Archive for the ‘Community’ Category

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The Hills Are Alive

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

The hills of Wellington may not be alive with the sound of music as such, but they are home to some of New Zealand’s coolest emerging technology sector companies.

Providing a network forum for entrepreneurs to connect with investors, future employees and other innovators is part of what we do at Unlimited Potential. This week IN-Business magazine published its fantabulous SmartNZ technology supplement and were kind enough to include an article penned by yours truly. In the article I talk about the resurgence of tech entrepreneurship and how we can enjoy New Zealand’s lifestyle whilst scaling our businesses globally.

The publication leans heavily on the people and events happening in the technology scene around the Greater Wellington region and is a beacon of light for those of us working within smaller tech companies. Being an entrepreneur has its ups and downs and we all need a little dose of inspiration at times. Tim Collins and the team at IN-Business have done an outstanding job with SmartNZ and I would highly recommend grabbing a hard copy or checking out the digital version of the magazine.

The article I wrote for SmartNZ also mentions Startup Digest, a weekly listing of startup, innovation and technology events. If you would like to subscribe to the New Zealand digest or find out how to get your tech event or product launch listed, you can find this week’s edition here.

Posted in Community, Entrepreneurship, ION, Innovation, Start-Ups, Technology | No Comments »

Funding Allocation Begs Questions

Saturday, July 10th, 2010

The Pacific Island community was reeling last month after the shock suspension of popular community radio personality Efeso Collins. The gagging came shortly after Collins expressed reservations over an uncontested government funding deal worth almost $5 million offered to a previously unknown economic development trust entity called Pacific EDA. Now the government is scrambling to distance itself from the whole mess, but the story just won’t die.

Collins made an empassioned statement during his regular spot on Radio 531pi recently, calling for more transparency but was then dumped by the station management. The text of his comments has been made available on the Pacific Eyewitness blog. Pacific EDA received a direct Ministerial allocation of funding in the 2010 Budget, contrary to advice given by officials at the Ministry for Pacific Island Affairs. Radio 531pi parent company National Pacific Radio Trust receives government funding and is chaired by Tino Pereira. The CEO of the Pacific EDA is one Anthony J M (JR) Pereira. Coincidence? No, the men are brothers and were both directors of Pacific EDA when the company first formed.

The affair reeks of political patronage and has been aggravated further by the fact that a journalist appears to have been prevented from doing his job because of vested interests. These efforts will come to nought however because Collins’ friends have ensured the case has been widely aired in the New Zealand Herald and in other media forums online. Collins rightly asks why an organisation with three employees should receive such a vast sum to essentially perform programmes that already exist within other organisations.

So, will this funding create more jobs and improved outcomes for Pacific Islanders? Will there be a demonstrable return to New Zealand in general? Those are very good questions. Questions that will no doubt be further explored by the media and the government in the weeks ahead.

Posted in Community, Opinion, Politics | No Comments »

Bright Tech to Lead Recovery

Monday, May 10th, 2010

The collapse of financial institutions during the recession led to the destruction of billions of dollars of wealth and made us question the sanity behind investing exclusively in property or risky finance companies. But a renaissance in angel investing and a surge of interest by economic development organisations in the tech sector is opening up new opportunities.

Grow Wellington is the regional economic development body that offers business programmes for enterprises across Kapiti Coast, Wairarapa, Hutt Valley and Wellington city. Recently Grow Wellington launched the Bright Ideas Challenge in an effort to identify and motivate the region’s closet entrepreneurs and help get good ideas supported and funded. The challenge invites aspiring entrepreneurs to submit a 100 word description of their business idea in return for advice and coaching. The top 200 ideas will be eligible for KickStart, a business startup programme. There is $25,000 in seed funding on offer plus the chance to meet investors and inspirational leaders in business.

With high value technology ventures and small businesses driving the economic recovery globally, at Unlimited Potential we thought it a good idea to get behind the Bright Ideas Challenge and to encourage our entrepreneurial members from the ICT sector to put their best foot forward. So when you go to the Bright Ideas submission page, make sure you click on Unlimited Potential in the dropdown box. UP will use its industry networks and events to support nominated ICT projects that graduate from the challenge.

Paul Spence is currently Unlimited Potential co-chair, CEO at tech startup iWantMyName and the New Zealand moderator for Silicon Valley based StartupDigest. You can contact him on Twitter @GeniusNet.

Posted in Community, Economy, Entrepreneurship, Innovation | No Comments »

Two Dimensional Culture Devalues Society

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

A couple of issues currently being debated in the New Zealand media suggest why as a nation we struggle to think outside the box. It also illustrates how we are failing miserably to deal with a selfish and deeply ingrained culture of alcohol misuse that continues to plague our society.

