We had a rare one day double hitter today. Two of our tech clients Hivemind and Connexionz appeared on Stuff.co.nz today for their innovative technology. Keep it up Christchurch!
Lots of people have opinions, but very few actually bother to put pen to paper. We secured the opportunity with the Sunday Star Times and polished an opinion article for Connexionz about Smart Cities and Intelligent Transport Systems, and it’s already stimulating conversation. The business editor said she wished more people did the same.
Recently, Rod Oram criticised Christchurch for “failing to use its $50 billion investment to build a very distinctive, 21st century city” and said one of the great gaps between achievement and potential was that “Christchurch has no plans to be a leader in integrated urban transport, or being a data-driven smart city.”
To put this into perspective, Christchurch public transport was not only affected in a major way by earthquake damage to the infrastructure, it also had the challenge of re-routing services, while navigating roadworks and diversions to meet the changing needs of city residents. Considering the recovery and rebuild has dumped so much on their plates, is being a “smart city” a priority for city planners to be focussing on? Yes, it is.
Being a smart city means readying for the growth challenges ahead through technology, creativity, and collaboration. Read the full article here.
In recent years, drone innovation has been accelerating at such an exponential rate that regulations have struggled to keep up.
The capabilities of this technology is limitless – from the positives such as: filming athletes in a race; delivering medicines to remote places; mapping terrains; or checking the condition of a bridge – to the negatives such as: spying over private property; sneaking drugs or electronics into a prison; or risking lives by flying dangerously close to airplanes.
Many of these innovations are already providing amazing scientific, economic, and social benefits. But if standards and guidelines are ignored, or if the technology gets in the hands of those who want to cause harm, will the rules be enough to protect ourselves with confidence?
Ethical, privacy and safety breaches are providing strong reason for society to be concerned about the vulnerabilities.
Already in New Zealand there are 2645 registered drone users, 968 commercial drone operators, and 400 registered drone companies. In the US, the commercial drone industry is burgeoning, with researchers predicting it will generate more than USD$82 billion for the U.S. economy by 2025.
A report on “beyond-line-of-site” drones (also called Unmanned Aerial Vehicles or UAV, and Unmanned Aircraft Systems or UAS), estimates that drones will benefit New Zealand by up to NZD$190 million per year across just three sectors studied – if we can get the regulatory environment and technology right.
The questions are, will the risks outweigh the advantages of drone technology, and do we have sufficient capability and resource to manage infringements?
Drones – the opportunities
Originally used for target practice by the Royal Marines in the 1930’s and 1940’s, drones today are commercially available on a large and increasing scale. For a few years now, they have been helping a number of government, research and industry organisations to gain access to new and valuable data more easily, quickly and efficiently than ever before.
There is still huge potential of this new technology to be explored. And, with our vast multi-level terrain, multiple climates, weather conditions, and low population, New Zealand is one the world’s most active hot beds of drone development. What might have been considered science fiction just a couple years ago, is fast becoming a reality today. For example, in agriculture, farmers are already using drones to monitor their stock and pasture cover remotely – saving them considerable time and fuel.
The average small drone can be launched within minutes and fly over a range of five miles for up to 90 minutes. They can also be fitted with other technology, like high resolution infrared cameras that can zero in on suspected criminals, wildlife, poachers, missing people, or monitor events, and more.
Drones are also being used to help with emergency response and disaster recovery, improving security, helping with pest control and erosive monitoring. There are even trials underway to discover if drones can be used safely for delivering freight direct to the buyer’s door, transporting medicines, and more.
Even in the GIS industry, a low altitude small drone could provide surveyors and GIS professionals with a more cost-efficient alternative to the georeferenced photographs taken by manned aircraft or satellites. More so if the drone is kitted with LiDAR and camera equipment to create a turnkey remotely piloted flying LiDAR scanner that can capture rich and accurate images more frequently and cheaply.
In fact, GIS is predicted to be the second biggest commercial drone market behind aerial photography and cinema, and ahead of precision agriculture.
