Daniel Watson talks to Jesse Mulligan regarding investing and being careful and a handy dandy Logitech keyboard.
Jesse Mulligan: Time for Tech Tuesday. Dan Watson from Vertech It Services joins me. Hey Dan.
Daniel Watson: Good Jesse.
Jesse Mulligan: What's that word vertech come from?
Daniel Watson: Oh, that's a twister. Well, it's a combination of truth and technology,
Jesse Mulligan: Like virtuous
Daniel Watson:Yup...
Jesse Mulligan: Yeah. Oh, good. Good, good, good.
Daniel Watson: Okay. That's about as far as it goes. At some point when you're starting a company, you just have to choose the name. This was easy for me. I bought into the business.
Jesse Mulligan: Yeah, well it's quite appropriate for you actually, because a lot of what you do on Our Tech Tuesday is warn people. Warn people about truthful and non truthful things that they may come across on the internet and in the world of tech. And actually you just got some good stock tips.
Daniel Watson: Oh yes. I'm not a financial advisor, but I do subscribe to an outfit called Clare Capital that's C-L-A-R-E capital co nz. They chuck out a newsletter on a regular basis of Tech Insights and you can go there and you can go subscribe to it and view a whole bunch of the ones in the past. But there's one that has been squirted out and it's an unusual listing on the New Zealand Stock Exchange where it's a company that's positioning itself as focusing on delivering AI products and services now. Okay, fine. There's lots of stuff going on in ai, there's lots of hype, lots of buzz, and then they break it down as to where this company has come from and it hasn't directly listed on the stock exchange. It's used an existing company that's not really all that active that sits on the stock exchange. I think it's called a reverse listing, but looking as to what it's made up of is three companies. One of them's a male and courier service, one of it's a school for years, one to 13 in Auckland and an AI consultant, and the valuation they've put on the business is quite decent. 45 million.
Jesse Mulligan: Right. What you're saying is there's a new business on the exchange. It's a bit of a patchwork of other entities and it's not quite clear what the business itself is.
Daniel Watson: Yes. I think charitable way to put it might be aspirational anyway.
Jesse Mulligan: So are they making their money in cryptocurrency then?
Daniel Watson: I dunno. I honestly dunno. I mean, there might be ultimately an amazing transformation in how they deliver mailing courier services. That seems to be the biggest one. They have other services in there, but I don't know. There's not really much information on their website that really gives you a clear handle onto how they achieved this valuation. What it reminded me of is back in the early two thousands, for those of us who are unfortunately old enough to be in our middle years, is that as soon as the internet started blowing up any bricks and mortar business that set up a website like pet food.com got massive amounts of investment and anybody and everybody was putting out websites and then going to venture capitalists and getting stock loads of money. And ultimately it collapsed right on time with the 9/11. And it feels like we might be seeing a little bit of this tail trying to wag the dog here as well, right?
Jesse Mulligan: Yes. So the company, I've just found this one you're talking about, so it's positioned itself as New Zealand's first listed AI company. That sounds pretty good, but you are pointing out that your source rates their value well officially as less than the sum of its parts as opposed to the apparent value. So you're saying be careful.
Daniel Watson: Yes, yes, because it's quite possible. So there's a bit of a trend out there for the pump and dump the hyping up of certain technologies. We saw it most recently with crypto and NFTs where people are so paying silly money and then months later it's worth nothing, especially if the people who make money are the first people to sell the items. Right? Yeah. I think there's always a bit of caution in there, and I know with my business it really is, it takes a lot of work to drive real business value to build up an organisation which would be investible to outsiders. And I think by tacking on a few buzzwords, people can be blinded by it if they don't really understand what's going on there. I'm not saying this is complete b.s. There might actually be something really amazing in here. I'm just not seeing it yet.
Jesse Mulligan: On the other hand, lots of people out there may have friends or family who got into, for example, Bitcoin at an early stage, and I'm currently crying about how much money they've made and there's a bit of a fear of missing out around some of these very fast moving and not well understood tech properties.
Daniel Watson: Yes, and for every Bitcoin, there's thousands of ones that were copycats that went to zero and some very few people made money and a lot of people lost significant amounts of their life savings. And in some cases, if you're in an uninformed or investor taking a punt, you're not diversified. This might be all of your savings and like anything, ask the experts, they'll give you better advice. Thank you. It's worth it just for going to that website and checking out things there because they can start to self educate as the kind of things that the experts look at and try and understand what's most important when assessing opportunities for investments, especially in technology,
Jesse Mulligan: So to some more everyday tech advice. Dan, you've got a new keyboard.
Daniel Watson: Oh yeah, yeah. We've got this Logitech, MK950. It's a really neat little swim line package. The key thing about it is it's designed to work for, there's a lot of people working from home and there's a lot of people who can consult. Now. They might be provided with a work laptop, but the work environment or the work policies may be that no personal stuff happens on that device because they want to keep the information security nice and tight. With this MK950, you can Bluetooth connect to up to three computers and then at a touch of a button flick between the mouse and keyboard on them. So keeping you, nobody's at my office. I've got a nice big desk over, I can spread out and have things out there, but at home it's a bit more pokey. You don't have space for, you don't want multiple keyboards and cables all over the place. This keeps it nice and tight. You can just have your work set up screen on one side, your personal laptop, you could have a third one if you wanted to go there and you can just quickly flick between them.
Jesse Mulligan: Where's the switch?
Daniel Watson: Very handy. Oh, it's just kind of up on that, on part of the keyboard above the insert home and page up keys, that kind of thing. It's just a little top, top, top.
Jesse Mulligan: Yeah. And is it hard set up?
Daniel Watson: Easy as, which is big. It's just another way of, if you're a business, you want to make life easier for people, provide one of those and keeps things nice and tight. Less confusing for people too. What's the other thing about it? Oh, I mean we are using it in the office where we set up multiple laptops at a time and just to conserve space on our guys' desks and make it easy for them to press next on the next laptop as you're going through all the setup procedures for building out for a business. Just a neat little thing to do.
Jesse Mulligan: Also quiet clicking and quiet typing, which is quite handy if you're on a zoom and you want to be doing some work without the other person knowing, you can type a away in the background.
Daniel Watson: I've seen my wife and my mother-in-law typing away on keyboards and if they've got long enough nails, nothing's going to make it quiet.
Jesse Mulligan: Good stuff, Dan. Hey, thanks for the recommendation and great to chat to you as always.
Daniel Watson: No worries, mate. Have a good one.
Jesse Mulligan: Dan Watson Vertech It Services for our Tech Tuesday.