Jonathan Cotton.

Hiring staff between now and 2030? Here’s what you need to know… “The children now love luxury,” spat Socrates, sometime between 469–399 B.C. “They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise….They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannise their teachers.”

As the online guy for Idealog, I do a lot of interviews, most by phone, some in person. The face-to-face ones are always the best and the easiest to write: you get a better feel for a person when you’re there, face-to-face. You also get to check out the staff and the office digs too, which is great for adding a little colour to stories than can easily become bogged-down in the intangibilities of digi-tech.

For many small business owners it’s an all too familiar feeling – the churning stomach, the sweaty palms – both symptoms of the worst part of the working week: the aged receivables collection calls. This isn’t what you signed up for. That’s not the only problem though. There’s also the fact that every receivables call made is a flirtation with disaster, with the very real spectre of spoiled relationships, or at the very least upset debtors, hovering over your head.

*Almost all links decidedly NSFW, depending on where you work. When Virginia Wade’s daughter left home for college in 2010, the stay-at-home housewife decided to try her hand at a long-held interest – writing and self-publishing romantic fiction novels. While Wade (not her real name) enjoyed the process – writing, editing and uploading her work to Kindle Direct – the novels themselves were not popular, with sales stalling in the single digits and attracting sometimes scathing reviews.

Unconscious bias maybe, but true value lies in a diversity of ideology not collective indignation... In a week where LaunchVic has cut ties with 500 Startups and a Google engineer was dismissed for holding views which fall outside of the politically-correct mainstream, a question worth asking arises: where and how is value created, and how central are the so-called ‘soft’ issues of diversity and culture to that?

Jonathan Cotton goes to Techweek’17’s Future of Food event in Christchurch to find out how New Zealand can innovate our way to a bigger slice of the $1 trillion global food market. It’s the brutal hour of 7:30 in the morning and I’m at the Canterbury Employers’ Chamber of Commerce on Kilmore Street for The Future of Food, a Techweek’17 event presented by Kea & SingularityU Christchurch Chapter. So just what is the future food?

We cover a fair bit of technology at Idealog and we’re usually among the first in line when it comes to product launches. So I watched Microsoft’s latest launch last month – the new HoloLens virtual-reality technology – with more than a little enthusiasm. Make no mistake: the HoloLens is a pretty big deal. According to everyone, it is set to bring interactive, high-definition holograms to the real world. It’s very much the stuff of a sci-fi nerd’s wet dream.