Image: Top commercial drone industry trends based on DroneDeploy usage data.
One example of this is the research team at Auckland University’s School of Science which specialises in unmanned aerial low altitude sensing and geospatial analysis for ecological and environmental monitoring.
Using a swarm of flying drones, the AUT UAV team is creating high resolution maps of habitats and landscapes, monitoring wildlife behaviour, and examining the human impact on the environment. They are also working with a Swiss company to create 3D mosaic landscapes and turning the images into a virtual reality experience. This allows people to visualise and understand their environment in a way they’ve never experienced before.
Disruptive innovation, or a potentially catastrophic disruption?
Because drones can dramatically lower the cost of data collection and analysis, the pace of development has been phenomenal.
The challenge for policy makers however has ranged from determining how to protect public safety and personal rights, such as privacy and land ownership, as well as areas of national, historical, or natural importance from potential harm caused by drones – either intentional or accidental.
It was only last year when the Civil Aviation Authority in New Zealand announced new rules to improve aviation safety for drone operators, other airspace users, and for the general public and their property – eight years after the first known incident was reported in the country.
And it was just last month that the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in the US announced new steps to promote the safe integration and innovative adoption of drones across the country.
While the rules may prescribe more explicit constraints upon the use of drones than was previously the case, understanding and abiding by them is another matter. And as more and more drones enter the market, understanding and enforcing compliance will be challenging for both users and the authorities. For example, Amazon and Google’s drone package delivery plans have already hit a stumbling block with the new US regulations.
What next?
By 2018 there will be an integration of airspace in New Zealand, where drones will be part of the transport grid. With increasing drones in our skies, the next challenge will be innovating a way to manage the airspace and avoid collision.
Meanwhile, the race is on with innovation in drone technology happening at warp speed around the world, and everyone is joining in from hobbyists to global brands. Amazon has been trialling its Prime Air drone delivery service in the UK, Dominos has been working on various air and land based drones to deliver pizzas, and last but by no means least Facebook is now racing against Google to deliver 5G to unconnected parts of the world with its solar powered Aquila drone that can fly for months.
To ensure their economies don’t miss out on a slice of the lucrative drone pie, governments are providing incentives for innovators to research, develop and commercialise drone technology.
Last month the US announced USD$35m in research funding for the National Science Foundation to accelerate the understanding of how to intelligently and effectively design, control, and apply drones to beneficial applications – such as monitoring and inspection of physical infrastructure, smart disaster response, agricultural monitoring, the study of severe storms, and more.
Last year Callaghan Innovation in New Zealand launched the first C-PRIZE & UAV challenge – a NZD$50,000 incentivised challenge that aims to advance the commercialisation of innovative drone technology for the screen industry. Team VorTech won the prize for their Gyroscope UAV that uses an innovative propeller design that allows thrust in any direction, helping it hold position in gusty winds.
Like other countries in this drone innovation race, New Zealand has been ploughing funding into firms like Aeronavics to ensure the pace of research and development stays lightning fast.
If users can work around and abide by the new rules and regulations, then the future looks bright for both the drone industry and for society. But if rules and resources fail to protect your personal safety and privacy, what would you do to protect your rights?
– This blog article was written for our GIS client Vicinity Solutions
Looks like the Champion Canterbury Awards are going to be popular again this year. If you haven’t been nominated, but you know you deserve credit for your hard earned success, don’t undervalue your achievements and watch others win. Nominate your business yourself and put in an entry.
The judges want to be impressed. And your chances increase with powerful content, so ask for help if you need it. We’ve been polishing entries for award winners and finalists for many years.
The closing date for nominations is Friday 27 May and for entries is Friday 10 June, so you’ve got heaps of time to create your award winning masterpiece. Good luck!
Rupert Deans, Founder of Christchurch mixed reality agency, One Fat Sheep, has raised over NZ$1.2m in seed funding for his new startup Plattar (www.plattar.com).
