Business Is Boring

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he talks to Angus Brown from Arepa. There are a fair few functional drinks that have popped up in the fridges of interesting retail.  Drinks that claim to help you focus and recover and what have you, though many - I’m looking at you Vitamin Water - have actually been packed full of sugar and dubious science.  So many in fact over the years that you might be forgiven for thinking that they were all empty claims.  But not so today’s guest’s product. After seeing the impact of cognitive illnesses on family, he set out to learn more about things that help the brain, and the journey took him to launch a functional drink that is backed by patents, research and formulated with a Professor of Psychopharmacology from  Melbourne. Our g

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he talks to, CEO Founder of Romer, Emily Heazlewood. You all would have been there - being in a city and wanting to do the kind of stuff the locals love, not the places you’ll find the tourist lines. But how do you cut past the dubious wisdom of a crowd and get those personal recommendations. Well perhaps you could do it with an app that had been described as the tinder for things to do - -Romer. Although quite new this app has been accepted into Vodafone One, picked up tens of thousands of users, some impressive partnerships with the likes of AA travel, and just announced funding from some big names in NZ tech, like Ben Kepes and our past guest Hadleigh Ford. To chat the journey, the future and connecting people and experienc

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt.  Last year a medicinal cannabis producer called Hikurangi Cannabis Company came out of seemingly nowhere and broke the internet, crashing PledgeMe’s servers as it became the fastest local company to crowdfund into the millions - doing 2 million odd in less than ten minutes. But as with most overnight successes it was on the back of years of work. It’s a long journey to change an illegal activity well connected with an area to a legal one. Locals from the Ruatoria area and around Ngati Porou and the East Coast, of which Hikurangi is a significant Maunga to local Iwi, were given first dibs, and invested ahead of the public raise. And the company, that inked deals overseas that could stretch into the hundreds of millions has gained first l

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he talks to Mahmood Hikmet, research and development coordinator for Ohmio. When you think about the companies bringing autonomous vehicles to the roads, you probably think of some of the world’s biggest names - Apple, Google, Tesla, Uber, but what if I was to tell you there was a kiwi start up that grew from repairing computers and making intelligent signage to inking multi-million dollar international deals for its autonomous shuttles. Ohmio, is the maker of 20-person shuttle that can be extended to carry up to 40-people their breakthrough is to operate on pre-determined routes without the need for a driver. It’s kind of like a tram, but with virtual rails, guided by a range of electronic systems. They are working with bus o

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he talks to Mark Kneebone, Head of Promotions at Live Nation and the Co-promoter at Laneway. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he talks to Rebekah and Tamati Norman. Business at its best can be a tool for bringing countries and peoples together - and things like fair trade and conscious consumerism hold part of the solution to helping traditional communities enter the global economy. One country that is really quite close, and big, and populated and but not widely known visited or understood is Papau New Guinea, more than 8 million people, living mainly rural and farming lives, with some of the most amazing geographical and cultural diversity and oldest cultures in the world. Colonialism, mining exploitation, civil war and international neglect have meant that PNG faces many challenges today - with the exploitation and unrest still forces to contend w

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he talks to Warner Cowin. A big theme in the world of business and economics this year, that I struggle to understand, yet is proven over and over again, is that in the middle of a construction boom companies in the sector are going bust left right and centre and no-one is said to be making any money. Which, when you look at supply and demand, and also things like the cost of materials, and the highly concentrated set-up for supply, seems a bit bananas. Well, one figure in the industry, who is founder-CEO of procurement and bidding consultancy, Height, and so knows the business from both the pitch for and commission project sides of the fence, has a few idea that he has been sharing as to what might be off in this particular s

Until very recently, if you were wanting to buy shares in American companies like Apple, Facebook, Google or Tesla it is quite amazing how hard it could be.You needed either to be buying an awful lot, so to make sense of the massive fees of using a local bank share-trading service as a broker, or you needed to navigate a confusing and bewildering process to get access to an international broking platform, and then all the tax and hassle around that. It is not recommended. And now, an innovative new platform has started up to solve the problem, offering access to US shares and exchange traded funds with brokerage fees at an order of magnitude under the existing big bank status quo. Which may make it surprising that this start up has come from the same holding company as …a big bank! It’s called Hatch, and is from Kiwi Wealth, the sister company to Kiwi Bank, and is a product of their focus on innovation. Because the big banking sector is ripe for disruption, and big change is coming with open banking already c

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he talks to Nick Whitehouse. How many times might a board member have asked, what are we doing to innovate? And how many times did anything happen? Well, at MinterEllisonRuddWatts that question was answered by the start of an innovation lab, that has led to a company joint venture spun out with VC backing to use AI to change how the law works. The fantastically named McCarthy Finch are using NLP, machine learning and human inputs to help analyse mountains of legal documents in a fraction of the time, augmenting humans to make decisions faster and cut out the leg work while looking out for the fishhooks. The company has jumped onto the world stage, winning awards like Sir Richard Branson judged Global Talent Unleashed gongs, an

