From delivering pizzas, to firing rockets to finding lost souls to letting film-makers capture amazing aerial footage, drones are proving fairly useful. And New Zealand production company Reel Factory is benefitting from providing what it claims is the first drone-based footage for a live, full HD, international broadcast at the Cricket World Cup.

Approximately one million NFC-enabled smartphones are in use in New Zealand and as more and more humans become accustomed to paying via contactless terminals, those two technologies are edging ever closer. Semble, a joint venture between banks and telcos (and supported by Samsung), announced its arrival last year (and is holding a special event on Tuesday), and there are plenty of other ways to pay without using notes or coins. Now the country’s biggest bank is joining the fun with its own solution: an update to its goMoney app that will turn your phone into a mobile wallet.

Danushka Abeysuriya is a geek-turned- adept-businessman, whose smartphone video game development company Rush Digital, founded in 2010, now has 20 staff, turned over more than $1 million in 2013, and has clients across in Europe, the US and Australia. This is the story behind the success.

Despite a rocky start and questions over commercial influence on the government, the $10 million strategic marketing partnership between Warner Bros and Tourism New Zealand (with Air New Zealand also along for the ride) seems to have done the business, with The Hobbit trilogy—and the Lord of the Rings movies before it—getting the country into the minds of numerous foreign moviegoers and helping to increase the number of visitors to our shores. But we could always do with a few more, so it’s released the third and final instalment of its ‘Home of Middle-earth’ series.

Often when we visit or move to a new city and are ready to explore what it has to offer, we can be overwhelmed with choice. Where are the decent cheap eateries? Which art galleries will I like? Which music venues suit my tastes? There are plenty of media outlets devoted to informing us where the best bits are, but one of the more interesting—and increasingly popular—options is Concrete Playground, an online guide to culture in Auckland, Wellington and Australia.

For its latest campaign, McDonald’s seems to have taken inspiration from the the nursery rhyme ‘Sing a song of six pence’. But rather than having “four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie” singing to a king, it has instead added a touch of music to its Big Mac boxes. Yesterday, as selected McDonald’s customers in Auckland opened their Big Mac boxes, they were blasted by song straight from the burger’s container. The singing boxes were part of McDonald’s global ‘imlovinit24’ initiative, which sought to share 24 moments of joy to millions in 24 hours.

As the .GIFYs, Buzzfeed and Reddit show, looping images are extremely appealing to modern day humans. And, in celebration of International Happiness Day last Friday, Google, Pharrell Williams and the UN foundation invited folks from all over the globe to create their own dancing GIF and spread a bit of happiness for climate action.

American bank BancFirst embraced Steven Adams’ colloquialisms in an ad called ‘Speaking Kiwi with Steven Adams’. And here’s part two.

After the Blackcaps play in the Cricket World Cup final on Sunday, you can be sure there will be a host of print ads congratulating or commiserating the team the following day, as there was when the All Blacks won the Rugby World Cup in 2011. But Ford has got in early with a full-page ad featuring in today’s Herald celebrating the glorious victory over the South Africans and warning Melburnian Mrs Mavis Madrigal to cover her gnomes and azaleas to protect them from flying round objects.

For the third year running, Tourism New Zealand has reworked its ‘more magic every day’ campaign in a bid to attract Aussie skiers across the ditch for a winter holiday. The latest iteration of the ongoing campaign by Whybin\TBWA Sydney sees the Kiwi tourism body partner with Air New Zealand, Flight Centre, Instagram and the ski industry in New Zealand to drive holiday visitor numbers. And while Tourism New Zealand has previously collaborated with the other parties, this marks the first time that the organisation has partnered with Instagram to promote New Zealand through paid imagery and video content. PLUS: StopPress chats to Tourism New Zealand director of marketing Andrew Fraser about the organisation’s digital strategy.

It’s been just a few days since Air New Zealand announced its departure from Airpoints partner BNZ to team up with Westpac, but banking brands have fast taken action pushing themselves out through social media via sponsored posts (featuring an array of creative airline puns) to make sure they’re not overshadowed by the new partnership deal. Here’s what BNZ, Westpac, Kiwibank and ANZ have been up to.

Yesterday, it was widely reported that 2degrees had acquired internet service provider Snap for an amount speculated to be between $26 million and $30 million, making it possible for the telco to offer a service that had long been absent from its offering. StopPress chatted to chief marketing officer Malcolm Phillipps about what this means for the company.

The One Percent Collective, which aims to create “a seismic shift in charitable giving in Aotearoa”, has already chalked up a few celebrity endorsements, with Dai Henwood, Conrad Smith, Kimbra and many others contributing to its first magazine, The Generosity Journal. And now ‘local craplebrity’ Guy Williams is helping out by imploring punters to do something good for a change and apply for the newly created chief digital storyteller role. PLUS: six more charities set to be added to the flock.

The joy of prediction is that no-one tends to remember the incorrect guesses. But whether it’s Arthur C Clarke, Nostradamus or Minority Report, they’ll often cling to the correct guesses as proof of some remarkable soothsaying ability. And, with the help of Weta Workshop, Magic Leap, a fairly mysterious “cinematic reality” startup that received US$542 million of funding last year, posted a video of what it sees as the future of gaming a few days ago.

The rise of social media has given humans an opportunity to communicate directly with brands. That seems to have led to more gimme gimme gimme than positive endorsement, but Toyota has decided the risk is worth it and is soliciting questions from New Zealanders and attempting to answer them in an entertaining fashion as part of its Armchair Test Drive campaign.

Air New Zealand has announced it has dropped its long-time Airpoints partner BNZ to team up with Westpac, saying the partnership would result in better earn rates for customers and BNZ saying the relationship was no longer a good fit for the bank. So is the lure of ‘free’ travel enough to make customers switch?