Proponents of street racing in Christchurch have suggested that the best way to keep intoxicated young drivers off the street is by providing a burn-out pad adjacent to a residential suburb away from the city centre. The disadvantages of this idea will be immediately apparent to local residents who will be required to endure hours of engine revving, tyre squealing and the stomach churning stench of burnt rubber associated with this mindless “sport”. Construction of a burn-out pad therefore simply legitimises what is already a highly anti-social form of behaviour.

At the other end of the country there is much public hand-wringing and a media feeding frenzy over the lack of progress to develop the Auckland waterfront into “party central” in time for the predicted influx of visitors to the Rugby World Cup (RWC). But nobody has yet questioned whether there exists a real need. A quick survey of Princes Wharf and surrounds reveals dozens of existing bars and restaurants, many of which seem to be struggling to attract any custom at all outside of the traditional boozy weekend nights. Surely the basis for “Party Central” already exists. On the other hand, given the rugby playing community’s poor track record in treating alcohol responsibly, perhaps the Police would prefer all of the RWC drinkers to be corralled into a large centralised holding pen, as is being suggested.

The most disturbing aspect of these two debates is that the focus seems to be on providing a solution that caters for and indeed promotes boorish behaviour as a cultural norm rather than addressing the prevailing values in wider society. In a nation that seems overly self-obsessed with a two dimensional culture of sport and binge drinking, will we ever truly be able to nourish and grow an environment of creativity and innovation?

Posted in Community, Culture, Innovation, Opinion, Society | 5 Comments »

Why Would Welly?

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

I’ve never been particularly fond of the “Welly” moniker. But to have it plastered all over a local hillside on the approach to Wellington Airport smacks of a complete lack of imagination.

I generally try to avoid getting too deeply mired in political debate and I don’t want to start a rant about why we don’t need to be aping American culture; but there remains something rather disturbing about the prospect of a Hollywood style sign being plonked on my front doorstep. I have friends and family over in Hataitai and there is certainly no great enthusiasm for the idea amongst local residents.

For me personally, the overriding image attached to the original Hollywood sign is one of tacky fakery and gross self-indulgence. Yes, Wellington has benefitted economically through partnerships that reach deep into the L.A. film industry. But that doesn’t mean we need to emulate it entirely. In fact our strength is that we differ from it.

I would also question whether a creative city, such as Wellington, needs to brand itself by ripping off someone else’s intellectual property. This seems entirely counter-intuitive when we have a vast richness of other iconology available from amongst our collective Maori, Pacifica, Asian and European peoples. I hope the airport company will sniff the wind and quietly retire the concept. As one commentator suggested, they would gain a lot more respect by simply replanting the hillside in native trees.

Posted in Community, Culture, Politics | No Comments »

ION e-Letter Jan/Feb 2010

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

GeniusNet is proud to host the ION e-Letter. ION is New Zealand’s original virtual community forum for innovators, entrepreneurs, mentors and investors. February and March are looking like hot months for tech, business and innovation events all over New Zealand.

ION is kindly supported by EGL, Revera and iWantMyName.

Collaboration with Start-Up Digest

We are thrilled to announce that our New Zealand biz/tech event listings will be shouted out globally from this month.  TEDxSV social media strategist and Silicon Valley based entrepreneur Chris McCann also runs the highly acclaimed The StartUp Digest and has now included New Zealand event listings within his service offering. It’s more important than ever for New Zealand tech companies to connect offshore and especially in the U.S. market, so if you have an upcoming event or are a technology start-up with a launch announcement – please contact ION about it so we can share.

Don’t forget to sign up for The StartUp Digest to find out about global biz/tech events if you are heading offshore to promote your business.

Webstock – Wellington – 15-19 February

Design, development, mobile, usability, content, community, open data, innovation & inspiration. 5 full-on days. 13 hands-on workshops. 24 kickass international speakers. 24 must-see presentations including Kevin Rose (Digg) and Eric Ries (Lean StartUps guy).

http://www.webstock.org.nz/

Eric Ries Workshop – Webstock – Wellington – 15th February

The Lean Startup: a disciplined approach to imagining, designing, and building new products. Through case studies, exercises, and discussions, Eric Ries will guide entrepreneurs of all stripes through the key areas that determine success for startups: product, engineering, QA, marketing, and business strategy.

http://www.webstock.org.nz/10/programme/workshops.php#ries

NZICT Meeting – Wellington – 16th February

Andy Lark is a director of technology venture capital firm No 8 Ventures and sits on the board of Xero. He also chairs the NZTE technology beachhead in the U.S. market. Andy will speak about a number of themes covering ICT, marketing and communications.

