While Amazon dominates the western world as a marketplace destination (China belongs to online shopping website Taobao and B2C online retail market Tmall), in Australia and New Zealand we’ve missed that megalith. In New Zealand the market really belongs to TradeMe, 20-year-old online shopping veteran, with nearly five million registered users, while in Australia, Ebay holds the greatest market share.

Ebay Australia receives around 69 million monthly visitors; behind that, UK-founded Gumtree, with 35 million visitors per month, and only then, Amazon Australia (with 19 million visitors).

“Above all, marketplaces are contributing to retailers’ bottom lines.”

Those numbers are still climbing. As buy now pay later schemes and click and collect models gain traction, and as online marketplaces proliferate, a new wave of online growth is expected.

“In the five years following the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), e-commerce boomed,” says KPMG in its 2020 Australian Retail Outlook.

According to the report, while total retail growth fell to three percent over the five years, e-commerce grew at 21 percent – hitting peak growth in 2011 at 30 per cent.

“In the wake of the GFC, Australians had permanently changed how they shopped and as the purse strings eased, e-commerce growth rates accelerated.”

Landscape shifting deals are being done: In the last year Amazon Australia launched its Amazon Hub, Ebay Australia partnered with Afterpay, and in 2019 Catch Group, the country’s largest daily deals site, combined with Kmart and Target to create a single multi-channel marketplace ecosystem.

Catch.com is currently Australia’s largest ‘daily deals’ site. Founded by entrepreneurial brothers Gabby and Hezi Leibovich in 2006, the deals site added an online marketplace for third-party sellers in 2017. The company has only grown from there – more than 2.1m last year – and was acquired in by Wesfarmers in 2019 for AU$230 million.

Marketplaces like Catch.com have experienced significant growth in the last year, new research from Mirakl, a SaaS marketplace platform provider, says. According to its 2021 Enterprise Marketplace Index, online marketplaces have been outperforming the general e-commerce sector at a rate of two to one.

The research shows marketplaces growing by more than 80 percent year-over-year globally in the fourth quarter of 2020, more than double the rate of overall e-commerce growth.

“Marketplaces [give] retailers a clear advantage: Achieve scale and agility through a curated ecosystem of quality third-party sellers,” says the report.

“This network of sellers [has] exploded, increasing by an average of 46 percent year-over-year, as retailers recruited and onboarded at an accelerated pace to meet immediate shopper demand.

“Concurrently, alongside the rise in sellers, the gross merchandise value per seller jumped 24 percent.”

Together, says Mirakl, these two factors – seller growth and growing sellers – produced the massive momentum of marketplace retail.

“A new class of seller supply has emerged: Traditional brands and manufacturers seeking a path to digital, and digital-native brands aiming to accelerate their distribution to drive their growth mandate.”

While TradeMe is the biggest in New Zealand, it’s challenger TheMarket.com, the Warehouse Group-backed ‘curated lifestyle marketplace’ that’s growing the fastest.

Taking 14 months and NZ$12 million to build and launch, the platform offers third party retailers access to 3.5 million active customers, as well as localised customer service and a distributed last-mile collect and return network, for a ‘frictionless customer experience’.

Customers can click and collect products from MarketPoint locations around New Zealand, which also act as a drop off point for returns. The platform has attracted leading brands including Noel Leeming, Lancome and, of course, The Warehouse.

As commerce continues its shift online, expect marketplace platforms to proliferate for a while yet, says Mirakl.

“Above all, marketplaces are contributing to retailers’ bottom lines,” says the report.

“Marketplace retailers found a scale solution to the most central act of retailing: Connecting shoppers to products, recasting themselves as something more – trusted shopping destinations poised to win in a rapidly growing but increasingly competitive environment.”

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Not only has it just completed a huge new funding round, but it’s quickly put that cash injection to work, acquiring Hong Kong-based Unicard, after receiving regulatory consent from the local Monetary Authority to become a controlling shareholder in the company.

Airwallex is a financial platform that lets customers conduct financial transactions across countries and currencies. Using Airwallex, SMEs and larger users can efficiently conduct multicurrency and cross-border transactions, massively simplifying international business. Current clients include such internet bigwigs as JD.com, Tencent and Ctrip, and MasterCard.

“The digital economy is going to be the centre of the world’s economic structure.”

Airwallex says it will continue to support the prepaid Unicard product, but promises ‘access to new and innovative payment and collection solutions’ for Hong Kong-based users, with plans to launch various new card payment products to make ‘multi-currency, cross-border transactions in a safe, convenient, compliant and cost-effective’ some time in 2021.

It’s not just hyping its Hong Kong expansion that’s been keeping the Airwallex busy. The company is also on a recruiting drive, following its recent successful funding round. In 2019, Series C fundraising brought the company value to more than US$1 billion, and late last year a Series D funding round added a further US$200 million in equity funding to the company’s coffers.

From Aussie startup to billion dollar unicorn in three and half years? Not bad, and with more than 600 staff across 12 global offices now, that’s some fast growth.

But it’s a rapidly growing industry as a whole, and with the Covid-19 pandemic accelerating demand for digital payments, Airwallex has ridden that wave for record growth. Last year, the revenue management company reported a 50 percent uptick in customers and triple-digit net revenue growth for 2020.

“A major shift in the way businesses operate from offline to online is something Airwallex predicted from our inception,” says Jack Zhang, CEO and co-founder of Airwallex.

“Businesses are now racing to embrace digital transformation at an unprecedented rate,” he says. “We are more certain than ever that the digital economy is going to be the centre of the world’s economic structure.”

And while demand for digital payment solutions has increased faster than anyone expected, that hasn’t seen the company slow its aggressive growth strategy. Zhang says Airwallex has been investing heavily over the past few years to build the necessary global digital infrastructure to better move and manage their money across borders.

If anything, the company has ‘increased execution velocity in product innovation, infrastructure and coverage expansion’, says Zhang.

Last year also saw the roll out of new Airwallex functionality including virtual multi-currency debit cards with Visa, bank feed integration with Xero and improved card payment acceptance capabilities.

The company also found time to collect four major awards at the 2020 Finnies, including Fintech Organisation of The Year (the top prize), Excellence in Payments, and the People’s Choice award for Organisation of The Year.

The company’s president and co-founder Lucy Liu was also named Emerging FinTech Leader of the Year.

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So what’s hot in the IT jobs market?

According to recruiting giant Hays, security, cloud, data and development is where it’s at 2021, both globally and locally.

Cyber
As remote and mixed working environments push IT security to its limits – and as generalised Covid-19 chaos continues to upend traditional modes of working – experts in cybersecurity are in hot demand. According to a report from the International Information System Security Certification Consortium, as it stands, employment in cybersecurity would have to grow 89 percent globally to meet security requirements.

Demand in this area will be acute and supply will be limited

“It’s going to be a challenge to fill all of the new vacancies, as an estimated 3.1 million professionals will be required in the next 12 months to bridge the global cybersecurity talent gap,” says James Milligan, global head of tech at Hays.

“Cybersecurity will account for many of the fastest-growing jobs for tech professionals in 2021, including security operations; governance, risk and compliance; identity and privileged access management; cloud security and architecture. As teams expand, other jobs in demand will include leadership roles such as chief or manager of information security.”

Cloud experts
According to one survey, more than 80 percent of global IT leaders have increased their use of cloud as a result of the Covid-19 crisis. And that shift to the cloud has been rapid for many, leading to substandard rollouts, all in the name of business continuity.

“Circumstances at the onset of the pandemic meant that initial migrations were typically very quick in order to get all employees online as soon as possible,” says Milligan.

“Therefore, organisations now need to take the time to ensure these systems are robust and as optimised as they could and should be.”

For cloud engineers and cloud architects job-hunting in 2021, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure are the two primary skills, with about 80 percent market share.

“I predict that demand in this area will be acute and supply will be limited, so it’s certainly a hot area to be working in.”

Data scientists
With the rise of smart devices, sensor tech and digital everything, someone needs to analyse all that complex data.

“Changes in the way we live our everyday lives have led to many of us placing greater reliance on our devices, meaning organisations have even more data available to them. And with more data comes the need for more people to analyse it,” says Milligan.

According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2020, data analysts and scientists are the fastest growing demand segment across all industries.

“Data analysts and data scientists will be high on the list of the hottest tech jobs over the coming 12 months… After all, a core element of any platform is the insights it can provide, and organisations need data people for that.

“The important role data science plays within businesses has increased dramatically in recent years, as analysing and interpreting complex data helps organisations make informed and timely decisions.”

Developers, developers, developers
It’s tech that powers modern businesses, and from the front-end to the back, developers will be in demand this year as organisations look to create new products, tools and services in response to the shifting business landscape.

“Those developers working for tech organisations – organisations which provide essential products, services or tools which consumers will always need in this new world – will be particularly high in demand,” says Milligan.

“It’s important to note, too, that these software development roles will also be absolutely crucial in enabling organisations to innovate to solve the many new problems that have emerged as a result of the pandemic.”

Similarly, the demand for DevOps will remain high too.

“Many more organisations now have a DevOps team than was the case just a few years ago, so there will continue to be jobs in demand in this field, such as platform, build, and reliability engineers.

“In fact, there’s been a 40 to 45 per cent growth in the market over the last five years, with DevOps Zone predicting this will rise even higher.”

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We like the internet. A lot.

According to the report, the average internet user now spends almost seven hours per day using the internet across all devices, equating to more than 48 hours per week online, or two full days out of a seven-day week.

We now spend around 42 percent of our waking lives online.

Put another way, we now spend around 42 percent of our waking lives online, almost as much time as we do sleeping. If current trends continue, the world’s internet users will spend almost 12 trillion hours online this year, which translates into more than 1.3 billion years of combined human time.

In New Zealand, there are currently 4.55 million internet users, an increase of around 84,000 (+1.9 percent) between 2020 and 2021. In Australia, the number is about 22.82 million and rising at a rate of 2.3 percent per annum.

The global average of time spent on the internet is six hours and 54 minutes. New Zealand comes in just below that average with six hours and 39 minutes. Australians are slightly less connected, with six hours and 13 minutes spent online per day.

Filipinos, Brazilians, Colombians and South Africans all spend significantly more time online than that – an average of over 10 hours per day on the internet.

Who’s most likely to be offline? Japan seems to spend the least amount of time online, at less than 4.5 hours per day.

That goes for social too.

For daily time spent on social media, both Australia and New Zealand clock well below the global average of two hours and twenty five minutes per day. Australians spend about an hour and 46 minutes on social per day; New Zealanders slightly above that with an hour and 55 minutes.

Once again Filipinos use social media the most at a whopping average of four hours and fifteen minutes daily. Again, the Japanese consume the least with just 51 minutes social media use per day.

All in all, it adds up. According to the report, the world will spend a total of 3.7 trillion hours on social media in 2021.

The rise of eCommerce
eCommerce went bananas over 2020, with the pandemic driving businesses everywhere to commit to their digital shopfronts.

Globally, more than 76 percent of internet users aged 16 to 64 shop online within any given month. That’s slightly higher than Australia’s average (just under 75 percent of Aussies shop online each month), and significantly higher than the 70.9 percent of Kiwis who do the same.

Globally, Indonesians are the most frequently online shoppers (87.1 percent), with Egyptians the most online shopping averse (56.6).

And what are we buying? Over 2020, the fashion and beauty category accounted for the largest share of global B2C ecommerce revenues in 2020 at more than US$665 billion. The food and personal care category ballooned (41 percent), as did fashion & beauty (27 percent growth), digital music sales (26 percent) and toys, DIY and hobbies (25 percent), as retail therapy soothed locked down shoppers.

Last year was the first time in the 10 year research series that the mobility and accommodation (US$593.6 billion) category hasn’t captured the largest B2C ecommerce share. Indeed, the category experienced a crippling -51 percent change in fortunes last year, representing half a trillion US dollar drop in consumer spending.

Mobile rules
There were 6.56 million mobile connections in New Zealand in January this year, equivalent to 135.6 percent of the total population. In Australia connections hit 32.47 million, an equivalent of 126.6 percent of the total population.

Globally, 5.22 billion people use a mobile phone today, around 66.6 percent of the world’s total population. Since January 2020 the total number of mobile connections has increased by 72 million (0.9 percent) to reach a total of 8.02 billion at the start of 2021.

And our connections are getting faster. The increased bandwidth of 5G networks sees both Australia and New Zealand well outperform the global average mobile download speed of 42.70 Mbps. Australia enjoys speeds of 112.68 Mbps with New Zealand at 78.53 Mbps.

India has the worst mobile speeds with 12.91Mbps, and we’re all dwarfed by the UAE, with the fastest average speed of 177.52Mbps.

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The Government has been attempting to force Facebook to negotiate content sharing deals with Australia’s major publishers since last year. The News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code would establish a mandatory code of conduct for digital platforms and news media businesses when bargaining over news content posted on social media.

Facebook doesn’t want to pay for news content at all of course, and things came to a head last week, with the social media giant blocking the sharing of news content – and lots of other stuff – in Australia, en masse. Major sites blocked in Australia last week included ABC, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Guardian and The Age.

“Oligarchies will consolidate, and consumers will get nothing.”

But Facebook is using a sledgehammer here, not a scalpel. Among the collateral damage, Bureau of Meteorology, Suicide Prevention Australia and even New Zealand’s Climate Change Commission, all misidentified by Facebook as Australian news outlets and banned from having links to their website content shared.

Facebook’s Simon Milner, VP of APAC public policy, has since apologised for the temporary bans, charactering the company’s restriction of news content across the country of Australia as ‘a really hard thing to do’.

“We are sorry for the mistakes we made”.

The social media giant’s restriction of news has been met with almost universal criticism from politicians around the world, with US House of Representatives chairman David Cicilline characterising the Facebook’s coercive behaviour as ‘not compatible with democracy’.

But that was then, and the news is back on now after the Australian Government promised to introduce amendments to the code  to ‘provide further clarity’ to digital platforms and news media businesses about the way the Code is intended to operate. Facebook today announced it has signed ‘letters of intent’ with three Australian publishers: Private Media whose stable includes The Mandarin and Smart Company, Schwartz Media and Solstice.

The amendments are small, but Minister for Communications Paul Fletcher, says they provide ‘further impetus for parties to engage in commercial negotiations outside the Code’, a central feature of the Government’s proposed framework.

The amendments were met with immediate approval from Facebook, which has now restored news-sharing in Australia.

“It’s always been our intention to support journalism in Australia and around the world, and we’ll continue to invest in news globally,” says Campbell Brown, Facebook’s VP of global news partnerships, “and resist efforts by media conglomerates to advance regulatory frameworks that do not take account of the true value exchange between publishers and platforms like Facebook.

“The government has clarified we will retain the ability to decide if news appears on Facebook so that we won’t automatically be subject to a forced negotiation,”

News content creators have struggled to monetise their online businesses. While many of the grievances against Facebook are legitimate – fake news, et al – Facebook has filled a market gap, offering low-cost, targeted advertising to audiences, that content creators struggle to compete with. Why would Facebook want to change that arrangement?

“What the proposed law introduced in Australia fails to recognise is the fundamental nature of the relationship between our platform and publishers,” says Facebook’s Brown.

“Contrary to what some have suggested, Facebook does not steal news content. Publishers choose to share their stories on Facebook. From finding new readers to getting new subscribers and driving revenue, news organisations wouldn’t use Facebook if it didn’t help their bottom lines.”

But while Facebook is underplaying the importance of news content on its platform, it’s news content – shared across Facebook audiences without recompense to the original publisher – that makes the social giant’s US$84.2b worth of global advertising medicine go down.

It’s just that advertising used to pay for journalism. Now it pays for platforms.

Unfortunately, news isn’t a simple commodity like any other. It’s an essential service. When a privately-owned service provider can switch off the news for 25 million people because it disagrees with the laws of the land, that’s a big problem – especially when that platform is a notorious source of misinformation itself.

For now, the news is back on and Facebook, which has done deals in the UK with publishers including Sky News, The Guardian and Telegraph Media Group for its Facebook News section, is talking up its plans to ‘invest’ in supporting the news industry and ‘partner’ with news publishers.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg earlier comments that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has told him he intends to engage in ‘good faith’ negotiations and sign commercial deals – discussions for which are apparently underway – with news publishers came to fruition – somewhat – with the news of the signing of letters of intent. Commercial agreements will apparently come into force within 60 days of full deals being signed. Facebook signed a similar deal earlier this week with Perth’s Seven West Media.

So what does that mean for the future of news in Australia? What does it mean for competition?

“Where will this end up?” asks Joshua Gans, professor of strategic management at the University of Toronto and advisor to the ACCC on the Digital Platforms Inquiry in 2019.

“It will end up with the large digital platforms doing deals with the largest news outlets,” he says. “Those deals will be multi-year lump-sum payments which enable everyone to go about their business.”

Gans says that, as it stands, the government’s legislation will fail to deliver any competitive outcome whatsoever.

“There will be no new digital platforms, no new content providers, no more competition. The shareholders of the large digital platforms will be a few million dollars poorer and the shareholders of large Australian news outlets a few million dollars richer.

“As often happens in Australia, oligarchies will consolidate, and consumers will get nothing.”

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Which is good. Self-driving cars, intelligent intersections and apps that help you find that elusive LAST available parking space; what’s not to love?

Smart traffic management systems are set to reduce emissions and congestion globally and save cities around US$277 billion.

According to Juniper research, such smart traffic management systems are set to reduce emissions and congestion globally – and save cities around the world around US$277 billion – in the next four years.

But how?

There’s a few methods. Smart intersections are one way. Leveraging AI-enabled automation and connectivity to manage the traffic flow in busy areas in real-time can have significant impacts on the total time drivers spend in the car and the amount of congestion on the road.

It’s not all congestion detection and number crunching however. One less obvious place where both emissions and wasted hours can be saved is parking.

Let’s face it, the average city parking building sucks. Size and complexity of facilities can mean that drivers spend several minutes just looking for a park, resulting in unnecessary congestion, emissions, and time wasted, not to mention having to suffer through inefficient payment methods, unnecessary stress and collision risk.

‘Smart parking’ technologies aim to solve these issues by harnessing parking sensor data and smart platform tech to provide real-time intelligence to guide drivers.

The technology generally comes in two parts: Sensor tech and driver guidance systems. Simple surface and flush mount sensors utilise magnetic sensing technology to detect the presence (or absence) of parked vehicles. This information is then transmitted to a nearby gateway which collects and collates the information from several dozen sensors. From there a signal is transmitted to the smart parking management system for processing and dissemination to the waiting driver.

Alternatively, overhead parking sensors can gather information from several dozen spaces simultaneously.

“These sensors typically utilise a combination of artificial intelligence and/or machine learning to ‘recognise’ empty spaces,” says Juniper, “edge computing to allow the real-time processing and analysis of sensor data, and GPS to identify the precise geographical position of vacant spaces.”

Dynamic display messaging can direct drivers to vacant parks and mobile apps can offer turn-by-turn directions to vacant spaces.

Such apps can also include payment and reservation functionality, as well as the ability to ‘top up’ their accounts for extended parking.

In older rollouts however, cybersecurity can be an issue, as it can when cybersecurity is not prioritised in the early stages of the project.

“Where security issues are not taken into consideration during the initial planning and implementation phases, this can lead to an increased number of threats not just to the integrity of citywide infrastructure, but the security of citizens’ data,” says Juniper.

That data could potentially include licence plate numbers, registration details, financial information, and movement patterns, says Juniper.

While platform suppliers will need to bring their own security expertise to the table, cities must also take responsibility for ensuring that ‘security at every layer of the system is accounted for, and that security measures are built and implemented with flexibility and future requirements in mind’.

And with an international appetite for the technology, Juniper is forecasting growth. The research company forecasts that investment into smart parking will reach US$1 billion by 2025 (rising from just US$460 million this year).

Juniper Research also predicts that the total annual congestion and emissions cost savings achievable globally through the implementation of smart parking and other smart traffic management systems will reach US$277 billion in 2025.

The overwhelming majority of savings attributable to smart traffic management systems will come by way of congestion reduction.

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A survey from software company Pega canvassing 1,350 C-level executives from around the world looks to find that out. The paper, entitled Future-proof 2025: A look at top tech trends, finds business leaders expecting bad things from AI technology in the near future.

According to the paper, which surveys leaders in financial services, retail, healthcare, manufacturing, telcos and the public sector, business leaders think that a lack of accountability within the private sector likely will lead to governments ‘taking over responsibility’ for AI regulation, all within the next five years.

“All surveyed industries see trouble ahead for AI governance and regulation that do not go far enough.”

“Sixty-five percent of respondents felt external governance was insufficient to manage AI adoption,” says the report.

“All surveyed industries see trouble ahead for AI governance and regulation that do not go far enough.”

According to the survey, the private sector will ‘fail to provide the governance necessary’ to keep artificial intelligence in check, with governments around the world ‘forced to take over within five years’.

So what’s with the feckless attitude to good AI governance? The survey seems to show business leaders seemingly caught between the burdens of regulatory compliance and their own limitations.

Respondents from all industry sectors described the challenges of conforming to GDPR, bank directives and other regulatory frameworks, with 27 percent of respondents saying they have no designated leader in AI governance.

Manufacturing, healthcare, and financial services all reported significant ‘AI governance gaps’ in internal leadership and formal strategies.

“This frustration with external governing frameworks actually reveals their natural limitations,” says the report, “and the urgent need and responsibility for enterprises to step up and create more comprehensive governance frameworks.”

So who should be filling this perceived AI governance leadership void? The public or private sector?

“Though the vast majority (78 percent) of respondents prefer full or equally shared responsibility for regulation, the numbers flip when asked about expectations for five years out, when 75 percent expect the government will be largely or fully responsible for governance, which is clearly far from what respondents feel is the most appropriate balance.

“Whatever the future actually brings, the stakes are high: more than half (53 percent) are concerned that external and/or government regulation will stifle their innovation.”

The research urges businesses to take better control and stronger accountability for the governance, integration, innovation and adoption of emerging technologies so they can better enact change within their organisations.

The New Zealand government has not yet developed an AI strategy, but industry body AI Forum of New Zealand has published a set of guiding principles. Australia has similarly taken a hands-off approach, developing the AI Ethics Framework, a set of voluntary AI Ethics Principles to encourage organisations using AI systems to ‘strive for the best outcomes for Australia and Australians’.

“Trust is central to the widespread acceptance and adoption of AI,” says Nicole Gillespie, professor of management at the University of Queensland.

“However, our research suggests the Australian public is ambivalent about trusting AI systems.”

The survey of over 2,500 Australians in June and July of last year found that, when it comes to developing and using AI systems, Australians had little confidence in commercial organisations to develop and use AI responsibly (37 percent had no or low confidence).

Overwhelmingly (96 percent), Australians expected AI to be regulated and most expected external, independent oversight.

Most Australians (over 68 percent) have moderate to high confidence in the federal government and regulatory agencies to regulate and govern AI in the best interests of the public.

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According to Salesforce, almost half of its employees now want to come in just ‘a few times per month’, so, going forward, staff who don’t need office-time can skip it and work remotely fulltime.

“Remote work strengthens the mandate to digitally monitor worker activity.”

It’s the exciting new work-from-home age, but with employees remote, it can be hard to keep the lines of communication open. So with an increasingly distributed and digital work environment, solutions that support corporate culture – and productivity – are on the rise. According to one reckoning, Employee Experience Platforms (EXP) are on track to hit US$300 billion in annual spend by 2022.

Several offerings have recently hit the market, including Microsoft’s Viva employee experience platform, which was announced earlier this month and is designed to bring tools for ‘employee engagement, learning, wellbeing and knowledge discovery, directly into the flow of people’s work’.

Viva uses Microsoft products Teams and Microsoft 365 to create a ‘unified employee experience’ across four key areas – engagement, wellbeing, learning and knowledge – in a way that ‘empowers people to be their best’.

“We have participated in the largest at-scale remote work experiment the world has seen, and it has had a dramatic impact on the employee experience,” says Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft.

“Every organisation will require a unified employee experience from onboarding and collaboration to continuous learning and growth. Viva brings together everything an employee needs to be successful, from day one, in a single, integrated experience directly in Teams.”

Workday is another employee engagement app looking for a piece of the market. The company recently announced the acquisition of Peakon ApS – another enterprise app that measures employee engagement – for an eye-watering US$700 million.

“Never waste a good crisis,” Winston Churchill may have once said, and if there was ever an opportunity for the corporate kraken to latch its slimy tentacles onto the final few remaining corners of free time and space its employees have, it would be now.

But no one likes being tracked, and excessive monitoring is a health hazard. One survey from the Harvard Business Review found that almost half employees subject to stringent monitoring report severe anxiety and are much more likely to suffer from burnout.

A recent UK survey found 12 percent of all firms – and 16 percent of larger firms – had already implemented some form of remote tracking of at-home employees. Slack, Google Workspace and Teams all provide employers with a startling access to their employees.

Microsoft recently had to dial back the level of granularity it provided for the Productivity Score tool for Microsoft 365 after concerns over privacy. (The feature allowed employers to see how often employees engaged with an app over the course of a month).

Is Viva the next step to complete employee transparency? Microsoft says it ain’t so.

“Viva Insights gives individuals, managers and leaders personalised and actionable insights that help everyone in an organisation thrive. Personal experiences and insights, visible only to the employee, help individuals protect time for regular breaks, focused work and learning, as well as strengthen relationships with their colleagues.

“Managers and leaders can see trends at team and organisation level, as well as recommendations to better balance productivity and wellbeing. The insights are aggregated and de-identified by default to maintain personal privacy.”

As for Workday, its new ‘employee success’ acquisition is itself a ‘highly targeted and integrated employee listening strategy’.

As employers grapple with the new work-from-home reality, there will be the temptation to further blur the line between work and home life.

And while there’s a temptation to collect more and more employee data in the name of analysis, it’s worth asking: Does access to things like employee correspondence actually improve productivity? Does it improve culture?

And if employees feel that management is overstepping reasonable boundaries, expect pushback, says Gartner.

“For management cultures that are accustomed to relying on direct observation of employee behavior, remote work strengthens the mandate to digitally monitor worker activity, in some cases via AI,” says Whit Andrews, researchVP at Gartner.

“Just as we’ve seen with every technology aimed at restricting its users, workers will quickly discover the gaps in AI-based surveillance strategies. They may do so for a variety of reasons, such as in the interest of lower workloads, better pay or simply spite.

“IT leaders who are considering deploying AI-enabled productivity monitoring tools should take a close look at the data sources, user experience design and the initial use case intended for these tools before investing,” Andrews says.

“Determine whether the purpose and scope of data collection supports employees doing their best work. For those that do decide to invest, ensure that the technology is being implemented ethically by testing it against a key set of human-centric design principles.”

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For business, that uncertainty is a challenge to be managed; enter predictive technologies – tools that can use data patterns to give us a picture of what might be just around the corner.

“The pandemic blew more rigid demand forecasting to pieces.”

The latest on the matter is a survey from Forrester – commissioned by Dataminr – of some 410 global risk and compliance decision-makers across New Zealand, Australia, the US and the UK.

Entitled Risk In A Real-Time World, the report says the Covid-19 pandemic has ‘solely exposed’ how organisations are challenged when anticipating and responding to the unforeseen cascade of short- and long-term market impacts.

“Businesses and societies of today face extreme levels of uncertainty in regard to the threats toward safety, growth, and continuity,” says the report. “This increasingly complex and interconnected landscape of risk spans public health, global financial markets, trade policies, cyberattacks, political unrest, social movements and climate risk.

“While some events simply cannot be predicted, using real-time information (RTI) to better anticipate systemic risk can enhance organisational agility in workflows and enable effective response to drive business resiliency.”

And the survey seems to show a gap between resources and requirements.

“We found that 82 percent of enterprise risk professionals believe having visibility and insights around RTI is more necessary today than ever before,” says the report. “In addition, nearly eight in 10 (77 percent) risk decision-makers plan to leverage more risk management solutions.”

That’s despite the fact that 42 percent of those surveyed are currently ‘improvising’ when it comes to their risk management function, with the majority of those surveyed lacking ‘a holistic understanding of what real-time information really offers’.

Nevertheless, driven by the pandemic-fuelled chaos, more and more businesses are turning to real-time predictive analytics to assess risk and remain competitive.

“Predictive tech and data-driven demand forecasting have never been more important,” says Campbell Brown, CEO and co-founder of Kiwi data intelligence company PredictHQ.

Founded in 2016 by Brown and Robert Kern, PredictHQ provides a data platform that can anticipate fluctuations in demand for products and services by aggregating historical, scheduled and unscheduled event data, factoring in weather, holidays, events, airport delays and global pandemics. PredictHQ then bundles that data into a single API for its customers, who include high-profile brands Uber and Dominos.

“The pandemic blew more rigid demand forecasting to pieces, so sources of demand intelligence went from driving significant competitive advantage to mission critical in helping forecast models to adapt in real time.”

The pandemic was a ‘massive wake up call’ for many businesses, says Campbell, especially for incumbent industry leaders, with many rapidly accelerating to execute on what were 10 year plans, in 12 or even six months.

“Predictive tech is critical for this,” he says. “Many are switching to continuous forecasting to better engage with a highly dynamic situation.

“It’s become clear to many that what they thought was demand prediction was merely a relatively static approach, devoid of understanding how the real-world around them is impacting their operating models.

“In both a recovery and post-Covid world, business can better capture surges in demand to claw back losses incurred during the worst of the black swan event and mitigate against additional negatively impacting events, whether that’s a flood or an attended event needing to be rescheduled or cancelled altogether.”

In response to Covid-19 Campbell says the company has added new tracking functionality, including the ability to track lockdowns and restrictions by city, as well as specific bans on hospitality and leisure venues being open.

“For us Kiwis with a centralised government, and even for many Americans, it can be surprising just how differently each state and even city is responding to the pandemic in the USA,” says Campbell.

The company has also launched its Live TV Events category, the first ever tool that forecasts how many fans will tune into watch a sports game, says Campbell.

“Before our solution it was impossible to make broadcast sporting events part of any forecast model as no one predicted viewership in advance.”

PredictHQ models predicted the Super Bowl viewership with 99.6 percent accuracy – a full two weeks before it actually occurred.

“This provides incredible value to our quick serve restaurant, delivery and grocery customers like Dominos, who were the first to sign up for this.”

Campbell says that businesses can leverage real-time data to better inform their pricing strategies, both in times of demand and excess supply.

That includes Legion, a company which provides forecasting for retail stores in the USA, and Uber, which uses PredictHQ data to ensure they have enough drivers in the right place, at the right time.

“Imagine you run a New Zealand car hire company,” says Campbell. “Knowing a major event is coming up outside of Christchurch means you can ensure you get enough vehicles on hand to meet demand, run targeted marketing campaigns and price and package your vehicles well. If you imagine the impact of one or two companies knowing that, while others are scrambling in the week leading up to it as inquiries roll in, it becomes clear how critical demand predictions are.” And once the pandemic conditions settle, there’s still plenty more value to be unlocked in the data.

“Whether it’s pricing, labour optimisation, inventory management, predictive analytics across anything from coffee shops, Amazon Alexa to destination marketing organisations, the value extracted is multifaceted,” says Campbell.

“Our company grew throughout the pandemic, both in terms of more customers and more revenue. We’re getting more inbound customers than ever, as companies realise that our demand intelligence is one of the very few sources of information that can provide certainty to build plans upon, in uncertain times.”

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The app makes it possible to book online (or in-clinic) appointments with a Tend doctor, get prescriptions and repeat prescriptions over the internet and more.

Think of it as virtual infrastructure for remote doctor ‘visits’. Through the app, users can see and consult with clinicians, get prescriptions (or ‘e-prescriptions’), referrals and organise anything else that you normally would with your GP. Patients can also access their appointment notes as well as message their care team securely.

Think of it as virtual infrastructure for remote doctor ‘visits’.

Users don’t have to change doctors to try the service, and patients can book on a casual basis.

It sounds like a good idea, and well it might with the calibre of the team behind the project. Founded by James and Cecilia Robinson (the couple behind My Food Bag), the board of directors also includes Dr Lee Mathias (co-founder of Labtests and director of high-tech diagnostics firm Pictor) and former CEO of Telecom and My Food Bag cofounder Theresa Gattung.

Also on the team is co-founder and chief product officer Josh Robb (formerly of Pushpay) and co-founder and clinical director (and senior lecturer at University of Auckland), Dr Mataroria Lyndon.

As for the latest funding round, all of the current shareholders participated, with Infratil CEO Marko Bogoievski joining the fold as both director and shareholder.

The service is currently only in Auckland, with a single bricks and mortar practice in Kingsland. However the company says the new funding round will be used to expand its footprint throughout the country, acquiring more medical practices as well as integrating pharmacy services into its offering and hiring more clinical staff.

Telehealth has been slow to catch on in New Zealand, but it’s increasingly well-established in Australia. A survey published last year showed more than 60 percent of Australian GPs reporting that more than a quarter of all their weekly consults are now virtual, with 11 percent working ‘completely virtually’.

So is this the transformative digital step general practitioners have been waiting for?

With around 50 percent of New Zealand’s GPs currently within 10 years of retirement, it might be the perfect storm for Tend, as beleaguered GPs look to sell up and retire, perhaps retaining some patients in a flexible, part-time – and digital – way.

And telehealth approaches such as Tend may help ease the burden of predicted future shortages: A study published in the New Zealand Medical Journal last year predicts significant pressure on clinics looking to secure new graduate general practitioners. According to the research, there is a ‘lack of interest’ in general practice among new graduates, in favour of other specialties.

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That’s the takeaway from a new report by the World Economic Forum, produced in collaboration with Boston Consulting Group, Data Excellence: Transforming manufacturing and supply systems.

The paper looks at the new value that is currently being unlocked by data and analytics applications in manufacturing, and what the factory of the near-future will look like.

“Many companies have become disillusioned because they lack the technological backbone required to effectively scale data-and-analytics applications.”

Simply put, to compete effectively manufacturers will need to employ a large variety of data‑and‑analytics applications, such as predictive maintenance, advanced robotics, and tracking and tracing in supply networks.

Data will be the lifeblood of these applications, thus, the successful transformation of manufacturing and supply systems today should be the focus for decisionmakers.

That’s understood by the industry: Nearly three‑quarters (72 percent) of manufacturing executives say they consider advanced analytics to be more important now than they were three years ago.

