it definitely indicated that Spark had done some sort of a deal. But we’re waiting for formal confirmation on exactly what the deal is and who with. One of the things around Starlink seems to be that it is more than likely that Starlink will ultimately end up partnering with, with more than one telco in, in a lot of markets. I’m picking that’s what’s going to work out for them commercially, but we’ll wait and see. I don’t think we’ve actually seen that formally announced anywhere, but I think Starlink have, have suggested that that’s, that that’s quite likely, but New Zealand’s still very much at the forefront. So, you know, well done, well done New Zealand on that front that we’re at the forefront of these things. And I think there are a lot of countries in the world right now where there will be accidents happening and people are outside of coverage and there will be some serious consequences that they’re not able to communicate. But here in New Zealand, we’re at the forefront of benefiting on that front.

Matt Archer:
Doesn’t seem that long ago that. Remember those old satellite phones that were rumored to cost like $500aminute? You know, if you’re gonna go and explore Antarctica or climb some mountain and you’re a rich billionaire, you’d have at least one satellite phone, you know, in your backpack.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Matt Archer:
And now, you know, your $99 warehouse phone might be able to do a similar thing.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, look, it’s interesting these, you know, the role of kind of satellite in communications and how that keeps evolving. Just, just wanted to have a, have a look. If I took a screenshot of it, I’ve been on some FL. Pacific islands and one of the, one of the places where one of the flights I was on, I got a message telling me that I was now roaming on XYZ Network. Now, you know, I’ve talked In the past, around a long time ago, being on one of the very early WI fi services in, in, in flight, I’ve talked around which, which airline is it? Emirates, where you jump on board and you had this kind of roaming option that lets you send texts and, and so on, you know, which to me made a bit of a mockery of the, hey, turn, turn your phone onto flight mode because when you’re on them it’s like, no, turn off flight mode so you can use those services. Yeah, so I was on a, I think this was Singapore Airlines, remember correctly? And yeah, came up and basically you would have X. Even though you had WI fi on the flight. The message from the roaming provider was and I don’t think I’ve got it, I’ve got it captured here, I’m not seeing it was basically saying that you could use them to make phone calls, to send texts and to use, and to use data.

Paul Spain:
And the amount was like astronomical. So I’m hoping I, I, I didn’t have my data on at that point. I’m pretty sure I had roaming data off. But if I didn’t, won’t be looking forward to seeing that bill because, you know, I mean it would have been an older satellite and probably not very, very fast. But there are some reminders around how we travel and how you kind of balance out your costs when traveling and some appropriate tricks. A lot of folks don’t know that one thing you can do these days is to buy a local SIM in the country you’re going to. And if you’ve got WI fi calling turned on, it isn’t actually just WI fi calling, it is, you know, your calls, your texts, etc. Happening over any Internet connection.

Paul Spain:
So a local SIM then, you know, your WI fi calling turned on means you might be able to avoid, and sorry to our sponsors, but you might, depending on which carrier you’re with and so on, you might be able to avoid some, you know, some reasonably chunky roaming charges. So, you know, from a convenience point of view, the, the, you know, the roaming options that, you know, 2 degrees Spark and M1NZ have are really, really handy and I’ll tend to use them but if I’m somewhere for a longer period of time and it’s super easy to get a, to get an ESIM or something in some cases I’ll go down that track. Now sometimes it’s just because I’m curious and I want to try it out because it’s like, well, it’s kind of six or one half dozen of the other by the time you jump through all the hoops to kind of test it. But that’s something that I like to do is test these things. And I did find that in, in a country in Asia recently where I was able to buy a local SIM card, converted it to an esim, you know, jump through these different hoops to get a feel for what’s possible. And yeah, it’s certainly become easier than it, than it used to be and in some cases, you know, reasonably low cost to, to have access to a reasonable chunk of data. But of course everyone’s usage varies so the idea of things like being able to take your New Zealand plan with you or have a, have a good chunk that’s just getting built back to your original plan, you know, I, I still use that, that side as well. I haven’t gone down the track of some sort of global ESIM that, you know, that’s another, another track that some folks go down.