http://www.ict.org.nz/index.php/02022010_wellington-members-meeting/

SKANZ 2010 Conference – Auckland 16-18 February

Reviews recent developments with the Square Kilometre Array, a next generation radio telescope project aimed at probing the universe with a much greater degree of resolution than before. 

http://www.aut.ac.nz/study-at-aut/study-areas/computing–mathematical-sciences/skanz-2010-conference

Accelerate 2010 – Hawkes Bay – 17th February

Interactive one day session for management, founders and investors of high growth New Zealand technology companies. Features ex-pat Kiwi Andy Lark (senior exec at Dell). Good food, wine and music plus workshops covering strategy, marketing and funding. [Sold out - but may consider individual late applications]

http://www.0to60.com/
 

Escalator – Power Pitching – Various venues from 18th February

Interactive workshop where you will learn what investors are looking for in an investor pitch. The course helps you to refine your company “pitch”.

http://angelassociation.trainingplatform.co.nz/courses/1-power-pitching

Mentors Needed for E-Day – Wellington – Tuesday 23 February  

The Lion Foundation Young Enterprise Scheme (YES) needs some mentors for an E-Day. The E-Day will kick off this year’s YES programme in the Wellington region. About 60 student companies are taking part and they need 30 mentors. YES in Wellington is managed by the Wellington Regional Chamber of Commerce.

1.30- 2.45pm. Venue: Lecture Theatre 1, Ground Floor, Rutherford House, Pipitea Campus, Victoria University.

Distiller Event – Dunedin – Thursday 25 February

Technology start-up incubator Distiller is holding a meetup with guest presenters at South Bar, Frederick Street, Dunedin.

http://thedistiller.org/

Activate Networking Event – Wellington – Thursday 25 February

Want to activate your business or idea? Activate’s mission is to find Wellington’s most talented entrepreneurs and give them the skills, know-how and networks to get their dreams off the ground and their businesses humming. Mingle with Wellington’s best and brightest entrepreneurs and hear from some amazing businesses already on the journey.

Venue: Smith the Grocer, Old Bank Arcade  RSVP: By Monday 22 February to: activate [at} growwellington (dot) co [dot) nz

2010 Shanghai Expo Workshop – Wellington – 26 February

The Wellington City Council invites interested parties to attend a workshop on the 2010 Shanghai Expo. The workshop is a chance to learn more about Wellington City Council’s ideas on sending a delegation to the Shanghai Expo – and the potential opportunities for your business. RSVP by 19th Feb.

More details here >>

Damsel’s Den – Wellington – 9th March

Unlimited Potential  and Angel HQ matchmake angel investors with technology geeks and cool startup founders. Special guest Bill Payne, engineer, entrepreneur and technology investor.

http://up.org.nz/damsels-den-201/

Planet 2010 Conference Launchpad – Auckland 12-13 March Telecommunications industry event offering 10 start-up companies the chance to pitch their business ideas to a panel of judges. The winner will receive $70,000 worth of IT, marketing, legal and accounting services.

http://www.planet2010.co.nz/launchpad/

Spark 2010 Launch – Auckland – 18 March

The University of Auckland Business School Entrepreneurship Challenge kicks off with a launch event on 18th March 5.30pm. 

http://www.spark.auckland.ac.nz/


NZBio Conference – Auckland 22-24 March

The annual showcase for New Zealand’s life sciences sector. Attracting innovators, entrepreneurs and investors from across the agriculture, food, health and biofuel industries.

http://www.nzbio2010.co.nz/home

CloudCamp Wellington – 26th March

CloudCamp is an unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas.

http://www.cloudcamp.org/wellington

Want to add your tech/biz/startup event? Contact us @ Twitter or post a comment below.

Posted in Community, Entrepreneurship, ION, Innovation, Technology | 1 Comment »

A Big Week for Edgy ICT

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

TuxAfter a lazy summer break the technology event scene bursts into life next week as hundreds of Linux and Open Source exponents and some eminent speakers rock into Wellington for LCA 2010 the Australasian Linux Conference.

The fact that Wellington scored the big gig is very much a testament to the depth and breadth of the local technology community, the emerging potential for the government sector as an open source user and the fact that a number of key companies (including ideegeo) are keen supporters of the open source movement. Consequently you will see the iWantMyName logo (and our QR code stickers) around the halls during the conference, as we are timing the launch of our New Zealand domain registrar site and global affiliate program to capitalise on buzz around the event which runs from 18th to 23rd January.

Running in conjunction with the main conference are a number of “MiniConfs“. Our CTO at ideegeo Lenz Gschwendtner will be involved, speaking at the Multicore and Parallel Computing session on Tuesday 19th January. The programme aims to address the many challenges and opportunities posed by parallel computing especially in regards to open source. Also speaking at this event will be Intel Software Products evangelist James Reinders who as an engineer has been involved with processor development.

