Download Weekly: Spark exorcises Yahoo mail demon
Spark and Yahoo have parted ways. Or as Spark says, it has brought its Xtra email service home.
SMX, a New Zealand owned cloud email company now hosts Spark's email service. The telco says it now has more than 800,000 customer accounts running on the new system.
Yahoo has provided Spark with web email since 2007 when the company was still Telecom NZ.
Spark's relationship with Yahoo was never happy. When Telecom switched to Yahoo many customers had trouble configuring their mail clients. Business users found Yahoo's zealous spam filtering meant customers could not reach them.
Yahoo Mail has seen huge spam attacks and service outages. There have been at least two known major security breaches. Last year details emerged of a 2014 data breach, one of the largest ever.
The incident saw hackers gain Yahoo user names, email address and passwords. YahooXtra customers were also subject to a series of phishing attacks.
Spark and Yahoo had a strained relationship towards the end. Many Spark insiders have talked of how Yahoo was difficult to deal with. There was a clear unwillingness to accept any accountability.
Jason Paris, Spark home mobile and business chief executive, says 1.4 billion messages moved in the switch. He says it was one of the biggest IT migration projects in New Zealand history. The move took around six months/
Internet health could mean empty hospitals
Scott Arrol, chief executive of NZ Health IT says hospitals may soon not have patients in them.
Arrol is speaking at the Future Healthcare Facilities Conference later this month. He says: “We will see a big shift in healthcare to those who need it as people can access healthcare from their device".
Clinicians and support staff will remain in hospitals. From there they will use technology to observe patients and respond when needed.
Arrol says: "Health needs to catch up with other industries. From a clinical point of view, doctors or nurses don’t need to be in front of patients to maintain their health. Clinics and doctors’ rooms as we currently know them will become things of the past."
He says New Zealand can be a leader in using technology for precision medicine. It can create an interoperable system and develop new business models to support it.
Data security is one area that will need attention.
The Future Healthcare Facilities Conference takes place in Auckland on May 22 and 23.
Gigatown flood sensor
Tussock designed a stormwater drain sensor that watches water levels and silt build-up. Supporting the hardware is Tussock's Swiftlet platform. The local council then uses collected data to know when to clear silt from the drains. This helps reduce flooding.
The flood sensor project is a spinoff from Dunedin's 2014 Gigatown competition win. As a prize, the city was the first in New Zealand to have gigabit fibre.
Chorus sponsored the competion and supplied the fibre. It also worked with Nokia to enable the ng Connect programme. This invited local businesses to show their technology.
As a result Nokia took Tussock's sensor to the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. It is talking about making the sensor and Swiftlet platform availble world wide. Tussock also received a GigStart award from the fund set up by Chorus and Nokia.
Now Tussock is talking to other councils and looking at ways to use the technology elsewhere.
Hokitika first cab off the UFB2 rank
Hokitika on the West Coast is the first town selected for Chorus’ UFB2 build. Work on Hokitika’s new fibre network began this week when Chorus general manager of infrastructure Ed Beattie joined local mayor Bruce Smith at a kick-off event.
Smith says he is delighted his town is the first cab off the rank. He says: “Our major industries such as the Dairy Company, Silverfern Farms and many local IT businesses were delighted to be informed of the commencement of the build.
“It is also great to see Chorus using local contractors for the majority of the build.”
The other West Coast centres selected for UFB2 are Westport, Reefton and Runanga.
Chorus is building UFB2 fibre networks in 169 new areas nationwide. The project will lift the reach of New Zealand’s fibre-to-the-home from three-quarters of the population to around 85 percent by 2024. Most UFB2 areas are smaller towns in regional New Zealand. Eventually the UFB network will cover 1.3 million homes, businesses, schools and medical facilities.
According to the latest quarterly update about one third of homes reached by the UFB network have connected. The number connected climbed 12 percent in the last three months to 368,778.