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Junge Frau mit einer virtual reality Brille auf der re:publica 2015 am 05.05.2015 in Berlin.Copyright: re:publica/Jan Zappner
Junge Frau mit einer virtual reality Brille auf der re:publica 2015 am 05.05.2015 in Berlin.Copyright: re:publica/Jan Zappner

TechWeek17May 5, 2017

The Spinoff’s Guide to Techweek’17 – Christchurch Edition

Junge Frau mit einer virtual reality Brille auf der re:publica 2015 am 05.05.2015 in Berlin.Copyright: re:publica/Jan Zappner
Junge Frau mit einer virtual reality Brille auf der re:publica 2015 am 05.05.2015 in Berlin.Copyright: re:publica/Jan Zappner

Contrary to what many people in the city of sails might assume, there is in fact an entire country outside of Auckland. Here our Christchurch correspondent curates the best of Techweek’17 in the south. 

Let’s all say it together: New Zealand should become a digital economy. We get it already. Cow poo is poisoning the rivers and it would be much better if we were a plucky innovation hub at the bottom of the Pacific. But that’s surely easier said than done, right? Just how does one go about doing such a thing?

How about an annual event designed purely for the sake of building New Zealand’s technology cred? Because that’s exactly what’s happening in Christchurch and around the country from the 6th to the 14th of May.

Charging itself with ‘tackling global issues using local ingenuity’, this year’s event is set to be the biggest ever with more than 100 events.

And they’re not messing around. The event covers a lot of literal and figurative ground with shows from Whangarei to Greymouth, with a ton of great stuff happening in the Garden City in particular. Most importantly though, Techweek’17 features a stellar round-up of speakers, including both local rabble rousers and international speakers with cred to burn, promising something more than the usual collective spit-balling/back-patting/PR-stunting event that these things sometimes devolve into.

So what’s on? All the usual boxes are definitely checked, so expect plenty of deep-dive experiential things (read: Lots of VR), boot-up-the-bum speeches from local investors urging us to lift our collective game, sincere but noncommittal encouragement from international investors, and plenty of quintessentially Kiwi non-confrontational debates.

Why Christchurch?

In the wake of the devastating 2010/201 earthquakes, Christchurch is emerging as New Zealand’s unlikely new innovation centre. With several busy collaborative business hubs springing up, a rapidly developing hi-tech infrastructure and with the place being, by all accounts, one of the most most livable cities in the world, Christchurch just might be New Zealand’s most exciting new tech ecosystem.

Convinced? Well come along to ‘Why Christchurch?’ to become even moreso, and find out why living and working in Christchurch just makes so much damn sense.

Global Innovation

Throw a rock in downtown Christchurch and there’s a high chance you’ll scone one of the city’s many steely-eyed entrepreneurs. Throw that same rock near the Enterprise Precinct and Innovation Centre (EPIC) next week, and your chances improve tenfold.

Companies such as SLI Systems, CerebralFix, Digital Confectioners, Brush Technology, Redseed and Skilitic will be sharing their stories and explaining how they are taking their ideas and turning them into real McCoy viable global products and services.

More than a monologue, you’ll also get the chance to ask your own questions in the “Ask Me Anything” panel interview at the end.

Disrupting Climate Change

Disrupting Climate Change is a two part event aiming to foster conversation around just what NZ’s response to the challenge of climate change.

Expert speakers will be presenting on the tech available to combat climate change as well as the opportunities/barriers within each sector, and a small group session will be held where participants explore approaches to make it all happen.

Mother earth thanks you in advance.

Kea Inspire the Future Series

Members of the Kea World Class New Zealand Network come together to discuss the big ideas facing New Zealand including the delicious and tech-relevant Future of Food.

What is the potential value of the New Zealand food sector? Where are the opportunities around technology and R&D, and what is the global impact our food technology sector can create?

Find out on Friday 12.


The Spinoff’s quick-and-easy nationwide Techweek’17 recommendations 

For the consumer tech geek: AR/VR Garage – Demos, meetups and workshops featuring some of NZ’s most promising AR/VR businesses.

For the artsy types: ArtsTech Speed Dating – NZ’s artistic, science and tech sectors come together and innovate.

For the unabashed capitalist: Show Me The Money – An investment focused day to help connect startups and investors.

For the tech dilettante: 1st Assembly – A day-long event of playing with Arduino micro controllers.

For the culturally inclined: Waihiko – Digitising Māori Stories – Utilising digitech to tell traditional stories in a modern way.

For the underagers: 3D Kids – Workshops where you get to print your own 3D object to take home.

For the woke crowd: Inequality and Exponential Technology Panel – Experts discuss how is inequality impacted by technology and how technology can be used to create a better future.

For the would-be investor: Mainland Angel Investor Showcase – A large-scale Pitch Breakfast featuring up-and-coming companies from the South Island.

For the foodies: Food & the Internet – A look at how technology is changing the way we eat.


Techweek’17: a week of events bringing together New Zealand’s brightest technology and innovation talent to tackle global issues with local ingenuity. May 6-14, Nationwide. techweek.co.nz

Keep going!
Shingy

TechWeek17May 3, 2017

The Spinoff’s Techweek Glossary 1.0: A minimum viable guide to disruptive techspeak

Shingy

Next week is Techweek’17! So if you’re planning on attending one of the 100+ events across the country, but don’t know your pivots from your MVPs because you’re not in scrum sprints and hackathons in your everyday life, we’ve got you covered. Here are the 13 words and phrases you’re most likely to hear, explained!

