Tonight on Close Up ` how many of you actually use your phone books, and would you say no to one if you were given the chance? Plus we take a spin with the K who's built a car that's good for the wallet and the environment. Somebody's got to make fashion. Might as well be me. (LAUGHS) And the pharmacist who went from redundant... Very pregnant wife; I had no job. ...to rolling in it. I'm having a good time doing what I'm doing. Due to the live nature of Close Up, captions for some items may be incomplete. ONE News captions by June Yeow and Jessica Boell. Close Up captions by Glenna Casalme and Desney Shaw. Good evening. Tonight we're talking about these things ` the good old-fashioned phone book. These have been with us forever, but you have to ask, in the 21st century when the internet has become an integral part of our lives, do we really need them any more? Well, the fact is every year, we're all going to have these sent to us whether we like it or not, given we don't have a choice in the matter, unlike countries like Australia, Canada and in Britain where you can opt out of being sent something that many of us call obsolete. Michael Holland reports. Let your fingers do the walking. We've been doing as they've asked for decades ` exercising our digits as we've prepared to do the talking. But in this age where even instant coffee isn't quite fast enough, our fingers have rapidly moved on. The need to have that single paper-based directory just doesn't exist any more, I'm afraid. Aren't you assuming, though, that everyone is a slave to technology? I am, I am, cos everyone is. What use are these these days? No use. I don't use them. Use Google, jump online. Yellow Pages online. When did you last use one of these? Um... When we had an uneven chair and I packed it underneath the lower leg. Yet every year, whether we use or don't use, a new book ` and in many cases, make that plural ` dutifully arrives courtesy of Yellow, the Hong Kong/Canadian-owned company that bought the directory business off Telecom five years ago. The print product is something that is still king for us right now. But the Greens assert it's time for the king to be dethroned. We're one of the few countries in the world where you can't opt in or opt out of receiving a phone book. It turns up in your mailbox. Much like junk mail, you don't have a chance to opt out. We still print probably six million books a year. So lets put six million into some sort of context. How many books to fill Eden Park? One year's worth of books gets close to shoulder height. Now lets add another year's supply. Five years of directories and the hallowed turf's become a 7m deep sea of paper ` just over four times the height of this long-disappeared reporter. This is a huge footprint ` all the carbon burnt transporting these phone books and delivering round the country. Surely it's in the company's interest to be saving money by delivering fewer, but also in the environment's interest to not have so many phone books distributed. You have got to wonder how many people are actually using them, or they just sit them in the cardboard and think, 'Oh, that's good. Here's the new one. I will chuck out the old one,' and do the same thing the following year. Yellow, though, point to consumer research that shows... Yellow also tell us... On the digital front... The technological age has arrived, and we are doing what we can and moving as fast as we can in our transformation, If you're a business that wants success, you know you need to get your name out there, which is why you're already in this. But we know you're always looking to go bigger and grow further. That's why we've gone digital. But there are still people that want that print product, and as long as there are people that want it, there will always be a mix going forward of digital and the print product. Complicating matters, Yellow is tied to an obligation inherited from Telecom ` it must provide new directories every year until regulators suggest otherwise. Hand on heart, you haven't used a phone book for, what, the last year? Oh, in the last... (SIGHS) last five years ` four or five years. Honestly, I google stuff. So let's put this to the test. A big newsroom full of people who's job it is to seek out information. How many phone books can we find? You won't find one on my desk. Haven't used a phone book for years. < Always online? Always online. Looking for a phone book. Any phone books around here? Oh God, no. Not for years. I've got a phone book, um,... here. It begins with G ` Google ` and 018. Yellow pages for the Waikato and King Country. How good's that? Isn't Yellow, though, really a victim of this transitional phase? It's really in no-man's-land. It is. It's in the gape, isn't it, between a pure digital world and the an old paper-based world. It's a bit like newspapers. They are still struggling with 'How do we move from one world to the other?' Television content. All of these companies that are struggling to figure out their new place in the world. FUNKY MUSIC This is revealing. Phone book being put to some sort of use. It's called being practical. But going online for your searches. Absolutely. It's the modern world. I love them. So many uses. We use them for yoga. We sit on them instead of