Friday Focus

Some quick observations on the weeks tech news here and abroad.

Chorus still singing out of tune.

This weeks appeal court ruling, yet again signals the need for a strategic reset at our largest telco infrastructure provider.

Not going to hold my breath waiting though.

Spark splutters.

The Spark internet outage showed how dependent we’ve all become on fast, always on internet access. The various causes were fun to speculate on and will keep the conspiracy minded awake for ages, the choices range from old, out of date edge routers (DSL modems), through voyeuristically promoted malware to Russian cyberwarfare.

Whatever the cause Spark need to look at how responsive they are to major network failures and the speed of their response. As one insider said ‘thank god it happened on the weekend’.

All the more reason to be careful out there.

Apple do it again

Tim Cook showed that he really is the ‘Apple Master’ when he unveiled the first really new products and services of his era at Apple. The new iPhones play catch up with the larger Androids and now there is an Apple ‘phablet‘, The Apple Watch looks like it may do for wearables what the iPod did for music and the iPhone and iPad did for mobile, but the sleeper is probably the new Apple Pay service, which promises to make over the world of payments.

Its interesting that the branding schema is now ‘Apple’ and no longer ‘i’., probably just as well because for me the Apple Watch becomes the iWant and thats definitely followed by the iPay.

They say that you are more likely to get divorced than change banks, well I think leaving the Apple ecosystem is going to be even less likely than that real soon.

Broadband Affordability

A new report by Jon Brewer, asks if New Zealand is meeting its ITU broadband affordability obligations (basically less than 2% of average household incomes), after some serious ninja grade data mash ups and analysis Jon comes to the conclusion that on the whole we do meet the standard.

Except for rural satellite subscribers, some of whom are spending up to 9% of the household income on broadband.

We need more work like this done, I’d like to understand more about the often quoted 20% of households who can’t afford internet access.

Who to vote for

And finally with the election just around the corner, if you’re thinking of basing your vote on the respective parties ICT polices, the good folk at NZ Rise have gone to trouble of questioning all the parties and putting their responses here.