Agile: Cross-functional, adaptive, self-organising, collaborative, rapid, flexible… Sorry, is this not helping? Sometimes ‘agile’ just means agile.

Disrupt: To create a new market/model which, as it grows, displaces an existing market/model. Despite its overuse, disruption is a real thing and is happening all the time and has been happening for all time. But not everything that is innovative or new is disruptive. Clayton Christensen, who formulated what we now think of as “disruptive innovation” in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma, says that disruption isn’t just innovating or improving an existing product or service, it is:

a process whereby a smaller company with fewer resources is able to successfully challenge established incumbent businesses. Specifically, as incumbents focus on improving their products and services for their most demanding (and usually most profitable) customers, they exceed the needs of some segments and ignore the needs of others. Entrants that prove disruptive begin by successfully targeting those overlooked segments, gaining a foothold by delivering more-suitable functionality—frequently at a lower price. Incumbents, chasing higher profitability in more-demanding segments, tend not to respond vigorously. Entrants then move upmarket, delivering the performance that incumbents’ mainstream customers require, while preserving the advantages that drove their early success. When mainstream customers start adopting the entrants’ offerings in volume, disruption has occurred.

That’s why, he says, despite its reputation, Uber is not actually disruptive. Why? Because, it didn’t start by finding either a new or low-end market foothold, and it didn’t start as inferior service which only gained a mainstream customer base once its quality caught up with mainstream standards. It just did what existing companies did (i.e. a taxi service) but did it better.

Netflix, on the other hand, is disruptive because it started out small, going after a market segment that the companies it disrupted were largely ignoring – cinephiles who would happily wait two days for their DVD rentals to arrive in their letterbox. But, as Netflix got better as a service (by adding streaming to its core business), it started appealing to the incumbent’s customers so at such a rate that the incumbents were too late to react.

Here’s Christensen again:

If Netflix (like Uber) had begun by launching a service targeted at a larger competitor’s core market, Blockbuster’s response would very likely have been a vigorous and perhaps successful counterattack. But failing to respond effectively to the trajectory that Netflix was on led Blockbuster to collapse.

Got it? Got it.

(Sorry to go on and on about this like a rabid prescriptivist, but, y’know, disruption’s kind of a big deal and gets both overused and over-satirised.)

Gig economy: Usually a way for tech companies to profit off cheap labour without having to provide benefits or security of any kind. Genuinely good for some people looking for flexibility and (often) additional income, but usually less good for women (by which I mean more so than regular employment and income inequality).

Hack: ‘Hack’ used to mean illicitly getting access to data or networks you are not allowed access to. Like in the movie with Angelina Jolie and that dude from Trainspotting. Now it basically means to work on computer technology of some sort. Or, maybe, work slightly harder than usual on computer technology. And maybe at night.

Innovation: According to the OECD, innovation is the “production or adoption, assimilation, and exploitation of a value-added novelty in economic and social spheres; renewal and enlargement of products, services, and markets; development of new methods of production; and establishment of new management systems. It is both a process and an outcome”.

Sooo.. not invention. What’s the difference? Invention is the creation of something new, innovation is the ‘value-added novelty’, the ‘renewal’, the ‘enlargement’, the ‘new methods/systems’.

Cool? Cool.

Make the world a better place: Make money for you and your investors with your ever-so-slightly tweaked version of ‘[successful service] but for [marginally different market]’.

Move fast and breaking things: Work quickly and experimentally with less regard to social responsibilities, ethics or laws. If anything goes wrong, apologise later. Works great when the stakes are low (early Facebook), not great so great when the stakes are high (Facebook as the world’s most important news platform).

MVP: ‘Minimum viable product’. Your thing kinda works well enough for early adopters. Will still need work though. Lot’s of work.

Pivot: If the thing you made a) doesn’t work, b) doesn’t have users, c) can’t generate any revenue, you ‘pivot’, i.e. say your thing is actually best used for something other than its originally intended use and hope you get another chance/more investment. The big pivots of tech-lore have been so successful (like Twitter starting as a podcast subscription service called Odeo before ‘pivoting’ to a social media platform) that nowadays everyone says they’re pivoting all the time even most of them are actually just figuring out what the hell they’re actually trying to make.

SaaS: ‘Software as a service’. Let me take you back. Long ago, before broadband, when you used to buy software (well, technically you still licensed it, but still) it was a product. You paid once and used it until it wasn’t useful anymore. Now, most software is a service you have access to. It usually lives externally from your device and updates all the time, often without you knowing. You don’t ‘buy’ anything, you either pay by a monthly fee, a service charge, by being advertised to, or providing data about your use of the software which is then sold on, usually without your knowledge.

Sharing economy: Usually bullshit (your Uber driver isn’t sharing their car with you – it’s a taxi with a good app and a questionable business model), but nice when it works for real (like our buddies at Campable who can hook you up with cheap places to pitch a tent).

Thought Leadership: Writing a think piece for the CEO to put his (‘thought leaders’ almost always seem to be men BTW) name to.

Validation: Your thing does what you want it to do for the people you want it to do it for.

Editor’s note: This is our MVP techspeak glossary. If we get reader validation and sense a opportunity for further development, we may release a 2.0 update. Let us know! But remember: Stay hungry, stay foolish and just say what you goddam mean!


Techweek’17: a week of events bringing together New Zealand’s brightest technology and innovation talent to tackle global issues with local ingenuity. May 6-14, Nationwide. techweek.co.nz