Matt Archer:
There’s a couple of really good global providers that you can actually, you know, download an app store provisioning piece and it all happens. But I know a recent trip I did to, I think it was Japan, you know, where you’re in a country that English isn’t your number one piece. Yeah. So you don’t really know where you are or you wanted to double check the taxis or what have you. So you’re running Google Maps non stop and then using Google Translate non stop. And I found that you’d easily be knocking up to two to three gig a day which you know, it’s quite handy to have a much cheaper version of that data and then use the WI fi calling. So.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Yep. Now onto also on a sort of a local front, government have, have announced their approach to investing in electric vehicle charges. And look, they made a, you know, promise of the, the election that they were really going to get behind this and support rollout of a lot of charges. They’ve got this reference I think this to 10,000, you know, charges that have been made. The approach that they’re taking is, is quite different. So rather than electric vehicle charging grants which they did in the past where it’s just like here’s some cash, we’ll drop in a couple of hundred grand towards some, what’s the terminology? I think one of them used chargenet used, they called these hypercharges and so on. So some really big chunky electric vehicle charging infrastructure.

Paul Spain:
And look, I think some of what we’ve now got around the country is phenomenal. You can travel in most Parts of the country there are some more challenging areas, but most parts of the country you can get access to some really swift fast charges. There’s some good competition now. There’s been a bit of acquisition going on with Charge Net and so on. Z has a lot of fast charges in some of their stations. So that side of it with the fast charging, we’re streets ahead but there’s still lots of places where actually some charges in a car parking locations that are maybe a little bit slower could be super helpful. And you know we’ve done this in our own business. We have a, you know, a Tesla, just a standard run of the mill Tesla Charger running on three phase and you know that charges our company cars pretty, pretty swiftly.

Paul Spain:
And so I think what the government here are talking about, they’ve got a $68.5 million commitment as interest free loans and they’re talking about 10, 10,000 charges. So you’re not going to get 10,000, you know, super fast charges for, for that sort of money. So I’m picking that at least a reasonable percentage of these are going to be, you know, more, more you know, at the, at the slower speeds but not the super slow like plugging into a three pin plug which you know, can take days to charge a car. So yeah, interesting to see this approach. In many ways it’s, it’s, it’s similar to what the government did with ultra fast broadband. And you know they, they offered these loans which chorus took and the other local fiber companies and you know, the much, much larger chunks of money we were you know, 1.5 billion or, or more that was committed to that. But, but loans at you know, that are interest free so it makes, makes it easier for those entities that are wanting to build out these networks of charges to get going. What’s, what’s your thoughts on this as a, as an organisation? I’m you know, picking from our chat earlier that your company would get involved in financing probably this type of technology infrastructure.

Paul Spain:
So how do you feel around sort of the government’s approach? Does it make sense to you?

Matt Archer:
Yeah, look, I think we were chatting a bit about it today and look, it feels like the government’s probably missed a bit of a trick here. Again, rather than being the white knight, they could have been the facilitator of a much larger output. Right. So rather than actually taking six to $8 million and saying look, here’s some free money, if they were to underwrite a much larger project, again, get industry, get corporate in and actually make the actual Outputs much larger and underwrite a larger investment. We could have maybe made it half a billion dollars worth of infrastructure investment, had some people with skin in the game like we’re talking about with the Tuans, people that have got investment in New Zealand’s infrastructure that want to see New Zealand be great and be on the forefront and the government could easily have put that towards something that I think could have been a lot larger. There’s financiers like Quadrent that are in the wings that would love to be involved in that type of corporate government relationship and there’s a whole lot of providers of this kit that would probably much rather put in 50,000 charging stations than 5,000.

Paul Spain:
Interesting.

Matt Archer:
If the goal is to help New Zealand benefit, then maybe we could just look at the way that we slice things. But again I feel it’s a little bit like we want to take all the glory but the output could have been a lot larger. So hopefully we have a good look at it and we look and see how we can go forward on these type of things a little bit better.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, I think it’ll be an interesting one to watch. I mean I felt what they did with the ultra fast broadband worked really well by doing the interest free loans and you know, the money had had to come back. But yeah, I get that there are, there are other approaches and yeah, it’ll be, it will be interesting to see how it plays out. It sounds like, just a quick look, it looks like we’re, we’re up to around 120,000 registered electric vehicles. Was some, some data I saw today of which a bit over two thirds, you know, full battery electric and, but under a third or more your, your hybrids and, and plug in hybrids. So you know, fair number of, fair number of vehicles. Yeah in terms of how many charges you need to support those. I, you know, I don’t know what the best the ratio is.