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he talks to John Barnett. Outrageous Fortune, Sione’s wedding Shortland Street, Whale Rider. These enormous hits that are part of the cultural fabric of Aotearoa, can all trace back to today’s guest on the show. They came about in large part thanks to the work, organisation, connections made and championing from a man named John Barnett. Over a career that’s taken him from having an independent production company before there was much of independent industry to speak of, through to managing Fred Dagg and creating best selling albums, to bringing us the Footrot Flats movies, then moving into South Pacific Pictures which were State owned by TVNZ where he led a management buyout. And South Pacific pictures has played an amazing r

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. In our regular Business Chat special, Simon Pound speaks with Fleur Francois, director at New Zealand’s national metrology institute and Karyn Scherer, senior copywriter at Callaghan Innovation. It's been a big year in international measurement. A number of the big measures we rely on every day, and for the accurate use of more things in our lives than you might imagine, have swapped out, or are in the process of doing so. The kilo is a famous measure, kept under glass and lock and key in France,that’s changing from an actual lump of metal to being kept by quantum measurements based off fundamental laws of physics so as not to change.It turns out that up to now every now and again the kilo mass shifted and so would all measurements, kind of bananas to think of it. It's also been a big anniversary for another standard, standard time. Did you know, and I'm not trying to catch you out if you didn't, t

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he talks to CEO of EzyVet Hadleigh Bognuda. The move to the cloud has been called the biggest thing to happen to business since the dawn of the internet. At its best it means little businesses can enjoy the kind of enterprise software advantages the big players used to only be able to get, for small affordable payments, and big companies get enterprise software without enterprise price tags. We’ve seen it in business software, with local hero Xero becoming one of the great SaaS, software as a service companies in the world, and in its wake an ecosystem of possibility emerged. Some of the companies that came after were an obvious move of putting a business tool into the cloud. Others have pulled together a bunch of tools to cha

A few years after studying science, but beginning a career in cosmetics and lingerie and film, today’s guest was reading a science journal for fun. A line about the properties of native bee excreted nesting material caught her eye and made her wonder if it might make a good bioplastic. What for some might have been a quick muse, for Veronica Harwood-Stevenson became a mission and then company. It’s taken her across New Zealand and Australia to find specimens, had her duck venomous locals and bushfires, found collaborators and funding and led her to identify and be working to commercialise under the name Humble Bee. To chat the journey, inspiration and making that action, Veronica joined the podcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Did you know that every day around New Zealand more than $2 million of theft occurs that no one even bothers to report? Petrol station drive offs, little thefts at supermarkets, things under $1000 generally don’t even get reported to the police - and if they are the police often can’t do much about them.Well a few years ago a lawyer and his co-founders saw this issue and thought there must be a better way. They set up a company that became Auror - helping to link evidence of shoplifting or small-scale crime between the retailer and the police. It’s helped lead to some pretty amazing stats: 55% fewer drive offs at the petrol station Z, and hundreds of recidivist shoplifters brought to justice. The product works by making it easy to report and connect the dots on organised retail crime, and even helps prevent crimes by integrating with license plate recognition. It’s a company that’s attracted top-class investment and top-class customers with most of our major retailers here and more and more in Australia and a

2018 can feel quite progressive and doing pretty well, if you’re in the right bubble. But in many ways oh boy there’s a lot still to do. Like with tampons and pads. Half the population needs them, yet they are mainly made with synthetic and potentially harmful materials, and have attached to them in some places  luxury taxes and in many places a stigma around them. Which is where the Organic Initiative comes in, to provide an organic alternative and foster the movement to recognise safety and health around periods. A radically sustainable and progressive company it was co-founded by today’s guest a few short years ago. Helen Robinson is a wildly accomplished founder of a start-up - having been CEO at Microsoft New Zealand in some of its most dominant days, a board member of nationally and globally significant bodies like ATEED and a winner of the Supreme award at the Women of Influence awards. To talk the journey and the mission, Helen joins us by phone from America where she is with Oi/  Hosted on Acast. Se

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he talks to Nat Cheshire, self-described 'fake architect'. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he talks to Sandy Mamoli, author of Creating Great Teams. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you look at the digital landscape there has been a lot of innovation - Netflix has changed the way we watch things, we are in a golden age of television, movies keep getting bigger and bigger, musicians have a direct relationship with fans through the internet, and books, well books have moved to the digital age in much the same way they have always been, words on a page, except these days, it’s an electronic page. It’s an odd thing, that something so loved, books, hadn’t taken advantage of the possibilities of the internet to become more interactive, engrossing or amazing. Well, one company in Aotearoa saw this opportunity and have built a company that makes exciting Digital experiential books, and who have a focus on using modern methods to give traditional languages new avenues to grow and connect today.  They have published wonderful app based titles, like Ngarimu, that brings a graphic novel to life with sound and music and texture, revitalised classics, like the Hairy McLarey books, and have just ann

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. In our monthly Business Chat special, Simon Pound speaks with Maria Slade, business editor at The Spinoff, and Karyn Scherer, senior copywriter at Callaghan Innovation about the business stories making the news that month. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week he talks to Lisa Taouma, producer of Fresh.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices