Author Henry Oliver

Spark has enlisted an orderly line of robots to promote the new iPhone 7, and it’s become the new best friend of Idealog editor Henry Oliver.

This month, Fisher & Paykel opened its first Experience Centre in Sydney. Henry Oliver went to have a look.

Idealog’s Henry Oliver talks to Spotify’s global creative director Alex Bodman on how the music streaming service is relying less on the old marketing rule book and turning to data to connect with its audience in a more authentic way.

Henry Oliver enjoys a profanity-laden chat with author Sarah Knight about her new book ‘The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a Fuck: How to stop spending time you don’t have doing things you don’t want to do with people you don’t like’, published in New Zealand by Hachette this week.

In some ways, smartphones are a strange product. We all use them differently, and have different expectations as to their performance, yet most of us buy one of just a handful of models that all do pretty much exactly the same thing. But what if you want something different? What if you want something distinctly you? Well, here are some phones for particular people that fulfill a particular need.

News outlets are increasingly experimenting with virtual reality in a bid to bring viewers closer to the action. Henry Oliver looks at some of best examples of the news being experienced rather than read or watched.

Data is, as they say, big. It’s everywhere. We’re all creating it all the time. And within all the data are stories. Millions and millions of stories. And to help us make sense of those stories, a new breed of data visualisation from the likes of Pitch Interactive’s Wes Grubbs has arisen to deepen and broaden our understanding of the world around us. PLUS: some of our favourite data visualisations.

It seems like there’s an unending wave of innovative products coming out of the New Zealand tech sector at the moment. We’re making software and hardware for use in everything from nanotechnology to aerospace to kitchens to shops. And we’re not keeping it to ourselves. But, according to the latest Market Measures survey, New Zealand’s technology exporters are well behind their US competitors in using digital marketing techniques to sell themselves and their products.

Having recently had himself 3D-printed as part of Spark’s promotional push for the release of the iPhone 6, Henry Oliver looks at whether the concept of queuing for readily available items might soon become a thing of the past.

We’ve seen a few clever queue hacking campaign ideas in recent years, from Samsung’s Smartphone Line to Spark’s Emoji Queue. And Spark’s employed 3D printing technology for what it’s calling the world’s smallest queue for the world’s biggest phone launch.

Auckland’s been the City of Sails and the Big Little City. Aucklanders have been JAFAs and (long before that) Rangitoto Yanks. But none of these holdovers from the good ol’ days of the share market boom, the America’s Cup or the John Banks mayoralties work for the diverse ‘super city’ of 1.5 million people that Auckland is becoming. And after a comprehensive review of Auckland’s economic development strategy, Auckland Council’s economic growth agency Auckland Tourism, Events and Economic Development (ATEED) is undertaking Global Auckland, a rebranding project chaired by NZME’s chief executive Jane Hastings.

Since the heady days of 2013, when Uber and Airbnb started blossoming (or spreading like weeds) around the globe and raising millions of dollars in funding, ambitious app designers have been looking for problems that could be solved by combining smartphones and financial incentives.