MZ, formerly known as Machine Zone, has announced plans to improve the efficiency of New Zealand's public transport service using its server technology.

This is likely the first major project to make use of its RTplatform, announced in April 2016, which was planned to be used not just for games, but also financial services and government institutions.

The New Zealand project is reportedly an app that gives the government a 360-degree view of the county's transportation ecosystem, and will eventually show citizens the locations of buses and trains "down to the second".

Mussolini Zone

"Soon … entire cities will be networked in one real-time environment, which will create a level of efficiency that the world hasn't seen yet," said Gabe Leydon, CEO of MZ, talking to CNBC.

Slightly worryingly, Leydon also suggested something akin to tracking the citizens themselves, or at least their spending habits.

Touching on how the technology is currently being applied to marketing, Leydon said, "Let's just say you have 100 million devices out there. We could ping them once per second so we can create a kind of digital mirror of what's happening in the real world."

If the tech works as claimed, then MZ might well be worth the $9 billion estimated by financial blog GloMo.