Digital Debrief

Welcome to another episode of the Digital Debrief. In this episode we speak to founders of Winely, Abbe (Chief Product Officer) and Jacob (CEO).

Winely is an Exocule company and AI-powered precision fermentation solution that optimizes tradition while deepening the connection between the wine and winemaker through real-time, deep learning-based data collection and analysis.

They are passionate in the belief that biology can solve some of the world’s biggest problems. Jacob confidently leads the vision and strategy for Exocule’s technology, thereby making scale possible for alternative-protein production.

Through Winely's deep tech and proprietary AI-powered physical sensors, Jacob, Abbe and the team are helping winemakers and alternative food manufacturers gain real-time insights into the state of their vintages (or batches), eliminate dangerous and time-consuming manual sampling, and scale their production in an eco-friendly way while also saving them time, labour, money, waste, and many unnecessary interventions.

Welcome to another episode of the Digital Debrief. I’m your host Ben Rose, and today we’re speaking to Carolyn Luey, Chief Digital and Publishing Officer at NZME.

Carolyn is a strategic business leader, that brings a depth of experience and a strong track record built over 10 years leading large marketing, sales and operational teams in the telecommunications, technology and media industries. Prior to NZME, Carolyn worked at Vodafone and also MYOB.

She is a passionate driver of change particularly where she sees opportunity to drive benefits for customers and leverage the best of digital to create amazing customer experiences. She is a collaborative leader who loves to bring together diverse teams to deliver positive change and turn strategy into brilliant execution and commercial results.

In this episode we speak to our very own co-founder, Mitchell Pham.

Mitchell is a serial entrepreneur, senior executive, board director and strategic advisor with expertise in digital transformation, new innovation and technology ventures.

In this episode we speak to Luke Campbell, Co-Founder of VXT.

Luke Campbell & Lucy Turner founded Vxt in 2018 at Uni after identifying a problem that most people can relate to, that voicemail sucks. They released an application used by tens of thousands of people globally to help manage voicemail and have grown the business from there.

Vxt is a smart communications platform that leverages rich communication data to automate the work no one wants to do; admin. Since launching in March, Vxt has grown to serve customers all around the world who make thousands of calls every week, connecting to CRMs and record-keeping systems so that notes, time, and other details from calls can be recorded automatically, which helps firms grow revenue and mitigate risk.

Zeald was formed in 2001 by three young guys from the small New Zealand town of Mangawhai Heads brother David and Brent Kelly and their cousin Hamish Bradick. Now, Zeald is the largest SME website design and digital transformation agency in New Zealand and has clients throughout both New Zealand and Australia.

Jarra established and leads Zeald’s commercial agency in Tauranga and was a key part of the team, together with co-founder David Kelly, that developed Zeald's social impact initiative, GEM (the Get Ecommerce Movement).

GEM is an ecommerce-driven digital transformation initiative aimed at helping SMEs get started on their digital journey and trading online, which they launched in NZ in March last year in response to Covid's impact on SME businesses.

The technology has since grown with a number of developments and partnerships established, as a result. Jarra is now spearheading the rollout of GEM in Fiji, and is part of the architecture team that developed the Digital Cluster Initiative, a partnership between Zeald and Bank of New Zealand (as members of the Digital Boost Alliance).

As founder and creator of one of New Zealand’s most successful ever start-ups My Food Bag as well as Au Pair Link and now Tend Health – Cecilia is a serial innovator and one of New Zealand’s leading entrepreneurs. Cecilia is passionate about helping women in business and solving the everyday problems of working mums and dads.

In this episode we speak with Jordan Thoms, CTO and Co-Founder at Kami. Kami was founded in 2013 by Auckland university students Hengjie Wang, Jordan Thoms, and Alliv Samson along with Bob Drummond, looking for a way to digitally streamline their note-taking. Their digital classroom tool was built to transform documents of any kind into an interactive and more collaborative learning experience. Kami is used by over 30 million educators and students across more than 180 countries, enabling a more engaged and collaborative learning environment both in the classroom and online.

Kami was recently named the fastest-growing company in New Zealand in the Deloitte Fast 50 index, and famously celebrated by giving each of its staff a $10,000 bonus. In this episode Jordan talks to us about the company, and the role technology has played in their success.