Tēnā koe Fiona, nama hinu i kiekauta katoa, nau mai haere mai whakatau mai rā, ki te ūpoko o te ika Māui. You'll probably wondering why this picture's up here. That'll become apparent very shortly. Now welcome to Wellington. I know there are many Wellingtonians here. You know how beautiful our lovely city is. Good to see you here. And for all of those non-Wellingtonians, welcome to the head of the fish of Māui. It is a wonderful city. Two-thirds of us aren't actually from here. And likewise, I wasn't born in Wellington. I grew up in the deep south of Macargal, which I'll reference later. Now we are proud in Wellington to be recognised as a capital of culture. That doesn't mean to say that we are the only cultural capital in New Zealand. There are lots of other places where culture permeates throughout our towns and cities. But we are very fortunate and rather privileged to be the home for a large number of our national institutions. Including archives New Zealand, Ngā Taonga, Sound and Vision, and this wonderful facility we're in right now, Te Papa. With this privilege comes great responsibility. We need to make sure these organisations are well funded, they're well supported, and that we let them grow their knowledge in their base and contribute to broader New Zealand. When I was elected mayor a year ago, I took on the arts and culture portfolio within council. And I had a number of people come to me and say, why on earth are you doing arts and culture? Why don't you do something important? To which I responded, I don't see anything more important than arts and culture in our city. And I want to make sure that we celebrate in Wellington a decade of culture and we'll be rolling that out in our 10-year budget from next year. I know you'll hear of a coming day to talk about the digital world and knowledge and transformation. And I think back to my own youth and the first time I went overseas in 1996 and spent a year living abroad in Germany. I wrote about 300 or 400 letters home that year around Germany. It would take two weeks for a letter to get from my post box in my small German village in East Germany all the way back to Invercargill. And then even if my correspondent wrote and responded to me on that very day, it was two weeks before it got back to me, so a four-week turnaround time, a month. In the last week of my exchange, I had an Argentinian friend who lived nearby come to me and say, I've just sent an email home.  Because I had no idea. No one had really, except for those incredibly well informed, heard of the internet at that stage. I was bewildered. I remember starting the next year at Otago University and then telling me that snail mail, writing letters was a thing of the past and we'd all be writing emails in the future.  But us romantists will be writing letters forever and a day. A New Zealand post has a very solid and secure future. You can see that I'm clearly not made out to be a futurist. And then I compare that to my children today. I've got two girls, Madeleine, Harriet, seven and five. Every screen they see, they want to swipe. I expect there's a reasonable likelihood they'll never write a letter in their life, although they do enjoy the tactile nature of pen and paper and love to read and write. But their life will be a much different world to the one I've experienced and to the one many of you will experience. And that's why it's so important that we do have the digitisation of our national resources, our national treasures and archives so that they are made accessible to people. And that's why I have this picture here too. Because I want to have a bit of a shout-out to the Invercargill City Libraries social media team who are doing knowledge fun.  I still remember back when I was a student or at high school doing my research at the Invercargill Central Library learning about the Titanic, learning about the encyclopedias because again these are in pre-internet days. But I'm also comforted that children that I talk to today at public libraries never want to see them close. See them as valuable learning institutions where they can go and read and learn. So I do want to acknowledge the conference participants. Minister Clare, congratulations on your appointment to your new role and good luck to your new government as well. To the Organising Committee, to the Digital Forum Board I'm sure they've got plenty of action and story for you over coming days. If you do get a chance, we've got some wonderful new ways of being constructed around Wellington. I've got some wonderful new craft beer bars, brewed fresh local beer as well. If you get the chance and some of our wines from the Wai Rapa aren't too shabby either. Enjoy your time here. Ngamahinui kia koutou katoa, noraira tena koutou, tena koutou, tena koutou katoa. Kia ora.


It's always been of great interest to see students, to see the light bulbs go off over their heads as they understand that this is not your typical military scenarios that they're dealing with, but discussions of a much higher national level that they'll be asked to engage in after they leave Air University. Air University is a forum for developing these officers and enlisted members to engage in these national security policy discussions that they have previously never really had any encounter with. It's taking them out of their environment and into a very different world, but there are many people that come to Air University with experience from the outside, have a blend of both military experience, civilian experience and academic excellence that combined creates a unique forum for students to engage on these national security discussions. And that's Air University.


