Feedback added after the seminar on 6 November 2012

@Haggis (Whangarei Girls High School): I really enjoy the presentation as it gave a bird's eye view of the IT landscape

@Karen (Blomfield Special School): Always enjoy your knowledge and insight into the future

@Wayne (Excellere College): Made me think outside the old square

@Nancy (retired, Kamo High School): Very satisfied with today's briefing.  I will be putting lots of thought into the idea of Reverse Advertising.  Will be very useful

@Bryan (Blomfield Special School): Opened my eyes to innovations
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Compucon Technology Seminar
1 November 2012
Kamo High School

Continuing Professional Development plays an important role in assisting peers to remain current and develop new competencies in information technology practices. We would like to invite school and business people involved in IT or business planning to attend. Philip Mahoney, Assistant Principal of Kamo High School at 1 Wilkinson Ave Kamo Whangarei is the host of this event.  Please register ASAP by emailing This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it of your name and organisation name.  Attendance is free of charge but registration is strictly necessary due to limited seating and catering.

2:00 – 2:15pm Reception
2:15 – 3:15pm Digital Technology Lecture (TN Chan from Compucon New Zealand)
3:15 – 4:15pm Windows 8 (Warwick Grey from Microsoft New Zealand)
4:15 – 5:00pm Muffin Break

Digital Technology

o This lecture will attempt to address 2 high level questions arising from digital technology developments: (a) How do we gain and mitigate the threats from digitisation for organisational productivity and competitiveness, and (b) Do we know enough of the digital future for educating our next generation?   In order to address the first question, we will review existing digital technologies such as online Search, Maps, and Video Intelligence to gain an understanding of the scope of impacts they can have on our organisational performance.  To address the second question, we will look at the technologies that are being developed in the works such as smart dust, smart meters and smart vehicles.  We will be amazed to learn that smart does not mean smarter, but so smart that we thought we live on a different planet.   The lecture will come back to the reality and address current hot and controversial topics such as cloud computing, local computing, and bringing your own device (BYOD).  We will make a lot of analogies for reflections of where technology is pushing us to.  This lecture will certainly provide big pictures of digitization, some ideas for organisational productivity and for proofing our future, and a perspective for dealing with our next generation.  This lecture is a tutorial, not a commercial, and is suitable for an intellectual audience.

o TN Chan is the general manager and system architect of Compucon New Zealand.  He has provided industry level guidance to the University of Auckland since year 2002, and lectures and seminars to teachers and students of Kamo High School for about the same period.  He is a chartered engineer with major industrial project management track records in Hong Kong and Wellington.  His current interest is in technology transfer, quality assurance, and business productivity. 

Windows 8 and the Connections for 2013

o Windows 8 is Microsoft’s most game changing operating system launch since Windows 95. It is Windows re-imagined for the new mobile, social, connected world we are now living in.  Windows 95 is a desktop operating system but Windows 8 is a lot more than that.  It will be more correct to see Win 8 as a client operating system (as in server client computing).  Win 8 has incorporated many improvements for business productivity as well as consumer friendliness.  So many that we may even consider Windows 8 to be consisting of 2 systems with 2 user interfaces in one package- one for desktop systems and one for mobile platforms (Metro).  This is definitely a unique feature and this seminar will address this feature in reasonably depth within the confine of 60 minutes.  An example is the Internet Browser bundled with Windows 8.  It is Internet Explorer 10 or IE10 in short.  Whilst IE10 desktop has incorporated more web standard supports, IE10 Metro for the mobile platform is a totally new experience.   For daily business productivity, we may like to learn that our familiar Windows Explorer is renamed File Explorer with a ribbon style of menu presentation.  File searching is made faster and more enjoyable as a process.  Join IT veteran Warwick Grey for an informative and entertaining look at what IT trends are shaping the future of business, education and our lives over the next few years.

o Warwick Grey was a founding director of Renaissance Corporation and has 20 years’ experience of information technology developments after roles with Adobe Systems, Corel Corporation, Hewlett Packard, and Microsoft. He is widely known as subject matter expert on the Small to Medium Business sector and for explaining challenging technology concepts in easy to understand presentations.  He is currently the Distribution partner manager for Microsoft New Zealand.