Download Weekly: Vodafone’s global brand make-over

Vodafone has a new speech-mark logo and a new slogan. The bright red colour stays, although there will be less of it. From today the white on red will become red on white.

The change is all part of a global brand make-over. According to the company the new look shows that Vodafone is confident digital technologies and services are going to make our lives better. 

There’s also a subtle change of emphasis away from the company being, essentially a phone network, to being a more general technology service provider. This move was first noticeable at the Vodafone NZ Gigabit Summit held in August where there was little talk of phone networks and lots about how we’re going to live in the future. 

Vodafone New Zealand Consumer Director Matt Williams says “We think the future of technology is very exciting. Our focus now is to ensure our customers are ready to make the most of it." Actually he said a lot more in the press statement, but the words ‘phone’ and ‘network’ were conspicuous by their absence. 

The brand strategy is global. Vodafone says it heralds the biggest advertising campaign in the company’s history. New Zealanders will be able to see this in a new TV commercial which will show from today. Australia doesn’t get the new advertising until later this month. 

As part of the marketing activity Vodafone asked people in 14 countries about their views on the future. It says New Zealanders are more optimistic than Australians or the British, but all three come in behind India. 

Nokia phones return at Spark

Nokia phones are back. Spark has exclusive New Zealand rights to a range of new Nokia-branded mobile phones made under licence by HMD Global. 

Soon there will be four Nokia phone models. The flagship $1000 Nokia 8 is already on sale. It has a 5.3-inch screen, that’s a touch smaller than you’ll find on the top models from Apple or Samsung. It boasts the ability to take video using the front and rear camera at the same time. 

The Nokia 8 will be joined by the $250 Nokia 3 and the $350 Nokia 5 models. Both go on sale today. A Nokia 6 phone is expected later this month. 

Unlike earlier Nokia phones, the new models run Android, like every other phone maker except Apple. That puts them in the most heavily contested part of the market against companies like Samsung, Sony and Huawei. 

A decade ago Nokia was the leading mobile phone brand. The shine went off the company after Apple launched the first iPhone in 2007. The brand revived briefly when Nokia began making phones using a mobile version of Microsoft Windows, a move which saw the software giant buy the phone hardware business only to run it into the ground. 

Closer the edge

Research company Gartner revealed ten technology trends for 2018 this week, among them it sees the further rise of edge computing. That is a way of organising computing power so the processing, data collection and delivery are placed closer to data sources and the places where the information, once processed, is used. 

Gartner says: “Connectivity and latency challenges, bandwidth constraints and greater functionality embedded at the edge favours distributed models. Enterprises should begin using edge design patterns in their infrastructure architectures — particularly for those with significant IoT elements.”

Emergency wake-up call

Thousands of New Zealanders were woken at 1:30am on Wednesday by a Civil Defence emergency alert test message. It was a trial run for a planned phone alert system due to go live later this year. The Ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency Management says the message was sent by mistake by developers testing the system. Its antisocial timing was due to the developers being based in Europe. 

Sky updates programme guide app

NBR reports Sky has upgraded its EPG phone app. The smartphone app is an electronic programme guide. It lets users remotely set recordings on their MySky boxes. The upgrade includes daily alerts about sports, movies and other material. 

Vocus appoints M2 founder Bowen as chairman

M2 founder Vaughan Bowen will replace David Spence as chairman of Vocus. Bob Mansfield moves to become deputy chair replacing Craig Farrow. 

Spence announced his retirement earlier this year and will leave the company. He was in the role as Vocus grew from a specialist niche telco to become a trans-Tasman giant. Bowen oversaw a similar set of mergers and acquisitions at M2. Farrow will stay on the board as a non-executive director

Earlier this year Vocus was the target of a A$2.2 billion private equity take-over attempt. In August the company recorded a net loss of A$1.46 billion. 

Hawaiki picks US point of presence

Hawaiki Submarine Cable says it has chosen the Peak 10 + ViaWest Brookwood data centre in Hillsboro, Oregon as its US point of presence. From there it will connect to the Peak 10 + ViaWest 100 Gigabit network backbone. Peak 10 + ViaWest customers will have direct access to the Hawaiki cable using a simple cross connect. 

Randy Neals, president of business development for Hawaiki Cable North America says Hillsboro is the West Coast fibre optic hub where: "all major cloud computing companies and internet service providers converge and interconnect”.