blocks. Being a newsroom, there does have to be phone books somewhere, and we've found them, but I think this is also reasonably telling. All these ones that haven't been taken out of their wrappers, which suggests they're not used all that frequently. Just move with the times, yeah, yeah. Ring me if you need to know a phone number. I'll tell you what it is. (CHUCKLES) I don't know your number. I would have to look it up. You'd have to look it up, yeah. Yeah, well, yeah... Now, the Yellow Group's website says it constantly monitors requests for opt-outs, but because there are so few, it won't give us the option. Well, that doesn't sound quite right to us, so our poll tonight asks ` would you opt out of receiving a phone book? You can answer on our Facebook page or just text yes or no to 8875. We'll bring you the results at the end of the programme. After the break ` how this man could inspire you to get solar and save you a whole lot of cash on your car. Also, check your atlas. We check out the island that doesn't exist. Welcome back. Anyone who spends any time at the petrol station knows the cost of the fuel. Well, over two bucks a litre these days, and many of us madly collect those supermarket vouchers to a get a couple of extra cents a litre off the bill. But think about this; dream about it. What if you could slash your fuel bill by 95% and still travel the same distance? We're talking 100km for a dollar. Well, we've found a man who's doing just that using electricity, solar panels, and our hot, hot sun. Here's Matt Chisholm. So when they're training helicopter pilots, the bloody helicopter flies over the house,... (IMITATES HELICOPTER) and I'm sure they make the rotors go... (IMITATES HELICOPTER) just to, like, get inside your head the worst possible amount, you know. Peter Sewell's a character ` UPBEAT MUSIC ...an electrical-engineer cum boat-builder who's clever, good with his hands and endearingly honest. And the credit crunch, I take it, didn't do your boat-building business any favours? No, no, that doesn't do it any favours, eh, so that's partly why the cars have come along. Somebody's got to make fashion. Might as well be me. Yep, Pete's also a visionary. I'm one of those persons that looks a bit into the distance, you know. But trendsetter? Well, that remains to be seen. However, the numbers stack up. Just imagine filling up for a fiver. We're looking at about a buck per 100 K's, I think, for the Toyota. There's actually not many people in the country running a car on solar power. I think there may be only four or five. If there are four or five of you in 4.4 million, you are one in a million. One in a million, that's right. It is one in a million. (LAUGHS) I could drive across to Devonport, you know. What's that? About 60 K's from here. I drive all the way across to see my friend in Devonport and have a coffee. We go and buy a coffee, and I buy the coffees, and I think, 'Shit, I've spent more on bloody coffees than I have on fuel.' (GUFFAWS) Three years ago, when Pete wasn't up top much on the boats, he gave his 1995 Toyota Celica a complete overhaul. It's very quiet. Do you lose a bit of grunt? Uh, we got the same power. It just feels like the same as if you were driving it with the original 2-litre engine in it. What's involved in converting a petrol car to electric? We need to pull the petrol engine and all the related stuff out, remove the gas tank, and we replace that with an electric motor and put some batteries in the back. The job spanned over six months but actually involved only three weeks of Pete's labour. So, what does this machine owe you now? Including buying the car, about just under 30,000. It's just under $30,000, and that's including buying the car, which was chosen to be about 5500. So it's probably 30,000 plus three weeks of my labour. What would that be? Oh, depends on how much I liked the person, I guess. Once the rubber was hitting the road, Pete threw some solar panels up on top of the garage. We're talking about 25,000 K's I can do every year just from the power generated on my roof. And now, while the rest of us work hard to pay for our fuel, he's kicking back. We're putting power in the car right now, you know. Look, we've got good sunshine. For about 6000, I've got 25,000 K's a year and next year and next year and next year. I never used to be really into cars but, you know, making your own fuel, you know, installed all the electrical system in the car, you know, it's 36,000 K's, and I still really enjoy going for a drive. And why wouldn't he? No longer having to worry about the ever increasing price we pay at the pump... My gas station's everywhere. Every house has got a power point for me to charge up with. ...or even how much oil the planet might have left. All the oil's in really hard-to-get places where it's really expensive. It ain't gonna be cheap again. And not only is this renewable energy fuelling his vehicles, Pete converted the ute this year. It's also covering the dreaded power bill. In the middle of winter, I paid 20 bucks. And in the summer, they owe you? Oh, in the summer I might get a credit, yeah, so that's quite good. I've got a decent range, you know. 200 K's on a charge, so that's quite a way. Not many people drive more than 200 K's on one