Shevon James after this is a gale Paul wanted it Paul gets it. Oh, she's shaking Paul extending process because there's a nice way to shot Just like that the super striker comes up Trump's for that beholden once again It's a Nicholas there's a show of this first half He's going to done the whole enough struck twice and Tiffany are sinking Lovely move by Nelson and Paul was Paul who actually started the move With a nice little run and then a bi-player here. Let's look at this from Paul That was excellent from him nice touch in and guessing was Barrington price was it? Yep, and look at this. Just that touch there from Paul That was brilliant and then just trapping the shoulder and price was beaten. So was Clark. Yep Case of twisted blood for Barrington price. Not sure which way Nicholas Nelson was going Nelson knew which way he wanted to go. He wanted to go goal was on his right side


Russia uses prisoners as political weapon against Ukraine. Russia is increasing pressure on Ukrainians and involves prisoners of war in this. Moscow uses prisoners as a political weapon according to Politico. Ukrainian military personnel in Russian captivity have started calling for their relatives. At the same time, they say that supposedly Russia is ready for exchanges, but Ukraine refuses. Recently, these calls become massive. So we understand that this is a campaign to cause distrust in the government, said Petro Yatsenko, a representative of the coordination headquarters on the treatment of prisoners of war in a comment to the agency. The wife of a Chernobyl defender who ended up in captivity at the beginning of the invasion, Valentina Kachenko, said that she also received a call from her husband. Before that, she received a short note with the words, I am alive, everything is okay, only once. According to her, her husband got in touch on November 29, 2023, calling her on Vyber. The captured Ukrainian soldier said, Valya, go make things hard for Kiev. Kiev does not want to take us back, and then apologized and ended the conversation. The woman did not go out in protest because she believed that her husband had become an instrument of the Kremlin's political game against Ukraine. According to officially confirmed data, Russia holds 300 defenders and 28,000 civilians captive. According to Yatsenko, Ukraine has recently increased the exchange fund and is ready to accept all occupiers prepared to surrender. Since the start of the full-scale war, Ukraine has returned almost 2,600 military and civilians from Russian captivity. It is worth noting that the latest exchange occurred on August 7, when 22 soldiers were returned home. Russia has frozen the exchange of prisoners with Ukraine, and negotiations on their resumption are ongoing.


Hi, I'm Mike Murphy and welcome to the short the news roundup from IBM research first up quantum computing has come to Quebec IBM and pink a non-profit started by the University of Sherbrooke Recently unveiled the first IBM quantum system one in Canada The new machine was shown off in an event in Bromont, Quebec attended by executives from IBM pink and the Quebec government the new utility scale quantum computer will be available on the cloud It'll be dedicated to sustainability research for academics and businesses across Canada Next up we're celebrating a decade of IBM research in Africa 10 years ago IBM research opened its first lab in Nairobi, Kenya followed a few years later by a second lab in South Africa And at an event at our Nairobi lab leaders from IBM and the Kenyan government came together to celebrate the achievements The Africa labs over the last decade their projects have covered government digital transformation education Transportation water management Agriculture financial inclusion health care and climate and I recently spoke with outgoing African labs leader Solomon Asefa Who told me IBM is now at the epicenter of innovation on the African continent? And in case you missed it IBM announced its new granite models for Watson X and I'll just say it it rocks Earlier this year IBM introduced Watson X a new data and AI platform And now there's an entire new set of IBM created models for companies to use called granite The model series is well suited to generative AI tasks like summarization content generation classification and extracting insights Based on testing by IBM research results show that training granite models on high quality finance data Gives them the potential to perform similarly or even better than much larger models For more on the latest innovations from IBM, make sure you check out our newsletter future forward till next time


