Movers and shakers: Jeremy Nees, Mark Corbitt and Damian Swaffield

Corbitt’s previous roles included CIO at Housing New Zealand and head of solutions and service delivery at Telecom NZ (now Spark).

Michael Dreyer, currently programme director – ICT change and transformation, will be acting GM IT while Contact Energy is recruiting for the role.

Jeremy Nees is now chief product officer at REANNZ.

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Before this, Nees was the chief operating officer of The Network for Learning Ltd (N4L) which was formed by the government in 2013 to build a His previous roles included CTO of N4L, NZ sales and product manager for Vocus Communications, and enterprise architect and product manager at Maxnet.

Damian Swaffield, Terabyte NZ CEO, has announced the company has joined forces with The Creative Shop to establish a full service digital agency.

“This has been a significant year for Terabyte,” says Swaffield. “We continue to broaden our digital marketing profile and reputation and have been honoured to work with many new and existing customers on some ground breaking projects. The Creative Shop will add breadth and opportunity that will be exciting for all involved”.

The Creative Shop focuses on the small to market, offering a range of services including brand strategy, design, advertising, outdoor, online marketing and website design and build.

Melissa Slater will join the team as digital marketing director.

Damian Swaffield of Terada and Melissa Slater of The Creative Shop

2degrees says more than 67,000 Kiwis have joined the inaugural Data Hunting season, toting their smart phones and heading out to track and capture data across the country.

2degrees developed the augmented reality sport, disguised as an interactive advertising campaign. The users can download the Data Hunt app and then use the app to physically search out ‘data pins’ which have been ‘virtually’ dropped across New Zealand. Once they get within a certain proximity of a pin they can spin it to redeem 2degrees data.

Roy Ong, 2degrees chief marketing officer, says while the Data Hunt was designed as a fun campaign for customers, it’s fast becoming bigger than that with the Data Hunt app now topping both the Apple and Play Stores – beating out downloads of Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat in New Zealand.

“Data Hunting is now a thing in New Zealand,” says Ong. “People are forming hunting parties and heading out at all hours to scour hillsides in pursuit of our elusive blue and gold pins, there were over 45,000 unique hunting sessions alone this weekend!”

“What is remarkable is that we are only one week into Data Hunting season – it will run through the summer period as we give away over 200 million megabytes of data – based on our current run rate we are not sure where this thing could end up!”

Russell McVeagh has released its third publication Blockchains: Debugging bad drafting produced by the firm’s Information Communication and Technology (ICT) team. The booklet focuses this time on one of the most high-profile smart contract meltdowns.

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Smart contracts are here to stay. Lawyers need to understand the technology and the how widespread use of such smart contracts, in all areas of business, might interact with the lawTom Maasland, Russell McVeagh

In June this year, a legal tension inherent in the use of smart contracts came into focus, says the law firm. The Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO) developed a smart contract to run on the ethereum network. The DAO was ‘hacked’, and approximately US$60 million of digital currency was taken by one of the participants (whose identity remains unknown). The legal issues associated with the ‘hack’ are many and diverse and bring into close scrutiny, the interplay between contracts “in the code” and the current legal frameworks.

“Smart contracts are here to stay,” says Tom Maasland, head of the Auckland ICT team at Russell McVeagh. “Lawyers need to understand the technology and the how widespread use of such smart contracts, in all areas of business, might interact with the law. The DAO’s ‘hack’ provides us with a fascinating real time test case of how smart contracts and the law might intersect.”

Motorhome owners now have an “insurance to go” service with Covi NZMCA Insurance’s launch of Covi Connect, a mobile phone app that gives the key information needed for claims or renewals.

Covi NZMCA Insurance general manager David Culpan says the popularity of getting away in a motorhome or caravan, often for weeks or months at a time, has grown enormously in recent years. “Most motorhomers and caravanners have made a significant investment into their vehicles so, if they are in the unfortunate position of needing to make a claim, having all their information at your fingertips will bring them peace mind and enable Covi to get them back on the road more quickly.”

Follow Divina Paredes on Twitter: @divinap

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