Reinders is also an author with notable publications and articles on parallel computing to his credit. For those who cannot make the Wellington Miniconf, there will also be an Auckland event at the Massey University campus on Monday afternoon 18th January. Reinders will be speaking on “Threading Building Blocks” and why Intel settled on an open sourcing model to accelerate its parallel computing initiative.

On a slightly different note, Summer of Code are hosting another tech talk session at lunchtime on Monday 18th January. Aimed at current or aspiring I.T. entrepreneurs, a highly esteemed panel of business experts will talk about their experiences starting-up, investing-in and growing technology businesses. Not to be missed. Registration essential, entry by donation. See you there!

Posted in Community, Innovation, Technology, ideegeo | No Comments »

Bookhabit Acquisition Strengthens Web Venture Value Proposition

Monday, December 14th, 2009

The reported acquisition of Wellington based Bookhabit by Los Gatos company Smashwords is an encouraging development. It demonstrates that we can incubate attractive, high value web-based ventures and get noticed globally.

About 18 months ago I was involved in some consulting at Bookhabit, working on building their user community. It was a great experience and a good lead in to my next project, which was of course, starting up ideegeo and then launching our domain registrar software platform iWantMyName. Perhaps the most useful lesson from that experience was observing just how much hard work is needed to to gain traction with a start-up business.

On that basis I’m tremendously pleased for Clare Tanner and her partners at Webfund, who I know put in a lot of hours to build their business. I’m also pleased to hear from Webfund that the company remains strongly committed to supporting the Wellington technology scene and that they are keen to work with Clare and others on future projects as they look to reinvest.

But, last week I was reading the painful story of a New Zealand biotech start-up that flushed tens of millions of dollars down the drain through mismanagement and bad luck. Why aren’t we playing to our strengths? The set-up cost for a web technology venture is a fraction of that for biotech and the innovation wavelength on the Web is a lot shorter. We can spread the risk by funding 50 Bookhabits for every single biotech punt. That is why ICT specifically needs to be back on the national economic development agenda.

Posted in Community, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Start-Ups, Technology, Web 2.0, ideegeo | No Comments »

W2W Tech Showcase Gains Traction

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

Unlimited PotentialUnlimited Potential’s W2W is the only event that brings together New Zealand’s technology innovators, entrepreneurs and investors under one roof for a half day of demos, presentations and networking. W2W attracted a stellar speaker line-up this year as well as increased interest from the investor community.

W2W is all about strengthening the entrepreneurial ecosystem for emerging tech firms by facilitating conversations between ICT researchers, business entrepreneurs and technology investors. The event focuses on specially chosen emerging ventures that have the potential to scale globally.

Entrepreneur presenters included Dan Lee, who discussed Beetil an I.T. management and compliance SaaS product and Jody Bullen from Yonix who provide software for business analysts. Both Lee and Bullen are recently arrived skilled migrants, underlining the importance of migrants to the regional economy. John Mitchell showed off Learning Source, a great tool that helps manage and administer training programmes, and Ben Nolan demonstrated the impressive capabilities of digital rendering software Indigorenderer.

Keynote speaker for the event was local hero Richard MacManus, founder of ReadWriteWeb, and one of the world’s most influential tech bloggers. Richard spoke about how he operates a virtual business. Other speakers included entrepreneur and author Ben Young and John Watt nanotechnology researcher and New Zealand Young Scientist of the Year.

Support for W2W’09 by Wellington City Council, Grow Wellington, UK Trade & Investment, Summer of Code, CafeNet, VicLink and iWantMyName was greatly appreciated. If you would like to support W2W 2010, please contact Unlimited Potential co-chair and W2W event project manager Paul Spence:  paul [at} up [dot) org (dot} nz

Posted in Community, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Investment, Start-Ups, Technology | No Comments »

W2W Taking Kiwi Tech Global

Monday, November 9th, 2009

Unlimited PotentialIts that time again already. Next week’s Wellington to the World event (W2W) picks up where the inaugural event left off in 2008.

W2W is the leading annual showcase for New Zealand’s digital innovation at a time when strengthening our entrepreneurial ecosystem has never been more important and topical. The event gathers technology innovators, entrepreneurs and investors for product pitches, new ideas and networking.

The theme for the event is “Going Global with Your Tech Business”. If you are a technology entrepreneur or investor you should be at this event. Speakers include Richard MacManus, founder of ReadWriteWeb and one of the world’s most influential tech bloggers. Nanotechnology researcher and Young Scientist of the Year, John Watt will also be there. MC for the half day event is Ben Young, author, entrepreneur and marketing wunderkind.

Registration is essential. You can find programme details here:

http://up.org.nz/w2w09/

Posted in Community, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Start-Ups, Technology, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

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