Paul Spain:
The best ratio is, you know, of course a lot of folks are going to be charging at home but that doesn’t, doesn’t work for everyone as well. So having other options around the place is, is, is important. So yeah, it will be an interesting one to, to see how that, how that plays out and whether this is the right, the right approach. But yeah, certainly when I look at the ultra fast broadband I’m, I’m pretty happy with how that’s played out for, for New New Zealand. Although we, you know, we’ve now obviously got that, that interest in seeing fibre go even further than what’s been funded to date. Now looking on the international news, one of the announcements we’ve got is that Microsoft are finally rolling out their Windows Recall feature which they announced last year. And it just seemed like a real mess. They were going to create a whole lot of privacy issues.

Paul Spain:
This is a software that would basically do regular screenshots of what you’re doing on your computer so that you can jump back and look things up and say, hey, what was that, you know, gadget I was looking at online? Or what was the handbag I was looking at for, you know, etc. Etc. You put in a few details, color and, or whatever it is. And I guess the AI type search wouldn’t just be looking at the text, but it would be, you know, they would index based on the images that are there. So the AI is kind of analyzing that and capturing it. And yeah, there were real concerns around, well, you know, what about, what about privacy if somebody gets in? And the, you know, the early kind of, I guess the beta releases and so on of this were not looking as though Microsoft had really thought through the implications. And, and so, you know, I think this created quite a bit of concern. The way they were going to roll it out was it was going to be on by default on these AI or co pilot plus PCs.

Paul Spain:
And yeah, not a, not a good look at all. Now they, they’ve put a good few months into trying to resolve this and they, they’ve certainly made some strides forward. But I was sort of asking it around things that might impact an individual or a business. So a business might have. And look, they do encrypt what they capture, so that is positive. But there is, yeah, there are still risks. I don’t know how this plays out on things like a BYOD situation. So you’ve got this software running on your.

Paul Spain:
Bring your own device, then you’re linked into your workplace. And so from your local laptop’s perspective, it has no idea which apps are really running on your screen because the software lets you say, well, I don’t want you to screenshot my last pass or my this or my that to keep privacy. But if you’re a personal device linking into a work scenario, then it’s actually not going to know that information. And so could be getting screenshots of all sorts of things, whether it’s, you know, credit cards because you’re processing that sort of, you know, data or it gets typed into your screen from time to time, or some sort of, you know, private key information, API keys, there’s all sorts of, you know, confidential things, private people’s birth dates and whatnot that could go through. So, yeah, I’m not, not 100% clear that, that Microsoft have, have solved this. And I was trying to track it down, but I haven’t managed to. But I did also read in the last few days of some of this software that gets used sometimes for monitoring workers, particularly remote workers, and runs on, on a, you know, a company device. And I heard about this particular software that basically takes screenshots every, what is it, 20, 30 seconds, whatever the time frame is that it’s configured for.

Paul Spain:
And this particular software vendor had all this data sitting with Amazon AWS and apparently a bucket that was an S3 bucket that was accessible to anybody. So we’ve got this massive amount of data leak. Now this is on a different, is a different situation and there’s a different scale to what Microsoft are doing. But I think it is a reminder that tools like Windows recall, you know, do carry some risk with them. And yeah, I don’t think, you know, most organisations who maybe allow staff to log in from their own devices would be super excited that there is now the software that can be running on personal devices that might take a continuous stream of screenshots, up to 25 gigs worth of screenshots onto the local personal device, who then maybe lose their device, their device may get compromised or they may leave the organisation and still have this sort of stream of screenshots. Now, depending on the mechanism, there were certainly ways to sort of block those screenshots from business applications and so on. But yeah, it still doesn’t feel like a super relaxing type of feature for Microsoft to be rolling out. For those who can are concerned about data privacy and cybersecurity.

Paul Spain:
How would you feel about this, Matt? Am I on another planet or am I right here?

Matt Archer:
Well, it should be every. Everyone should have those cybersecurity concerns, right? I mean, again, two hands are calling. It’s one of the biggest issues that we need to look at. Yeah, I remember from a different time when I was involved in a lot more payments. You know, a credit card features about $3 to $5 US on the black market. Identities, again, commodities that are traded worldwide. And you don’t need to get a lot of personal information to actually steal someone’s identity. And then you’ve got a camera that’s sitting on your machine, right? So now the walls of this capture are not limited to your machine.