trip, you know. And if you do you take your charger with you? If I do, I take the charger with me. If I want to drive to Coromandel 185 K's, I take the charger with me, and I plug it in when I get there. How do you pay for that? Uh, usually carry a stack of coins in the little coin holder down there. Hey, 5c pieces is the way to go, eh. And they accept that? Most of the time. Some of my mates chuck it back in the car. (GUFFAWS) If you feel around under the seat there, you might be able to get a couple of bucks. UPBEAT MUSIC For Pete, this is a no-brainer. It's good for the wallet and the environment, and naturally, he'd like to see more of us coming along for the ride. He even wants to produce electric cars on a large scale. If every house in the country had solar panels on the roof and the second car was electric, the amount of money that we would be saving going overseas on foreign oil, can you imagine what our universities would be like, our schools, our hospitals? Wouldn't that be an amazing place to live? Yes, it probably would be, but there is the initial outlay to consider and that thing called fashion. For those that might think it's a bit nerdy, not very, you know, fashionable? Somebody's got to make fashion. CAR ZOOMS Every time I see somebody else going for a drive in the car, and they have a big smile on their face, I'm thinking, 'That would be pretty cool wouldn't it?' LAUGHS: Yeah, I think you're right. And if you want to learn more about electric vehicles and solar power technologies, you should head along to the Smart Energy Expo being held at Wellington's Town Hall auditorium tomorrow from 10. Still to come ` the island that's not an island at all. We speak to one of its 'undiscoverers'. And the K pain relief pill that has brought in millions. Welcome back. From redundancy to a turnover of $60m. That's what Hartley Atkinson's achieved in just a couple of years. When we caught up with him in 2009, he was building up his own company. A trained pharmacist, he wanted to develop new medicines and be the first K company to license his own products all over the world. Well, it looks like that was just the beginning. This from Gill Higgins This is our NZ headquarters. We have offices in Sydney, Malaysia, Singapore. It's a far, far cry from the back room of his house, where he started. A desk here with an office manager. I used to work from here. His is a classic tale of K can-do attitude jump-started when he was made redundant. Very pregnant wife, no job and ideas of starting a business, which, to be honest, some people thought was kind of crazy. But this pharmacist had a good idea ` a single pill combining two well-known painkillers ` and he used the power of advertising, though not in the way most companies do. Hi there. The first ad, we filmed it in the office. It was a bit raw, we didn't tidy the shelves. Yes, this really went out on TV. Maxigesic reduced pain better and faster than paracetemol or ibuprofen alone. Maxigesic, it's the future available today. I guess one of the positives is it got people's attention. You didn't go for a flash ad? No, no, it wasn't, really. One of the problems, I guess, is we're spending most of our money on R & D, so we really don't have a pile of money to spend on really fancy ads and things like that. It did the trick. Maxigesic is now a big player. We have outlicensed it at the moment to 30 countries. There's still a few countries in the world left, and that's still a work in progress. And he's turning over 60 million bucks a year. Seems he's got the last laugh. Some of the finance people have sort of shook their heads and said to me, 'It's not a very good business to be in, is it, Hartley?' It's an industry full of big guys who'll just squash you, and to be fair, they had a good go at squashing us. But he used money from his first product to develop other products, contracted out the research and had his team here gathering information from clinical trials to prove the products work. These are all things you've come up with. Yeah, they are. What's also happening too, though, is we're also being asked to license products in from other places where maybe people invent something. And we're getting approached from places like America, even, which is kind of really surprising that somewhere like America, which is the whole hub of pharma, actually comes to someone in NZ. Products like this. One of the projects we're working on is a drug delivery device. The idea is to treat sinusitis but also... The other thing you can with it too is instead of having to have an injection, you can actually take the drug intra-nasally as well. Both my kids would love that. So how does keep those big, hungry multinationals at bay? They're certainly still around... (CHUCKLES) obviously. One of the good things, I suppose, is pharmaceuticals and health, there's a lot of different potential areas that aren't really covered, So the big guys always leave lots of gaps, so if you have innovation or products that are different, you can exploit those. With things going so well, you can't help wonder how he's reaping the rewards, but... Nothing really changes. Sitting in a large yacht or something might be interesting, but I still personally reckon something like paddle boarding is much