Why does dropshipping work? I'm going to give you the top six reasons why dropshipping is one of the best business models to start your career on after you're looking to start an online business. The first reason? Well, as I've mentioned, there are no upfront costs for starting your dropshipping business. Abey dropshipping is a business model with one of the lowest entry barriers. You're only purchasing products after receiving payments for them. So the money is already there, making it a low-risk business to run. Therefore, you can also scale your business exponentially. There is no limit to how high you can climb and how far you can reach. The second reason is eBay is known as an auction online platform. Now, we are not going to be auctioning our products, but in time eBay transition and introduce the fixed price type listings, which is exactly what we are going to do, which means each product has its own fixed price. And so with this added method, buyers see eBay as a marketplace where they can get unique products for lower prices. eBay was always known as being a cheap online platform because of its auction prices and the reputation stayed the same even for the fixed type listings. So people know that eBay is a cheap place to go to find good products to buy and we are the dropshippers who are going to sell products to those customers on eBay's platform. The third reason why dropshipping works really well on eBay is because eBay is known for people selling to other people. A lot of people do not want to buy from big large companies where they are just seen as a small number in the system. They know that small and medium businesses are going to work much harder on customer support and making sure that the end customer is satisfied with their purchase because they're small companies and they really want to work on growing, which is exactly what we are doing and thousands of other sellers on eBay too. So many buyers would prefer to buy from sellers on eBay because of these reasons they want to buy from small and medium businesses and not from large companies. The fourth reason why dropshipping from eBay works is because no ads are needed to get people to your store to buy products and see your products. On any other platform that you want to sell on, you're going to have to run Google ads or Facebook ads or some type of source to bring traffic to your website and this can be really really expensive, especially if you're in the beginning of your journey because you won't know exactly what to put your money and where it will work. So eBay will take care of bringing traffic to your store organically, which means you do not have to pay any money to bring people to your store. The only thing that you need to worry about is having the right products in your store, products that are hot and trending and selling, optimizing your products, especially your title, because that's how people will get your listing and many other tips that we are going to get to in the future, so stay put and keep learning. The fifth reason why eBay dropshipping works so well is because you can sell pretty much almost anything you want.  But besides those you can sell pretty much anything you want, which means millions and millions of products are available for you to sell to anyone in the world. And that is one of the things that we love the most about eBay. Let me show you a quick list of the best dropshipping categories that you can find very hot items from and make a great profit at the end of the month. Some of those categories, as you can see here on the list, includes arts, crafts and sewing, clothing, shoes, jewelry and watches, home garden and tools, industrial and scientific products, pet supplies, beauty and health, kitchen and dining, toys, kids and baby, musical instruments, and this is one of my favorite categories because instead of paying a 9.15% fee, and this is one of my favorite categories to sell because eBay takes a really small final value fee from selling in this category, about three and a half percent instead of nine or ten percent from the product price, but we will get to the fees later. We also have office products, patio lawn and garden, tools and home improvement, toys and games, sports, outdoors, automotive and industrial. These are the best dropshipping categories to sell from and you have, as I've mentioned, millions of products inside these categories that you can choose. So that's why you don't have to focus on products that you cannot sell. It is dangerous to your business and you do not want to put up with any trouble. There is more than enough items to sell and new items are also coming out all of the time, all of which we will get to very, very soon. Now, it is really important to get to know eBay's Verified Rights owner program, the Vero program, to understand exactly what product we cannot sell, so we will have a link ready for you so you can get to know about these products that we cannot sell. But anyway, you should know that you have an extra layer of protection when using AutoDS. Every time you add a product, AutoDS will check its Vero database, which is huge and updating all of the time to make sure that you are not adding any products that you are not allowed to. So you will get a warning message if you're trying to add a product that is not allowed to be sold on eBay. Now, the sixth reason why dropshipping works so well is because of automation tools like AutoDS that will help you save the most amount of time while you are trying to run, create and manage your dropshipping business. From things like price and stock monitoring, automatic orders, automatic tracking updates and even the AutoDS Finder, which will do the product research for you and add the best sellers to your store without any of your interaction needed. This is how you're going to learn which products are best sellers and start to familiarize yourself with products that are good for the dropshipping business model and that will sell and make profit for you. So that is the sixth reason why dropshipping works. How you can scale it easily and not get stuck with small stores that are making really small profits. This way you can really scale your store and make it to the big numbers that really will make a difference in your life. So that is a brief explanation of how dropshipping works. We know what dropshipping is. We know what eBay is. We understand the combination of them both. And now we also understand why and how dropshipping works. Stay tuned because next you're going to learn how to create an eBay account from scratch and connected to AutoDS and start your dropshipping business. See you soon.