Matt Archer:
Because if you’re sitting in an office and you’re on a video call where now you’re capturing everything around you, everyone who walks by every other thing that’s happening outside of the camera. And now we’re going to submit this all to an AI to index for us and make a decision about what is acceptable and what’s not. And I imagine trigger all sorts of automations off the back of the AI’s autonomous decision about good and bad and ugly. I just think they’re biting off way more than they can chew. I don’t think our AI processing is up for it. And I think that the smart hackers of the world will flock around this as an opportunity to harvest information and I just think it’s too early. I think it’s way too early for this type of tech at the moment.

Paul Spain:
It does feel like Microsoft are setting themselves up for an own goal. And when I say they’re setting themselves up, really their customers. Right, because it’s. Yep, Microsoft will get some flack for however this technology gets misused. But those who are really paying the customers who use Microsoft’s technology. So yeah, I would, I’d like to hear more from Microsoft on this front. I haven’t, haven’t raised it with them locally or further afield, but any of the Microsoft folks listening and want to get in touch on this, I would love to hear how convinced they are that they’re really able to mitigate all of the risks. And I know when this was first announced it just seemed like an absolute joke and Microsoft sort of kept saying that no, no, this is coming.

Paul Spain:
And they have continued to push down this track, maybe because they’ve advertised it as one of the features that you get with a Copilot plus PC. But yeah.

Matt Archer:
I think most cybersecurity administrators going to be looking for the group policy to turn it off. Right. I think if I was in that role I’d be going right, until we know what this looks like, how do I just turn this off for everybody? If they started with that, I think it would be a better starting point. I think you said that by default it’s turned on.

Paul Spain:
Well, no, that was the original, but I think that they’ve moved to it being turned off by default now. So that was one of the announcements. But yeah, it doesn’t, it’s. Yeah, it’s, it’s still a potential. You know, I think there’s still, there’s still enough, enough risk with it in terms of it being on people’s personal devices that can access work systems and yeah, and if you do turn it on, is it mature enough to recognize it should blur out or it should, you know, make sure it doesn’t capture certain types of things. Yes, you can manually say exclude my password manager or exclude this development environment where there might be confidential stuff and so on. But yeah, when it’s, it’s not just not giving confidence from the, from the get go, those things do, do concern me.

Matt Archer:
So I think we might go back to that world of two devices rather than your work phone and your personal phone. Your work laptop. Your personal laptop.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, you know, yeah, yeah. So let’s, let’s, let’s see. Maybe Microsoft will surprise us and in a decade’s time there will be no issues out there. So. Yeah, so what am I reading here? Yeah, Recall is off. By default. It is something specific to copilot plus PCs. So those laptops and computers that have got a neural processing unit, users must opt in to enable the feature and start saving screenshots across unmanaged devices.

Paul Spain:
And if a user’s on a multi user device where multiple people are logging in, then each user does need to opt in individually in managed environments, you know, businesses and educational and so on. Recall is removed by default unless IT administrators explicitly allow it. But it’s those, yeah, those individual ones where people turn them on and there might be unintended consequences and I’m sure there’ll be lots of warnings, but maybe it’ll be that sort of feature that gets such low use that because of its low usage we see a very small amount of malware that targets it and bad actors taking advantage of it. I guess that’s the one thing you could hope for. That way Microsoft are ticking the box. They delivered what they said they would deliver for the copilot plus PCs. So their marketing teams are happy, but actually in the real world people are smart enough to avoid it.

Matt Archer:
I think there has been a, when I think about other cases of something similar, if you think of Apple’s time machine that almost follows a similar type of architecture where by default this is off. But if you’re wanting to keep your Mac up to date with every single thing that’s happening, you plug an external drive in and it’s snap, snap, snap, snapshotting yourself up all these backups. But then administrators started to get concerned because now we have these external devices that have got full snapshots that potentially again, if there’s a virus, it could get rolled back onto the machine from time, from the time machine backup. And so then we move to these consolidated workarounds and then no one ever hears about it anymore. So.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, I think these things will Keep evolving. Yeah, it just. To me, Windows Recall is something that maybe should have never seen the light of day, but we will.

Matt Archer:
Time will tell.

Paul Spain:
We will see how it plays out. Look, I’m sure some people are going to benefit from it, but I think as many people that benefit from it, yeah, you’re just increasing the risk. Now another sort of. On an international front, we were talking about EVs and charging earlier in the UK they’re moving forward with electric vehicle battery recycling with a facility there that is set to be able to process 24,000 used batteries annually. Now they’re apparently going to recover sort of critical minerals, lithium and nickel, that’s used in the batteries and start creating something of a improved supply chain when it comes to batteries. Now we’ve, we’ve kind of been hearing that this idea of recycling batteries is a part of the electric vehicle kind of story, I guess, for, you know, for, for a long time. And there are mechanisms like in New Zealand, people will buy secondhand, you know, let’s say a vehicle’s been in an accident, they might then use that battery to go back into a car that’s got a degraded battery or it might go in to provide backup onto someone’s home. But we do need a bit more of a bigger picture on this front.

Paul Spain:
And of course some of the minerals are, you know, are not too ideal. You think of the cobalt that comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, who have had ongoing sort of human rights issues associated with the mining there and so on. So, I mean, hearing this sort of news, I think pretty encouraging, but I’m not actually clear from the coverage that I’ve read, you know, what, what percentage of EV batteries is this going to, you know, going to cover? It does seem as though the, the world is still kind of caught up and hasn’t fully resolved what is a really efficient way of recycling lithium lithium batteries at en masse. Right.

Matt Archer:
It’s good for the uk. I think one of the things that we’ve, we’ve learned in our sustainability journey with, with the Green Lease product that we brought to market a while ago is that unfortunately, New Zealand is the worst E waste contributor by capita in the Western world.

Paul Spain:
Say that’s not true, Matt.

Matt Archer:
Unfortunately it is, and by quite a margin. And the problem that we have is New Zealanders don’t have this mindset of recycling their E waste, right. And the problem is maybe it’s so cheap or maybe who knows quite why, but the problem is that there’s such an overhead on these devices. So a 1 1/2 kilogram notebook might generate, according to HP, up to 300 kilograms of CO2 emissions per single device. And the way that we can get around that is we can put that into a secondary life and we can actually refurbish that thing. We can make sure it doesn’t go to countries that like to condone slavery and other mandated controls and we get them into the hands of kids that need them. Right. So, you know, that second life is just not really hasn’t been embraced to the level that it could be.

Matt Archer:
And I think that, you know, IT assets are one thing. You know, we’re looking at that e waste piece. You know, we’ve got all of these great electric vehicles that are going round. You know, where’s our recyclable, you know, recycle plant for those batteries? In New Zealand, you know, and I think New Zealanders need to start moving into this world where we, where we own the responsibilities of our consumption a little bit more.

Paul Spain:
Yep.

Matt Archer:
So I think it’s great for the, for the, you know, for the uk, there’s a lot of, lot of dollars up there and I think again, maybe two hands can look at another sustainability piece around the technology side of things and can start to influence government to start to maybe lead the way on this. If the government could start to show what it looks like with their fleets and their pieces, that then starts to create great precedent.

Paul Spain:
Now also before we finish up the funeral of the Pope, you were making some comments before we jumped in around some interesting, you know, tech there. Now this is a really big global event. It’s attracted sort of top world leaders. Seems like also some issues with tech can arise and drones potentially amongst those. What did you see on that front?

Matt Archer:
Well, look, I mean obviously a huge world stage saying goodbye to one of the big leaders. Right. And so I think in the world that we live in, that terrorism aspect is something that everyone wants to avoid. And I saw a whole lot of photos of a lot of military people that had these anti drone guns, which I thought was quite fascinating. Big fan of drones myself, Love flying them.

Paul Spain:
Yes, you definitely are. Taught me a bit about flying drones.

Matt Archer:
As you go to these different countries, you have to do your homework, make sure you don’t break any laws or you can have prison and fines and both. But I think on the world stage, the last thing we want to see is any form of event that shows the conflict that’s happening up in the Russia, Ukraine, coming into western lands. So yeah, it’s interesting and there’s a Lot of technology now that’s really starting to restrict the airspace, you know, and it seems like these have been handed to law enforcement people now. And you know, it’s, I think it’s good. I remember going to Eden park and watching some, some, some game that was there and watching two or three drones make their way over the stadium and hover with their little flashing lights and I thought, well, you know, if security guard had a little anti drone gun.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, they’d be able to take them out.

Matt Archer:
Might be a little less of that.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, quite fascinating. Yeah. I had had a look on, on, on online and yeah, we might possibly be able to post a link to one of those stories and, and coverage on these, these anti drone weapons. So how, how do they work? What are they, what do they do? From, from, from your knowledge of them.

Matt Archer:
My understanding you’ve got particularly the DJI and the Return to Home drones predicated on having a nice WI fi signal and a GPS signal. So if you block the WI fi then off they go, they fly home to the latest gps. But if they don’t have a GPS signal then they pretty much land immediately. So there’s that type of jamming technology. But then I also think they also have some EM pulse technology that overwhelms and looks to burn out chips and makes them fall out of the sky as well, which is possibly a little bit more scary. And also frequency hopping. Yeah, and a frequency hopping piece as well. So some of the more advanced military drones have got, you know, that Bluetooth signal stepping tech which they can jump between different WI fi bands.

Matt Archer:
And so again, these things blast all the frequencies or hop between frequencies on their, on their, you know, justice journey. Yeah, yeah, but, yeah, fascinating. I’d love to, I’d love to maybe have a bit of a demonstration of it at some stage. Would be great. Get all sorts of different drones, see if you could fly through it or.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, anyway, yeah, drone attack test testing.

Matt Archer:
Yeah. Water bombs maybe. I don’t know.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well look there, I mean the, the role of tech is, is really it goes everywhere, doesn’t it? And you know, both are good, the good and the, and the bad. And in fact, you know, looking at the, the Catholic Church, one of the, one of the things that they hold is this thing called the Shroud of Turin that has been around for, I think it’s history sort of documented back to 13th and 14th century, but some suggestions that this was the linen cloth that was wrapped around the body of Christ and interesting. I’ve seen a bit of media around this thing which I presumed was some sort of thing that some, you know, somebody had made up at some, some point in, in history. But yeah, some interesting commentary and, and you know, looking with I guess the latest tech and at, at this, this Shroud of Turin and some, you know, quite fascinating conclusions. So, yep, I’ll leave that for listeners if that’s an area of interest for them to, to, to delve into. But yeah, there’s certainly some, some, some fascinating coverage on, on that one that’s been spoken about on a few podcasts and, and videos recently. So yeah, that’s, I guess that’s the nature of tech, right? It gets into every, every into the worlds of sort of faith and religion.

Paul Spain:
Now, anything that you wanted to share in terms of, you know, for those that might be interested in Quadrent where you’re the Chief Technology officer, anything that’s, that’s worth mentioning or where folks can go to look up a little bit more about you if they think that your services could be relevant.

Matt Archer:
Yeah, look, I think as a company we’re really passionate about the whole sustainability piece at the moment. The product that we’re bringing to market is designed to help kids that don’t have computers. So the output of a green lease program, when you get a green lease from Quadrent A, part of that is structured to help kids that don’t have computers get computers. They become the beneficiaries of this recyclability and, and the second life that we’re touching on. So we’ve got 100,000 kids in New Zealand that don’t have it parity with their peers. And in the next year or two, the goal is to make NCEA a digital experience. And this is going to massively put kids out of parity with each other. So the greenlease program is designed to work with our leasing partners, give them an opportunity as they lease IT equipment to put it through a program without any extra cost to that which brings those devices through a second life.

Matt Archer:
When they’re finished, they go in through an ITAD program. We make sure everything gets wiped and erased and then we look to get the majority of those to where the kids can become beneficiaries at no cost to the school. And that also then massively satisfies Those corporate customers CO2 emission reporting, because whenever a device doesn’t go into the ground, those CO2 emissions can be offset against their, you know, their reporting for the year. So the goal is to try and find that path that delivers a real tangible outcome and also gives a great community kick. So, you know, we’ve got a team that’s working really hard on this and we’re getting a lot of really decent sized corporates. Some of our larger partners have been coming on, on board, like Fonterra and others. So it’s, it’s an exciting time and we’re looking forward to this year. Really ramping that up, getting the benefit for the kids.

Paul Spain:
That’s great. That’s. That’s really exciting. Yeah, I think there have been varying sort of takes at, you know, how we, how we get, you know, those sort of, that second life for laptops and the like, and how you, you know, best take advantage of that. But this sounds like a really organised and structured way to be able to do that, which is really encouraging.

Matt Archer:
So, yeah, quadrant.go to NZ. Greenlease is a good way for people to have a bit of a look, read some of the stories, see some of the schools that have been benefiting and, yeah, that’s great.

Paul Spain:
Oh, well, thank you very much. Great to have you back on the New Zealand tech podcast again. Matt Archer, much appreciated. And of course, a big thank you to our show partners. As always, Gorilla Technology, HP, Spark 2° and One NZ, really appreciate their support. Thanks everyone for joining us. We’ll be back on the next episode again next week. Until then, take care.

Paul Spain:
Cheers.