more fun. No luxury items from all your hard work? No, no, look, I'm having a good time doing what I'm doing, but I'm not a flash Harry. I don't have a helicopter, I don't have a luxury yacht or anything like that. Not flash but very successful and moving forward all the time. Seriously, if it were a 100m race, we're at about the 25m mark. And this pharmacist turned business player thinks others can do the same. It's just a matter of believing. Like, a lot of people don't believe in things. They'll tell you you can't do it, this can't be done. I think you've got to believe in yourself, back yourself and do it. Here's a challenge ` go check your atlas and look for a small blip about the size of Manhattan, off the west coast of New Caledonia. It's called Sandy Island, and it shouldn't be there. The thrill of discovery has driven some of the greatest explorers in history. Think Hillary, Armstrong or Captain Cook. But a team of Australian scientists have today set the world's media alight by doing the complete opposite. Earlier today, Sabin Zahirovic from the Sydney University team that undiscovered Sandy Island told me what they were doing there in the first place. We were primarily looking at the tectonic evolution of this region, so we were collecting rocks, other kinds of data. But we had some time under our sleeve and decided to detour because we found this, uh, blob on Google Maps and Google Earth and a lot of scientific maps, and so we decided to actually see if we can find this island, uh, called Sandy Island, apparently. And when we actually got there, although we were very nervous, we found nothing. Why were you nervous? Did you think it wasn't there, or did you think because it was night, that you're gonna run into it? Yeah, so, half of our maps said that there was an island there and half of them didn't. Even the captain was a little bit nervous and wasn't quite keen on going to this area at night, but we had a slight miscalculation, and we did actually end up going there at night. So we were nervously looking at our screens in the operations room at the time. Luckily for us, there was no island. What could it have been? I mean, could it have been something like an island that was once there, that's under the sea you could have run into? Could it have been completely, you know, just nothing there ever? I mean, did you know what you were doing in that sense? Yes, so it did look like a map error ` so some kind of human error at some stage, and these maps have gone through... but nobody's gone back to` to check until we got there. So we were able to establish that there was no island at all. How much discrepancy is there in mapping of the world or this part of the world? Do you know? Yeah, so, it's interesting because a lot of our data is patchy in this regions, so we depend on satellites, and they don't always produce the most reliable and precise predictions of where islands could be. So we were surprised by how big this island was because there were nearby smaller islands that showed up on our maps, and we could clearly see them in Google Earth and the satellite image, but this particular island was much bigger. But it was just a black blob, so we weren't quite sure what to do with it, and we decided to go and investigate. So is this a Google problem ` in other words Google put it there ` or were there other maps that, you know, from the olden days, so to speak, that had it there as well, and how has this even come to pass? Yeah, so we're not sure how it's actually gotten into a lot of these databases and world maps, but it seems to have gone into scientific maps, and Google has taken this database ` it's the World Vector Shoreline database. I think it's even supplied by the CIA, so we're not quite sure how it got there, but now we can actually send them data and tell them to fix this. For once` Once and for all, there is no Sandy Island. There never was a Sandy Island, and the maps are wrong. The maps are definitely wrong. There is no Sandy Island. There are other islands in the area which had been map correctly, but this island, we've definitely shown that there is nothing there. Is that like a eureka moment? Is that like discovering something or undiscovering something? Cos I'm sure you've never undiscovered something before, have you? It was an incredible experience. It just goes to show what science is. You` It raised a lot more questions. It was really a voyage of discovery. We found lots of things, but this was very unexpected. We made a detour; we had no plan or intention to look for this or unlook this... island, but because we had some time, we just decided to explore because this part of the world and many parts of the ocean are so poorly explored. The surface of Mars and the surface of the moon are mapped to greater detail than most of the oceans. So it was great that we got some time to go there and have a look. Right before we go, let's see the results of our poll on the phone book at the start of the show. The question was 'Would you opt out of receiving a phone book?' Well, this is how you answered. I FIGURED MOST WOULD OPT OUT, SO I GOT IT WRONG That's all for tonight and the week. Have a great weekend. That's NZ Close Up. Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air.