“The Covid‑19‑induced economic crisis has put an even stronger emphasis on the importance of data and analytics in manufacturing,” says Francisco Betti, report co-author and head of advanced manufacturing and production at the World Economic Forum.

“Emerging from the crisis, companies will need more resilient supply systems to prepare for future shocks as well as higher productivity in their operations to free up liquidity for future investments.”

Hyper-connection
As the shift towards hyperconnected networks of assets, factories and supply systems continues, data and analytics will play an ever more crucial role in unlocking value across productivity, customer experience and societal and environmental impact.

Applications driving value in these areas can sometimes be implemented using internal company data only. Many applications, however, require the exchange of data across corporate boundaries, which involves connecting multiple stakeholders in data ecosystems.

“As an example, consider equipment maintenance,” offers the report’s authors. “Connecting an asset to a data platform allows for the real‑time monitoring of an asset’s condition. A company can fully implement this application using only internal data.

“A more advanced application is the use of machine learning to predict and prevent failures. Such models need to be trained by a large amount of data. Companies can rarely provide this data alone, so they must share data with other asset operators.”

Challenges
Of course the extent to which a company needs to collaborate with other companies to share data depends on its size and the type of application, but the WEF estimates that data‑and‑analytics‑driven applications could potentially reduce conversion costs by up to 20 percent.

But while acknowledging the importance of data and analytics is easy, walking the talk is another matter, with many companies already disillusioned with their efforts to capture value from data-driven implementations.

So what stands in the way of full supply chain hyper-connectivity?

Manufacturers cite various challenges that have impeded their efforts to further scale and implement data and analytics solutions within their plants and across networks. Those challenges include struggling to prioritise the right value-adding use cases from the broad range of applications, data security and a lack of ‘critical organisational enablers’, such as skills and capabilities and effective internal governance.

The paper defines six organisational and technological priorities of data excellence in manufacturing to help companies capture value from new applications internally and within their larger ecosystems.

Those six priorities to capture value from data and analytics in manufacturing are:

• Define a data-to-value strategy and roadmap
• Incentivise internal and external ecosystem partners
• Build capabilities to capture and use data
• Implement an open platform to unlock data silos
• Enable connectivity for low-latency, high-bandwidth data flows
• Ensure data security and privacy

“Manufacturing is on the verge of a data‑driven revolution,” says Daniel Küpper, BCG managing director and partner and a report coauthor.

“But many companies have become disillusioned because they lack the technological backbone required to effectively scale data-and-analytics applications.”

“Establishing these prerequisites will be critical to success in the post-pandemic world.”

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Australian competition watchdog, the ACCC, has been looking to address the growing influence of the tech titans since last year, especially in regard to perceived bargaining power imbalances between Australian news media businesses and digital platforms. That culminated in last year’s release of the proposed News Media Bargaining Code, an ACCC-produced document that would see Facebook and Google forced to pay local media companies for linking to their content.

“It’s about breaking [Google’s] bank account. That’s what this is about.”

As for Google and Facebook, they’d rather not, and now Google has joined Facebook in threatening to take its massive Australian technology ball and go home.

Last week, Google Australia managing director Mel Silva told senators that if the current version of the News Media Bargaining Code were to become law, it would give the company ‘no real choice but to stop making Google Search available in Australia’.

Silva said that Google was willing to come to the table to negotiate ways to ‘pay publishers for value’, but without ‘breaking Google Search and [the company’s] business in Australia’.

The Code, says Silva, ‘would set an untenable precedent for our business, and the digital economy’.

“It’s not compatible with how search engines work, or how the internet works, and this is not just Google’s view – it has been cited in many of the submissions received by this Inquiry.”

The Senate is not backing down, however. Independent Senator Rex Patrick called bull on Silva’s claims last week, asserting that the code is not ‘in any way’ about ‘breaking the internet’.

“It’s about breaking [Google’s] revenue streams,” said Patrick. “It’s about breaking [Google’s] bank account. That’s what this is about.

“It does not touch the internet and the way in which it works.”

That bank account mentioned by Patrick is a substantial one. Established in 2005, Google’s holding company, Alphabet, has become one of the world’s most valuable publicly traded companies. Beside its largest subsidiary (Google), Alphabet owns more than 200 other companies, with interests including advertising, CRM, 3D modelling, video conferencing, security, home automation, travel, speech synthesis, facial and gesture recognition, rights management, neural networks, augmented reality, podcasting and wearables.

According to the company’s own reckoning, the annual economic value of Google’s services are worth AU$39 billion for Australian businesses, and AU$14 billion for Australian consumers annually. On the other side of the coin, Google Australia made A$4.8 billion in 2019.

So what would happen if Google actually did make good on its threats and shut up shop in Australia?

It depends. For example, if Google decided to withdraw or limit its Google News service in Australia, life, more or less as we know it, would likely continue. A little disruption to some publishers, sure.

But what if Google took more radical steps, removing some or all of its products from the Australian market? No more YouTube. No more Google Ads. Goodbye Gmail, Chrome and Docs. So long, Android. Goodnight Maps.

Well, that is a scenario difficult to reckon.

And an unlikely one too. In addition to a $4.8 billion revenue dip, there would be myriad legal hurdles to overcome, not to mention the human cost to the company’s 2,700 Australian staff (according to LinkedIn).

And Google has managed to strike content deals before, most recently with French news publishers. The search giant has said that it will invest $1 billion in partnerships with news publishers and create a curated news platform that will provide commercial incentives for publishers. Google says deals have also been inked with almost 200 publishers in Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, the UK and Australia.

But perhaps it’s time to start thinking seriously about what a Google-less or Facebook-less internet would look like, regardless. A new report from public policy think-tank, The Australia Institute, is urging for the development a National Risk Mitigation Strategy to deal with the Australia’s over-reliance on technology giants such as Google and Facebook.

That strategy should include fast-tracking the ACCC Platforms Inquiry – especially those elements related to the market dominance of the major platforms – as well as a forensic investigation on how pervasive single companies like Google have become in core public sectors like in education, health and government administration, says the report.

“Google and Facebook’s response to the ACCC mandatory news code has placed in stark relief our national over-reliance on them,” says Peter Lewis, director of the Australia Institute’s Centre for Responsible Technology.

“This analysis shows that two global corporations that play a dominant role in our civic and commercial institutions are prepared to threaten to withdraw those services to protect their own commercial self-interest.

“Whether or not they make good on their threats, it is incumbent on all Australians to ensure we are not in a position where we are held hostage to their commercial interests.

“While many people are uncomfortable with the power and the business models of Google and Facebook, they are so pervasive, it’s hard to imagine how we can live without them.

“But with sensible, long-term policy development and investment in the public square, we think it is possible to ensure these companies serve our interest.”

The post Imagine life without Google appeared first on iStart leading the way to smarter technology investment..

By any metric, Twitter and Donald Trump have had a long-running and mutually beneficial relationship. In 2017, Trump told Fox News hosts that without Twitter he may never have been elected at all. That’s likely true.

In return, Trump has provided Twitter with traffic, and lots of it. With almost 89 million followers on the platform, when Trump tweets (as he did 12,000 times in 2020), things happen.

Whether by design or accident, the model encourages human pathos, and then feeds off it.

Trump is good for business, but things had been strained between the tech giant and the now former US president since the election. Twitter had taken labeling Trump’s more disputed claims – mostly about the legitimacy of the election – as inaccurate, tagging around a third of the his tweets as such since November 9.

Then, following the January 6 storming of the United States Capitol, Twitter abruptly pulled the plug on Trump.

Such a move would have been easier to explain, were the evidence stronger. The tweets in question were hardly the president’s most egregious, and need significant contextualisation to even be considered inflammatory.

“The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future,” tweeted the President. “They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”

A few hours later, he tweeted again: “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the inauguration on January 20th.”

Hardly threatening to destroy North Korea, but this time, that was enough. Twitter made a public statement that the @realDonaldTrump Twitter account would be permanently suspended.

“After close review of recent tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them – specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter – we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” Twitter said in the statement.

According to Twitter, the tweets were in violation of its Glorification of Violence Policy which prohibits threatening violence against groups or individuals on the platform. According to that standard, it was decided that Trump’s account should be ‘immediately permanently suspended’.

“Our determination is that the two tweets above are likely to inspire others to replicate the violent acts that took place on January 6, 2021, and that there are multiple indicators that they are being received and understood as encouragement to do so.”

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey himself commented on the situation, describing it as an ‘extraordinary and untenable circumstance’ which had forced the company to focus all of its actions on ‘public safety’.

While there’s something in the move to upset almost everyone – from university-professors to right-wingers to big tech-haters – Twitter is, of course, a private company and free to enforce its policies as it sees fit.

But Twitter’s ban of Trump – given the ambiguity of what was actually said – seems unsatisfactory, almost by design.

Is Twitter’s cancellation of Donald Trump the silencing of conservative voices by liberal Silicon Valley elites? Yeah, a little bit, but it’s probably more accurate to say that Twitter is simply cutting ties with the monster it knows it had a part in creating – before the full ugly extent of that fact becomes commonly understood.

Sure, Twitter has always championed ‘free speech’, but that’s not to satisfy free speech ideologues at head office, it’s to satisfy its shareholders.

“Despite what we think of them, or how we might use them, platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube aren’t set up in the public interest,” says Timothy Graham senior lecturer, Queensland University of Technology.

“For them, it’s risky to censor a head of state when they know that content is profitable. Doing it anyway involves a complex risk calculus – with priorities being the shareholders, the companies’ market value and their reputation.”

Nations around the world are beginning to look seriously at limiting the influence of the big tech platforms. In the US, the Federal Trade Commission is ordering the social giants to provide data on their advertising and user engagement practices. In December the EU released new draft laws that seek to halt the spread of illegal content, including hate speech, on big tech platforms, with fines of up to 10 percent of annual turnover and the threat of being forced to sell off parts of the business.

Britain has also proposed new rules requiring social media sites to remove and limit the spread of illegal content including terroristic and violent material.

Downunder, the ACCC has called for sweeping reforms across the Australian media landscape, with the imposition of strict guidelines for how Facebook and Google will negotiate with news providers in Australia.

Yes, with Trump gone from Twitter, there will be a little less bull around the internet (it now goes in the Presidential Archive). But the potential for the manipulation, use, and abuse of these platforms by powerful entities still needs to be reckoned with. So too does the enormous power that companies like Twitter place in the hands of barely-accountable individuals.

Could self-regulation work? How could it, when the aim of the regulation threatens the core of the business model? Whether by design or accident, the model encourages human pathos, and then feeds off it.

And that’s the dilemma that we face, in a nutshell: Social media, as it stands, poses a significant threat to the public good.

The post Twitter deplatforms Trump appeared first on iStart leading the way to smarter technology investment..

Now, alternative working arrangements are the norm on a global scale, and with the demand for the tools of the trade, fortunes are being made – just ask Zoom.

Now recruitment tech seems to be catching up too. Video-interviewing processes, including both live chat and pre-recorded messages from candidates, are catching on. Research from earlier this year by Gartner found that, even as far back as April, organisations were moving quickly to incorporate ‘virtual’ means to interview candidates.

“A video is worth a thousand resumes.”

“Recruiting leaders are caught between the sourcing and hiring plans that were initiated before the Covid-19 outbreak and the rise in uncertainty and social and economic instability,” said Lauren Smith, VP at Gartner HR at the time.

“As external hiring slows for many organisations, and business priorities change, leaders must evaluate different methods of recruiting and hiring.”

That trend has only continued. Just this week, short-listed candidates for the CEO position at Canterbury District Health Board had their interviews conducted via Zoom.

With the increased activity, big deals are beginning to go down. Sydney-based video interview company myInterview has just completed a US$5 million seed funding round.

Founded in 2016, myInterview is used by more than 2,000 companies globally as demand for video interview tools continues to climb. The company says that it has experienced a 500 percent increase in annual recurring revenue since 2019.

“The way companies recruit talent is outdated and doesn’t provide the necessary level of insight into applicants required by HR professionals,” says Benjamin Gillman, CEO and co-founder.

“A video is worth a thousand resumes. By utilising video interviews, we help businesses prioritise personality and cultural fit, optimising the screening and selection process by ensuring that the applicants who are the best fit are moved to the head of the line”

“We use video in so many facets of our lives – recruiting and hiring are finally catching up.”

And myInterview’s money-raising success is just the tip of the iceberg. Scotland-based video interview startup Willo raised £250,000 in September, and in October video-based job application app JobUFO raised €2 million in seed funding.

Mobile video recruitment platform Altru has just been acquired for a reported US$60 million by enterprise recruiting company iCIMS.

Based in New York, Altru is a mobile-video platform designed to help businesses with hiring, onboarding, and internal communications content and counts organisations such as Target, PwC, Intuit and L’Oréal among its clients,

“We’re leaning in on technology that is critical to HR transformation and modern talent acquisition,” says Steve Lucas, CEO of iCIMS. “We’re offering a robust solution that the market has never seen before during a time that it’s needed most”.

But while there’s high hopes for the technology – especially among vendors – researchers warn that the ROI of high-tech recruitment techniques is yet to be empirically proven.

A new study of recruiting technology by The University of Calgary, examined the experience of recruiters using a range of tools, including computer-assisted interviews, tests as resume analysis, as well as video-based interviews.

The mixed results seem to underscore the relative immaturity of the industry.

“HR managers have pinned many hopes on technology, from increasing efficiency, and reducing costs to increasing applicant pools and standardising their entire selection systems,” says Derek Chapman, Associate Professor at the Department of Psychology at University of Calgary.

“While there are some success stories out there, the majority of organisations reported achieving moderate results with the use of technology-based solutions. As one HR manager put it, ‘Software and techniques are short lived. Today’s top product is tomorrow’s burden.’

“Although many organisations reported that they had a goal of reaching a larger applicant pool with their technologies, their experiences showed that while the size of the applicant pool increased, the average quality of applicants did not change or was lowered, leaving them flooded with applications from under-qualified or ineligible applicants.

“While technology use is becoming more prevalent in organisations – particularly for mid-level staffing – most organisations rely on a mix of traditional methods and technology solutions in their daily activities.”

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The most likely targets? Remote workers, says the research from tech security firm Check Point, with disrupted systems and processes proving tempting for would-be confidence tricksters.

“The social distancing demanded by Covid-19 has resulted in many changes to the way we work,” says the tech security firm.

“These attacks specifically target carefully selected users.”

“Massive organisations shifted their structure to accommodate a remote workforce with access to corporate resources via RDP [Remote Desktop Protocol] and VPN connections. This presents many opportunities for vishing operations, as attackers can easily pretend to be a colleague in need of assistance with VPN access, corporate credentials or other company information over the phone.

“Researchers describe coordinated attacks, leasing of American voice actors, set-up of dedicated phishing pages to bypass multifactor authentication mechanism, in campaigns often focusing on corporate new hires.”

According to the research, 81 percent of enterprises have adopted mass remote working for their employees, with 74 percent planning to enable it permanently.

That’s also in line with new numbers from Verizon, which finds phishing is one of the biggest security threats to organisations, accounting for more than 30 percent of all breaches.

“Unlike traditional tax or social security-related scams, these attacks specifically target carefully selected users by gathering extensive information about them from their social media profiles and other publicly-available resources, and choosing employees deemed most likely to cooperate prior to making the call.”

This year has seen its share of high-profile ‘vishing’ attacks. In June, Twitter revealed that it had been attacked, with hackers managing to gain access to 130 accounts, some belonging to high-profile business people, politicians and celebrities.

A security update from the social giant explained how the fraudsters impersonated employees to gain access to the user accounts.

“A successful attack required the attackers to obtain access to both our internal network as well as specific employee credentials that granted them access to our internal support tools. Not all of the employees that were initially targeted had permissions to use account management tools, but the attackers used their credentials to access our internal systems and gain information about our processes.

“This knowledge then enabled them to target additional employees who did have access to our account support tools.”

Using those credentials, the attackers took over 130 Twitter accounts (including those belonging to Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk), tweeting from 45 of them, accessing the DM inbox of 36, and downloading the Twitter data of seven.

Ultimately the hackers used the compromised accounts to promote a bitcoin scam. An investigation by Twitter has revealed that the takeover yielded more than US$100,000. A 17-year-old from Florida has been arrested.

“This attack relied on a significant and concerted attempt to mislead certain employees and exploit human vulnerabilities to gain access to our internal systems,” said the company. “This was a striking reminder of how important each person on our team is in protecting our service.”

And Twitter isn’t the only one. Employees at domain registrar GoDaddy fell victim to a phone call phishing attack this year, handing over control of cryptocurrency service sites NiceHash and Liquid to malicious actors.

“This gave the actor the ability to change DNS records and in turn, take control of a number of internal email accounts,” said Liquid CEO Mike Kayamori of the breach. “In due course, the malicious actor was able to partially compromise our infrastructure, and gain access to document storage.”

While Liquid ultimately regained control of the compromised accounts, the company says the hackers had access to customer emails, names, addresses and encrypted passwords.

“We are continuing to investigate whether the malicious actor also obtained access to personal documents provided for KYC such as ID, selfie, and proof of address, and will provide an update once the investigation has concluded.”

The post When a stranger calls: The rise of the ‘vishing’ scam appeared first on iStart leading the way to smarter technology investment..

Some 11,500 retailers in Australia and New Zealand rely on paper guarantees, the processing of which has traditionally been a painfully manual endeavour. Consuming both time and patience, back-and-forth sign-off procedures can take weeks to conclude.

“We’ve digitised the paperwork, the process and the legality behind it.”

That’s hardly ideal. Paper-based bank guarantees are prone to fraud (paper documents are prone to forgery after all) and they’re cumbersome too – landlords need to manage and store these guarantees in a safe place and manually reconcile them against property leases. Furthermore, whenever rates change or leases need to be renewed, banks have to issue all new guarantees, negotiating each new change with banks, landlords and tenants.

A more digital approach could reduce the risks, lower the potential for errors and significantly increase the speed of execution.

But who is going to do it?

Australian banks ANZ, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Westpac, as well as tech heavyweight IBM and shopping centre company Scentre Group, have combined forces to produce just such a solution: Lygon.

Based on the IBM Blockchain Platform, Lygon is looking to revolutionise bank guarantees, simplify document exchange and make the whole process simpler, easier and more transparent for everyone involved.

“This is a unique and transformational platform that enables the complete digitisation of bank guarantees,” says Nigel Dobson, Lygon chairman and Banking Services Lead at ANZ  Dobson says the Lygon platform has the potential to benefit many sectors and reduce the risk of fraud across billions of dollars guaranteed by the banks.

“Retailers of all sizes with physical outlets will experience radically improved bank guarantee cycle times,” he says. “Additionally, retail landlords will benefit from managing their outstanding guarantees in a secure, transparent and auditable manner.

“In digitising a bank guarantee, we’ve essentially transformed a three-way contract.”

There are typically three parties in a bank guarantee. The applicant, who needs the guarantee to secure a lease; the bank who issues the guarantee, and the beneficiary – typically a larger landlord or commercial property client.

“We’ve digitised the paperwork, the process and the legality behind it. This means wherever there’s a manual, paper-based process based on legal frameworks or similar regulations, we can apply Lygon”.

With the first public blockchain launched in 2009 and the Lygon platform now live in Australia (Lygon goes live in NZ with two financial institutions  in February 2021), the launch marks a significant milestone in distributed ledger tech, says Westpac’s GM of corporate and institutional banking, Didier Van Not.

“Distributed ledgers and platforms have a big role to play in delivering the right customer outcomes and better efficiencies in our industry, and we’ve demonstrated this with Lygon,” says Van Not.

“The use of blockchain technology, which provides a single source of truth across multiple parties, increases transparency – allowing tracking, reporting and validation – and security, while maintaining the privacy required in such a business process.

“What we’ve created is new financial markets infrastructure that is going to benefit a lot of businesses.”

The post Big four team up to digitise bank guarantees appeared first on iStart leading the way to smarter technology investment..

It’s an industry with an already patchy ethics record, as well as a business model that’s been described as exploitative, but for food-to-your-door services like Uber Eats, Deliveroo and Doordash, lock-downs have meant boom times.

But as demand increases, so too seemingly, do the risks.

“Companies like Uber do not care whether their workers live or die so long as the food gets delivered on time.”

There have been at least four delivery riders killed in Australia over the last few months – around one every 11 days since late September.

In the latest incident, Bijoy Paul, a 27-year ole Uber Eats delivery rider from Bangladesh was struck by a truck in Surry Hills, NSW, while completing an order. He was treated at the scene but later died of his injuries.

The death sparked fresh calls for better regulation of the industry, including one from Uber itself.

“On Monday evening we learned the incredibly sad news that an Uber Eats delivery partner had passed away following a road accident in the Sydney CBD,” said a spokesperson from the company.

“We notified SafeWork NSW and contacted our insurance team about the incident. Our thoughts are with his family and loved ones at this time. In isolation this fatality is devastating…but when considered alongside other recent incidents across the on-demand food delivery sector, it is all the more concerning.”

It’s clear the industry needs to do more to improve road safety, said the spokesperson, who also stated that the food delivery giant was ‘committed to playing a leading role in achieving this’.

Sounds promising, but the Australian Transport Workers Union was framing the conversation in starker terms.

“Companies like Uber do not care whether their workers live or die so long as the food gets delivered on time,” said TWU National Secretary Michael Kaine.

“That is clear from the lack of training and protective gear for riders. It’s also clear in the way companies like Uber harass their riders and threaten them with sacking if they are even a few minutes late.”

A September survey of delivery riders found more than one in three riders saying they had been injured on the job, with 80 percent saying they received no support from their company.

The survey also found that average earnings after costs were just over AU$10 an hour, with 70 percent of those surveyed saying they were struggling to pay bills and buy food.

The Union has called for the federal government to intervene.

“Food delivery riders are literally dying because of the federal government’s inaction,” says Kaine.

“The law has not kept up and is failing to protect workers. It is no longer an option for the federal government and the states to pass the buck between them, we need action now”.

That might be happening. NSW Minister for Transport and Roads Andrew Constance says an investigative taskforce has been launched to see if avoidable risks contributed to the recent fatalities.

“Any life lost on our road is one too many, and the purpose of this taskforce is to examine if more can be done to protect delivery riders, who are among some of our most at-risk road users.”

“We need to do our level best to avoid further tragedies,” says Constance.

The taskforce, led by SafeWork NSW, will explore the similarities between the recent deaths and assess whether the safety measures implemented by current players in the food delivery market are sufficient.

SafeWork NSW will offer its findings for immediate improvements or compliance activity that can be implemented to better protect food delivery riders, and will determine what further changes need to be made to improve safety in the industry.

Amelia Thorpe, associate professor at UNSW says that we also need to look at the laws that shape the streets: Road rules, planning requirements and engineering standards.

“Food delivery is a compelling example because it shows cycling is the most efficient way to get around the city,” she says.

“Of course, we have all seen cyclists doing risky things. But the issue is less about individual behaviour and more about the regulatory environment. In Sydney and many other places, a plethora of state and federal rules and regulations give priority to cars in our cities.

“The site of Sunday’s death is a clear example. The intersection where the cyclist was killed by an excavator-carrying truck is not a highway but a relatively narrow street with houses and a school. Should large trucks really be driving on streets like this?”

The conversation is vastly different in the United States. In California, the Proposition 22 ballot initiative has recently passed (with 55.8 percent of the vote). This new law allows companies such as Uber and Lyft to continue to classify their gig workers as independent contractors rather than employees.

Critics say the new rules weaken health care, workers compensation and insurance. For workers such as Uber rideshare drivers, the University of California estimates that the average rideshare worker will earn US$5.64 per hour, after time between rides and vehicle costs are factored in.

Notably, “Yes on 22” has been the most well-funded ballot initiative in California history. Along with Lyft, DoorDash and other tech heavyweights, Uber has spent around US$200m pushing the bill.

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When we talk about biotechnology, we’re talking about applying technology to living organisms to produce new products or knowledge. That includes historical processes such as making beer, bread and cheese, as well as the selective breeding of plants and animals for desired traits.

When we talk about modern biotech however, what we’re usually referring to genetic manipulation and the fusion of cells beyond the normal parameters of breeding.

“An expert panel…concluded that it is time for a regulation overhaul.”

We can do a lot. Genetically engineered bacteria are used to create insulin to treat diabetes, and more complex proteins such as hormones and antibodies can be produced too. Currently, new gene therapies are being used to target cancer and treat diseases like Parkinson’s disease and cystic fibrosis.

“Other new tools include CRISPR-Cas associated nucleases, that enables the modification of specific genes within an organism’s genetic material with greater precision and with fewer unintended changes elsewhere in the genome,” says BioTechNZ in the Innovating for a Sustainable Future report.

“These new technologies enable modifications to individuals, for example CAR T-cell therapy, which helps the immune system target and remove harmful substances in the body, including cancer.”

Modern biotechnology also includes DNA profiling for better selective breeding of plants and animals. These projects can produce plants resistant to insects, livestock with better meat or wool quality, as well as microorganisms that can clean up pollution in soil, air or water.

The numbers
Capabilities are growing and global demand has created a global biotech market that is expected to be worth $US729 billion by 2025.

“The world is currently facing unprecedented global challenges with the world’s population predicted to grow to 9.7 billion people by 2050,” says the report.

“This population growth is stimulating global megatrends including climate change, water shortages, loss of biodiversity, overuse of natural resources, increasing dependence on fossil fuels, an aging population, and greater expectations of healthcare and health systems. These global trends are dramatically impacting all economies and this is driving demand for technologies, including biotechnology, to help mitigate these challenges.”

New Zealand has a small but growing biotech sector, including some 211 companies, and with annual revenues of $2.7 billion.

Nearly half of the sector, 45 percent, is based in regional New Zealand.

Potential
There is increasing global demand across the biotechnology spectrum for solutions to health, agri-food and environmental challenges, the report says.

“This is presenting New Zealand with multiple economic opportunities. For example, bark biorefinery could add $1.8 billion to GDP and clinical trials could create an additional $880 million in GDP.

“Added to this, is the role that biotechnology plays in enabling and growing New Zealand’s critical bioeconomy, worth $49.4 billion.

“In addressing these challenges, it is clear how important a thriving biotechnology sector is for our future.”

We’ve got a lot going for us in New Zealand, says the report. Aotearoa has had more than 100 years of research into dairy proteins, is a world leader in pasture research, and has expertise in forest genetics biotech.

Include an excellent business environment, an educated populous and strict quarantine standards in the mix, and the opportunity is ours to lose.

“It is ranked number one in the world for doing business, is rated the least corrupt country in the world and is rated second in the world among the top 100 life science universities…New Zealand also has the most PhD graduates in life sciences per capita, a high level of international research co-authorship and the highest livestock disease free status globally.”

So what’s in the way?

Access to capital, access to talent and an out-of-date regulatory framework governing genetically modified organisms.

“The current regulatory framework governing genetic modified organisms is a major barrier to growth for the New Zealand biotechnology sector,” says BioTechNZ executive director Dr Zahra Champion.

“In New Zealand, there have been calls for wider public discussion about gene-technology and a review of the current regulations by multiple parties in recent years. An expert panel…concluded that it is time for a regulation overhaul.”

Champion says there is also an urgent need for wider discussion and debate about gene editing, within and across all New Zealand communities.

“As of now we need to drive change in New Zealand’s approach to understanding of genetic modification and review regulations relating to biotechnology and genetics.

“The science of genetics has developed considerably since our regulations were put in place and they don’t recognise the multitude of new technologies that exist to modify genetic material.

“So our regulation is a bit like a hammer when we might be better off with a selection of chisels.”

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“Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is essential – we are discussing which MFA method to use, not whether to use MFA,” writes Weinert in a November blog.

“I want to do what I can to convince you that it’s time to start your move away from the SMS and voice MFA mechanisms,” says Weinert.

“Your password is *definitely* terrible.”

Referring to a blog posted earlier this year, Weinert says that MFA-protected accounts are 99.9 percent less likely to be compromised than those relying on password-protection only.

“When it comes to composition and length, your password (mostly) doesn’t matter.

“That’s not to say your password isn’t terrible. It’s *definitely* terrible, given the likelihood that it gets guessed, intercepted, phished or re-used.”

In other words, what your password is doesn’t really matter, but your MFA does.

So what’s the problem with SMS as a method for proving who is who?

Weinert argues that authentication methods based on publicly switched telephone networks (PSTN) are ‘the least secure’ of the MFA methods available today.

“That gap will only widen as MFA adoption increases attackers’ interest in breaking these methods and purpose-built authenticators extend their security and usability advantages.”

According to Weinart, PSTN accounts have ‘all the vulnerabilities of every other authenticator’ as well as a host of other issues specific to PSTN, including being vulnerable to phishing attacks, account takeovers and device theft.

There’s an inherent inflexibility in the SMS format too – messages can’t be made longer, or richer, or do much except send a one-time password in a text message or a phone call.

“SMS and voice formats aren’t adaptable, so the experiences and opportunities for innovations in usability and security are very limited.”

When SMS and voice protocols were developed, they were designed without encryption, says Weinert.

“From a practical usability perspective, we can’t overlay encryption onto these protocols because users would be unable to read them (there are other reasons too, like message bloat, which have prevented these from taking hold over the existing protocols).”

What this means is that traditional authentication signals are vulnerable to interception by ‘anyone who can get access to the switching network or within the radio range of a device’.

Voice-activated authentication methods help little, and bring human weakness into the mix, with customer support agents vulnerable to charm, coercion, bribery or extortion by bad actors.

“If these social engineering efforts succeed, customer support can provide access to the SMS or voice channel,” says Weinert. “While social engineering attacks impact email systems as well, the major email systems (eg Outlook, Gmail) have a more developed ‘muscle’ for preventing account compromise via their support ecosystems.”

This leaves SMS and voice channels vulnerable to everything from message intercept, to call forwarding attacks, to SIM jacking.

Inconsistencies in mobile operator service and an uncertain regulatory environment add to the delivery challenges.

“Due to the increase in spam in SMS formats, regulators have required regulations on identifying codes, transmit rates, message content, permission to send and response to messages like ‘STOP’.

“Unfortunately, however, these regulations change rapidly and are inconsistent from region to region and can (and have) resulted in major delivery outages. More outages, more user frustration.”

The solution to all this? Biometric-based authentication.

The app-based alternative
With SMS and voice authentication off the table, Weinert makes the case for Microsoft Authenticator.

“For most users on their mobile devices, we believe the right answer is app-based authentication. For us, that means the Microsoft Authenticator.”

Available for Android and iOS, Microsoft Authenticator uses devices, not passwords, to log into your Microsoft account. Users enter their username, then approve a notification sent to the device. Fingerprint, face ID, or PIN provides a second layer of security to the two-step verification process.

“The Authenticator uses encrypted communication, allowing bi-directional communication on authentication status, and we’re currently working on adding even more context and control to the app to help users keep themselves safe,” says Weinert.

And there’s more to come, he says, so hurry up and embrace authentication-by-app already.

“In just the last year, we’ve added app lock, hiding notifications from the lock screen, sign-in history in the app, and more – and this list will have grown by the time you plan your deployment, and keep growing while SMS and voice keep sitting still.”

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Proving who we are – and who that other guy is – is a dilemma we’ve grappled with, as a species, for millennia.

And now maybe we’re getting closer to a new way to answer that question.

Facial recognition and fingerprint software – and advanced new payment security protocols such as 3D Secure 2.0 – are approaching ubiquity, and with even the implantation of microchips into human subjects seemingly on the table, biometric identity verification is the hot new tech market.

Arm chips aside, we’re only at the front end of the curve.

The numbers are certainly there: Research from Juniper shows that biometric authentication tech is welcomed by merchants, consumers and the tech industry alike. According to the market researcher, biometric identity tech will hit 90 percent saturation for devices by 2024, by which time biometric authentication methods will account for around US$2.5 trillion worth of mobile payment transactions.

A new report FIS Global, examines the shifting consumer attitudes towards these new payment technologies, surveying 15,000 consumers across 15 different countries.

Much like the Juniper research, the report finds biometric technology set to explode, driven by big support from the younger generation. Globally, Gen Z consumers (18-23 years olds) are the most interested in these new payment forms, with 69 percent already using, or at least interested in using, biometric authentication to authorise a payment.

In particular, mobile wallets are reaching a tipping point with over 70 percent of Gen Z respondents either using or willing to use the technology.

But that’s just the start of it. Public opinion towards more radical forms of identification – such as human microchipping – appears to be softening.

Enthusiasm is particularly high in China, with 49 percent of Chinese survey participants saying they would at least be ‘interested’ in having a microchip put into their hand to make payments easier. GenXers (40-54 years) are particularly keen on getting the Black Mirror treatment (59 percent enthusiasm), followed by baby boomers (47 percent), and the elderly (17 percent).

Aussies, for comparison, are less compliant: Just 17 percent of those surveyed would be interested in such a proposition.

Not that we’re disinterested in bold new payment tech methods Downunder; quite the opposite.

“Australians are usually on the front foot when it comes to adopting emerging payment trends, and we have already seen a huge uptake in biometric payment trends like fingerprint sensors and facial recognition technology,” says Phil Pomford, General Manager for Global eCommerce, APAC at FIS.

Arm chips aside, we’re only at the front end of the curve, says Pomford. Expect further innovations, such as voice-activated commerce, to quickly enter the mainstream and be embraced by youthful consumers in particular.

Sixty-nine percent of Gen Z consumers are using or are interested in using biometric authentication to authorise payments, says the report, with Gen Z and Millenials most enthusiastic about making payment commands via smart speakers and in-car payment integration services.

“Convenience is king to today’s consumer, particularly the younger generations, who are more likely to adopt new and emerging technologies trends if it means they are rewarded with some level of convenience in return,” says Pomford.

“For retailers and merchants to thrive in the future, they need to consider broadening their payment offering in order to appeal to tech-savvy, digitally-driven consumers.”

Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) is also shown to be highly favorable with younger generations, while between half (51 percent) and two-thirds (67 percent) of the three youngest generations surveyed have purchased something off social media. The research also reveals that younger generations are ‘more comfortable with taking financial risks and taking on debt’, as well as being more open to ‘riskier investments’.

And there’s more to come. New biometric identity verification methods set to enter the market include high tech ‘vein readers’ and perhaps even authentication via heartbeat.

Watch this space.

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