Plattar will offer a world first augmented reality (AR) platform that will enable brands, publishers and agencies to create, manage and distribute augmented reality content in a simple, cost-effective way. It is a cloud-based platform that consists of two parts: an app builder that comes with customisable templates, and a content management system for AR content.
Read the press release.
Read the NZ coverage in StopPress, NBR (for NBR subscribers only), Christchurch Press, Stuff, Herald, Idealog, Geekzone, iStart
Natural health product innovation company, Forest Herbs Research, is experiencing growing demand for its clinically proven anti-fungal products made from a single variety of New Zealand’s ancient Horopito plant.
The company owns the world’s only sustainably managed commercial plantation of 30,000 native Horopito plants on the edge of the Kahurangi National Park in Golden Bay, and is preparing a third piece of land with the aim to quadruple the number of mature plants by 2020.
Read the Forest Herbs Research press release.
Read the coverage in the National Business Review, Nelson Mail, Morning Report, Radio NZ, Pharmacy Today, Scoop, and the New Zealand Listener.
From 4 April, 2016 new laws governing workplace health and safety will come into effect in New Zealand. Glenn Baker, Editor of NZ Business, interviewed our client Mango on what business owners must do to be safe and compliant. Below is an excerpt from NZ Business’s March 2016 article “New Lines of Responsibility“:
Another company in a good position to help business owners comply with the new legislation is Christchurch-based Mango, which markets a proven cloud-based Quality, Health, Safety and Environmental (QHSE) Management solution.
Mango’s chief marketing officer Craig Thornton agrees that business owners will no longer be able to gamble with employee’s safety as the regulators have more powers to apply a financial penalty to the employee, management and owners. He says the Mango solution provides an overview of what’s going on and delivers all due diligence information on one system.
His advice for business owners right now is to first engage with staff on health and safety. “With their staff they should be doing a gap analysis on their systems with the new legislation. Gaps should be looked at closely and action plans put in place to fill those gaps.”
Business owners should also attend briefing sessions with industry associations, Institute of Directors or Chambers of Commerce, he adds. And if they need technical advice, they should engage a suitable consultant.
“The first agenda items on board or management meetings should be on health and safety performance,” he says. “Business owners need to be visible and repeat the same H&S message to their staff; they need to show employees this is important. Don’t look at H&S as a problem or an overhead/compliance cost. Accept it and see how you can get value from it.”
Thornton believes business owners must take authority and responsibility for H&S and not outsource to a consultant ‘because that’s easier’. Going forward, the biggest challenge will be the engagement and participation with staff and building a safety culture, he says.
“Having a safety culture is key to having a workable, sustainable and manageable health and safety system. Constantly talking about health and safety with staff will, over time, help make H&S just business as usual. It’ll become ‘this is what we do around here’ and standards will be set that everyone will comply to.”
Great to see our new client Shelley Sutcliffe and Bryan Clarke of Vicinity Solutions (@VicinityGIS) on the COVER of the March 2016 issue of NZ Business!
A really great way to get some free quality PR is to share your expertise in an opinion article, as our client Annette Dow of Binary Resource has recently done.
We placed two of her opinion articles (see links below) in one of NZ’s top business publications – the National Business Review. Then we shared the links to relevant groups via social media. There are lots of publications keen to accept authoritative contributions, so give it a go. The results can be well worth the effort.
NBR opinion article 1: Seven fallacies about managing virtual/remote teams
NBR opinion article 2: Recruiting remotely – can it work?
Oh yes, and if you read the articles and you’re struggling with your remote managers or workers, Annette Dow of Binary Resource is running a series of seminars across NZ from February 2016 on how to build and maintain an effective remote work environment. Find out more at www.binaryresource.com
To enter, just choose a category (or more) and answer the questions succinctly online to explain why you deserve to win. It’s that simple. If you’re unsure or want help from an experienced and successful awards entry writer, contact us.
Reasons why you should enter these awards:
