Back in August, Chinese technology company Huawei released its latest smartphone. To the surprise of everyone, it was powered by a high-quality semiconductor chip 100% made in China. According to the US, such a chip was impossible. And yet, there it was. The chip shouldn’t exist because the Trump administration created heavy sanctions to block…

Walking through a graveyard is always sobering. All that effort; all those risks. They count for nothing in the end. The graveyard is a place of perfect equality. There is no graveyard for companies. But if you scroll through a government register of businesses, you’ll find a lot more dead companies than ones that are…

It’s always nice when a solution looking for a problem actually finds a problem to solve. Blockchain’s reputation may be redeemed if it can fix the looming copyright issues for AI. For the past few years, many CEOs were convinced that blockchain would be a great tool and they promptly went hunting for ways to…

Ten years ago, every C-suite was under siege from the IT department begging their directors to be more careful with customer data so it wouldn’t be stolen. Newspaper headlines about major cyber-attacks made their way out of the geek media and started to appear on the business pages of mainstream media, which only reinforced what…

Tuapeka chief executive Greg Jolly had to push back on the sceptical comments from his chairman when he decided to question the company’s intangible assets. With folded arms, the chairman wondered aloud if the time spent on uncovering the hidden value in the business was worth the hassle. But Jolly saw exactly how the insights…

This month it was the turn of the giant AI companies to have their say on whether they should be allowed to use copyrighted material to train their systems. What’s the problem? Simply put, the US Copyright Office has no idea what to do, so it asked the public to comment on the many possible…

A company’s brand is so much more than just a visual element, it reflects how people perceive and think about your business. Brand is like the oil paint that colours the canvas of your firm’s values, promises and experiences. It is a deeply important asset that helps build customer loyalty, sets you apart from competitors…

By selling some of the cheapest goods in the world, US retailer Walmart generated $US611 billion and a whopping $US152 billion in profit for 2023. This is a bit strange at first glance because Walmart doesn’t really have anything unique to sell. Sure, it has thousands of private-label products, but these items are part of…

It was a great idea at the time. The plan was for the two founders to split the operations side of the business from the sales. Of course, that meant most of the late-night dinners and airline trips would fall on one of them, but that was okay since the other didn’t really like hotel…