When Potaua Biasiny-Tule talks in public, people listen. And that’s not just because of a colourful, down-to-earth presentation style that mixes Maori, English, tech-talk and expletives and got Potaua and his wife Nikolasa voted best speakers at the recent  WordCamp New Zealand conference.

Thirty seven-year-old Potaua is also one of the key influencers in the country when it comes to Maori people, language and technology. Born in Opotiki in the Bay of Plenty and raised in Rotorua, he became hooked on spaceys when his local dairy opened an arcade, and his passion for the internet was cemented in 1999 when he saw the benefits it was having on rural Indian communities.

Now he is Managing Director and creative boss of the Māori-run and operated news and ICT company TangataWhenua.com, which recently launched a Maori news app for iPhones.

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A search of the Apples iTunes store found the TangataWhenua.com Maori News app at the top of the What’s Hot category (News apps), surprising our small digital whanau and offering encouraging signs for the new year.

“We launched the Maori News app in time for Christmas” said Nikolasa Biasiny-Tule, Creative Director for TangataWhenua.com “and to see that the Maori News app was selected in the top spot of the Apple iTunes What’s Hot category, suggesting that our app brings something unique to the mobile market and something cool to your iPhone.” Read more →

In the lead up to Christmas, a small wish was answered early as iTunes approved the TangataWhenua.com Maori News app.

We are honoured to share our taonga with our whanau and appreciate them adding this app to their digital kete” said Managing Director, Potaua Biasiny-Tule.

The Maori News app is free and can be downloaded from the Apple iTunes app store and loaded on your iPhone, iPod Touch and is compatible with iPad. Read more →

(by Hon Dr Pita R Sharples; Minister of Māori Affairs)

Education, Training and Skills (excerpt)

The second area of innovation we must pursue is to ensure our educational pathways are an integral part of the infrastructural planning to chart the future forward. Indigenous peoples must be at the vanguard of a shift to a diverse, highly differentiated, high value, export-led economy, which utilizes both natural resources and technological innovation.

Last July, a young, vibrant couple calling themselves tangatawhenua.com launched Google Maori. Potaua and Nikolasa Biasiny-Tule were part of a large team which created the Maori interface to the world’s largest online search engine. Google Maori was always more than a mechanism for being able to search words and messages in te reo Maori. Read more →

From today you’ll be able to use Google in the second of New Zealand’s official languages.

Just go to the translations page on the web’s most used search page, and in the middle of the list, which goes from Afrikaans to Zulu, the Maori option will come up.

Allowing users to put different language skins on its interface is just one of the reasons Google has become the most used search engine.

Google’s ubiquity was one of the reasons Rotorua couple Nikolasa and Potaua Biasiny-Tule undertook the translation project. Read more →